From the Dublin Evening Telegraph, 13 March 1923:
“PITCHED BATTLE
Boys as ‘Republicans’ and ‘Free Staters’
DUBLIN STREET FIGHT
To-day, in the Dublin Police Court, before Mr E.A. Collins, KC, Anthony Casserly, Vincent Casserly, Joseph Maguire, James O’Connor, Nicholas Ward and Patrick Galvin, all residing in the vicinity of Great Brunswick street, and aged between 12 and 16 years, were charged in custody of Detective Officers Coleman and Devaney with wilfully and maliciously damaging a public monument erected to the memory of the late Lord Plunket at Kildare place, by daubing it all over with mud, between 4 and 5 o’c, on Sunday last.
Detective Officer Devaney gave evidence that in consequence of complaints made to the police he visited Kildare Place on Monday morning, and found that Lord Plunket’s monument was badly daubed with mud. He made inquiries, and as a result he arrested the six defendants and took them to the police station. He told them he was about to charge them with disfiguring the monument, and having cautioned them, each made a statement to the effect that they were coming from St Stephen’s Green Park, and when they arrived at Kildare Place ‘they commenced to play Republicans and Free Staters, and had a pitched battle, and imagined that the monument was the Four Courts.’
The party representing the Republicans took up a position at one side of the monument and the other party – acting as the Free Staters – concealed themselves in another position, and ‘bombarded the Republicans by firing mud at them’ with the result that the monument was daubed all over with mud. They continued the battle for some time when suddenly a policeman arrived on the scene and they all ran away.
Mr Collins – Was the monument damaged very much?
Detective Devaney – Not very much – but it was daubed all over with mud, which can be taken off by washing it with a hose.
Mr Collins said that apart from the disfiguring of the monument, the throwing of the mud in the public thoroughfare was very objectionable.
All the defendants pleaded guilty, and on their parents consenting to go bail for them each in the sum of £5 for their future good behaviour, Mr Collins allowed them out with a caution.”
The choice of the Plunket monument as the site to re-enact the Battle of the Four Courts was not inappropriate, as its subject was himself intimately connected to that building by the most eminent of legal pedigrees, being the grandson of not one but two Lord Chancellors of Ireland, William Plunket, 1st Baron Plunket, and Charles Kendal Bushe. Lord Chancellor Plunket, an aficionado of bare-knuckle boxing, would almost certainly have enjoyed the pitched battle.
The Plunket family’s influence in a different court continues to this day…
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