In Tipperary town for former political adviser Martin Mansergh’s funeral, I made a short side-trip to see the Soloheadbeg monument, a grandiose affair just off the main road to Limerick.
But as it said there, this was not the actual site of the 1919 ambush. So I had to make a side-trip off the side-trip to see that, a mile or more away on a narrow back road.
That, too, has a monument, smaller but no less portentous. The plaque reads: “Erected in proud and loving memory and to the honour and exaltation of the volunteers of the Third Tipperary Brigade Irish Republican Army who fired the first shots in the War of Independence here on 21st January 1919 and eventually compelled the enemy to sue for a truce…”
Divorced of t
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