Irish Free State offensive

Irish Free State offensive
Part of the Irish Civil War
National Army troops in Limerick, July 1922
Date 28 June - late August, 1922 Location Munster, Ireland Result Free State victory
Belligerents
Anti-treaty IRA	Irish Free State United Kingdom (Naval support)
Commanders and leaders
Liam Lynch	Michael Collins † Eoin O Duffy Richard Mulcahy
Strength
~15,000	14,000
Casualties and losses
300 killed and wounded 6,000 taken prisoner[1]	185 killed 674 wounded[1]

The Irish Free State offensive of July–September 1922 was the decisive military stroke of the Irish Civil War. It was carried out by the National Army of the newly created Irish Free State against anti-treaty strongholds in the south and southwest of Ireland.

At the beginning of the Civil War in June 1922, the Irish Free State government, composed of the leadership faction who had accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty, held the capital city of Dublin, where its armed forces were concentrated and some other areas of the midlands and north. The new National Army was composed of those units of the Irish Republican Army loyal to them, plus recent recruits, but was, at the start of the war, still relatively small and poorly armed.^[2]

Much of the rest of the country, particularly the south and west, was outside of its control and in the hands of the anti-Treaty elements of the IRA, who did not accept the legitimacy of the new state and who asserted that the Irish Republic, created in 1919, was the continuing legitimate all-island state. This situation was rapidly brought to an end in July and August 1922, when the commander-in-chief of the Free State forces, Michael Collins, launched the offensive.

The offensive re-took the major towns for the Free State Government and marked the end of the conventional phase of the conflict. The offensive was followed by a 10-month period of guerrilla warfare until the republican side was defeated.