George Lennon Born: IRA Leader Shapes Modern Ireland

George Lennon was born into a family that ran a bicycle shop in Clonmel, County Tipperary, the kind of place where you learned how to fix things and, later, how to make them explode. He joined the IRA at seventeen, commanded flying columns that ambushed British forces across Tipperary, then fought on the anti-Treaty side when former comrades became enemies. Survived both wars. Lived another seventy years after the Civil War ended, dying in 1991 at ninety-one. The bicycle mechanic's son outlasted the Free State, the Republic, and most men who'd tried to kill him. Born in 1900, Lennon came of age during the Irish War of Independence, joining the South Tipperary Brigade of the IRA as a teenager. The flying column he commanded conducted ambushes and raids against British military and police patrols in the rural countryside, operations that required intimate knowledge of the local terrain and the ability to strike quickly and disappear. His most notable engagements included the ambush at Knockagh and operations around the Comeragh Mountains. When the Anglo-Irish Treaty split the independence movement in 1922, Lennon sided with the anti-Treaty forces who rejected the compromise that partitioned Ireland and required an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. He fought against his former comrades in the Free State Army during the Civil War, which was in many ways more brutal than the war against Britain because it pitted neighbors and friends against each other. After the anti-Treaty side lost, Lennon returned to civilian life. He lived quietly for decades, outlasting nearly all his contemporaries from both sides of the conflict. His extraordinary longevity made him one of the last surviving commanders of the revolutionary generation.