Rineen Ambush The Rineen Ambush was an ambush carried out by the Irish Republican Army ( IRA ) on 22 September 1920 , during the Irish War of Independence . It took place at Drummin Hill in the townland of Drummin , near the hamlet of Rineen ( or Rinneen ) , County Clare . The IRA ' s Mid - Clare Brigade attacked a Royal Irish Constabulary ( RIC ) lorry , killing six officers . Shortly after , the IRA volunteers were attacked by ten lorry - loads of British Army soldiers , who had been sent as reinforcements . However , they held off this attack long enough to flee the scene and sustained only two wounded . In reprisal for the ambush , the RIC and British military raided three local villages , killed five civilians and burnt 16 houses and shops in the surrounding area . Background . The Volunteers in County Clare had been active since 1917 and by late 1920 had forced the RIC to abandon most of its small rural barracks in the county . This gave the IRA greater freedom to move in the countryside . In August 1920 , the RIC were reinforced by the British deployment of Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to the county . Five RIC men , eleven IRA volunteers and four civilians had been killed in County Clare during the two years before the ambush . The Rineen Ambush was ordered by the leadership of the IRA ' s Mid Clare Brigade , who had noticed that an RIC lorry travelled every week on the Ennistymon to Milltown Malbay road . John Joe Neylon ( the leader of the local IRA battalion ) was put in charge , although the actual attack was led by Ignatius O ' Neill , the Officer Commanding . He was a veteran of World War I who had formerly fought with the Irish Guards . The ambush party had only nine rifles and some grenades , the remainder being armed with shotguns or handguns . They prepared to attack the lorry from a railway bridge that overlooked the road at Rineen . Magistrate Lendrum . As the IRA party was lying in wait , Alan Lendrum , the local resident magistrate , drove unwittingly into a roadblock of IRA ' s West Clare Brigade , in an unrelated action . He was stopped at a railway crossing at Caherfeenick near Doonbeg . When the IRA demanded he surrender his car , he drew an automatic pistol and the IRA men shot him twice in the head , fatally wounding him . The IRA weighted his body with stones and dumped it in a nearby lake . Even though the British Military inquest had established that Lendrum had died of gunshot wounds members of the RIC . in Clare spread a false version of events and claimed that Lendrum had died of drowning . Although in strict military sense not related to the ambush ( the three battalions in co . Clare operated independently ) , it had serious consequences for the ambush . It was quite quickly noticed that the magistrate was missing and the military in Ennistymon decided to send out a search party of ten lorries of soldiers . Ambush . The RIC lorry passed safely through the ambush position , travelling from Ennistymon to Milltown Malbay , due to some confusion among the IRA over the numbers they faced . However when they learned that there was only one lorry , it was attacked on its return journey from Milltown Malbay . The lorry was hit by a grenade and blasted at close range by rifle and shotgun fire . The shooting was over in seconds , with five out of the six RIC men being killed outright . The sixth man managed to run about 300 yards before being shot dead . Five of the dead were Irish RIC officers and one was an English Black and Tan . The IRA took their weapons and burned the lorry . However , not long after the lorry had been set ablaze , ten more lorries of British Army troops arrived on the scene . They had been sent out to search for Alan Lendrum , the magistrate who had gone missing earlier that day . A running fight developed , as four IRA riflemen kept the troops at bay while the other volunteers made their escape . Two IRA volunteers and several British soldiers were wounded in the firing . Padraic O ' Farrell lists the casualties as three British soldiers killed , but this is not confirmed by the other sources . Reprisals . The British forces , enraged by the ambush and the escape of the IRA force , took out reprisals on civilians in the surrounding area . Immediately after the action ended , they burned the house and farm of the O ' Gorman family and shot a local farmer , Sean Keane . He later died of his wounds . That night , a mixed force of police and soldiers raided the home of Dan Lehane , whose two sons had taken part in the ambush . They shot him dead and burned his house at Lahinch . Patrick Lehane was burned to death in the attic when the house was set alight . Several other houses were burned in Lahinch and a further eight were razed in Milltown Malbay . A separate RIC raid took place in Ennistymon , in which several homes and businesses were burned . In this raid they killed Tom Connole , the secretary of the local ITGWU trade union , and burned his home . PJ Linnane , a 15 - year - old boy , was also shot dead by the police . In what may have been a belated reprisal for the ambush , four IRA men were arrested by the Auxiliaries at Killaloe on 16 November , beaten , interrogated and then shot dead . Another two were summarily executed in the same way on 22 December at Kilkee . Reactions . The reprisals were condemned in the British , Irish and international press . In the House of Commons , the British Labour Party tabled a resolution condemning the reprisals and calling for an investigation . This was defeated by 346 votes to 79 . Hamar Greenwood , the Chief Secretary for Ireland , defended the State Forces ' actions , saying that the houses destroyed were those of , " notorious Sinn Fein ers . . . I am convinced that the people of those two villages knew of this ambush " . In Clare itself , according to IRA man Anthony Malone , the ambush had two effects . One was that the RIC became careful to travel in convoys of no less than three lorries . The other was that , as a result of the reprisals , the civilian population " became embittered against [ the British ] and adopted a more defiant attitude to the [ British ] military and Black and Tans " . The death of Resident Magistrate Alan Lendrum , however , according to pro - republican Catholic priest Sean Gaynor , " was not to our credit " . On 1 October , the local IRA removed Lendrum ' s body from the lake , put it in a roughly constructed coffin and left it on the railway tracks at Craggaknock railway station for British forces to find .