Weeks after the Irish Free State was born, novelist Liam O'Flaherty was not writing at all. He was leading a ragtag army of jobless dockers into Dublin's Rotunda, flying red flags from its windows and daring the new government to remove them.
He may be better known for his stories "The Informer" and "The Sniper," but as one of the founding members of the Communist Party in Ireland, O'Flaherty's early life was one of left-wing rebellion.
Just days after the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, writer Liam O'Flaherty led a little-known, short-lived occupation of the Rotunda Hall in Dublin.
After serving with the Irish Guards in World War I, where he suffered from severe shell shock in Flanders, O'Flaherty was discharged with a disability pension and led a somewhat nomadic life for the next few years. His travels took him around the Mediterranean, South America, Canada, and North America, where his long-held left-wing ideals swelled.
He brought his political convictions back home to Ireland in 1921 and became a familiar fixture on Dublin's O'Connell Street, where, from a small newsstand, he sold the Workers Republic newspaper. It wasn't long before he gave up the role of the radical newspaper seller in order to lead a small working-class revolt just a few yards up the street in the Rotunda Hall.
On Monday, January 16, 1922, the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State was announced, and two days later, approximately 200 unemployed men, mostly jobless dockers, marched into the Rotunda Concert Hall and Pillar Room, now the Gate Theatre, and occupied it. O'Flaherty was at the head of this band as the chairman of the Council of Unemployed in Dublin and ordered red flags to be hung out of the windows of the Rotunda.
O'Flaherty admired workers in Cork and Limerick who took over workplaces to establish their own soviets, and he sought to do something similar by occupying the Rotunda. Due to its historical link to the era of revolution, the Rotunda was chosen by O'Flaherty as a significant place to take a social stand. It was at the Rotunda in 1905 that Sinn Féin was founded, and in 1913, the Irish Volunteers were founded there.
O'Flaherty spoke to journalists outside the Rotunda, informing them that if he and his men were apprehended, they would not recognize a court run by a government that did not recognize the unemployed.
The occupation of the Rotunda was not a half-hearted affair. A maintenance fund was established to ensure the occupation could continue while food provisions were arranged from Boland's bakery on Capel Street. Morale was also kept high through lectures and concerts.
While a Workers' Republic was on the minds of those inside the Rotunda, outside on the street, the mood for left-wing politics was not as clean-cut. A nightly mob would gather outside the Rotunda, where attempts were made to remove the red flags. To disperse the angry mob, shots were fired over their heads from the occupiers inside the Rotunda. At one stage, the mob tried to storm the building, but O'Flaherty and his men managed to push them back out.
The occupation that began that Wednesday ended 4 days later, at midnight on Saturday, when O'Flaherty and his men left without incident. The growing resentment from the mobs gathered in the street pushed the authorities to give O'Flaherty an ultimatum: leave or be forcibly removed. To avoid any bloodshed, O'Flaherty ended the occupation of the Rotunda, and with his revolver hidden in his coat, he managed to slip away from the authorities and flee to Cork.
Months later, O'Flaherty came out of hiding and traveled back to Dublin to fight with the Anti-Treaty side. He was not long in Dublin before he took flight again. O'Flaherty took a ship to Liverpool, where his political activism ended and his literary career began.
The four-day Rotunda occupation led by Liam O'Flaherty and hundreds of unemployed men has now been subsumed into the broader historical narrative of the period, while O'Flaherty's political involvement during that turbulent era has been overshadowed by his literary success.
* This article was originally published in 2018 and updated in Aug 2026.
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