Reginald Dunne


Reginald Dunne was Battalion Commandant of the London Battalion, IRA who was hanged for the murder of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson.
Dunne attended St Ignatius' College in Tottenham, North London. He was a British Army private in the Irish Guards who fought in the First World War.
On 22 June 1922, Dunne and Joseph O'Sullivan murdered Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson in London. Dunne managed to escape, but O'Sullivan was captured by an angry crowd. He had lost a leg in World War I. When Dunne returned to try to help his friend, he was also captured after shooting and wounding two police officers and a passer-by.
On trial, Dunne addressed the jury about how in the recent Great War he had been "fighting for the principles for which this country stood. Those principles I found as an Irishman were not applied to my own country…"
Dunne wrote a speech which he was prevented from making from the dock. In it he blamed Wilson for the "Orange Terror", as the Military Adviser to the Belfast Government who had raised the Ulster Special Constables. and went on to say:
He was found guilty after three minutes. Both men were hanged for Wilson's murder at Wandsworth Prison on 10 August 1922 and buried within the prison grounds. In 1967, Dunne and O'Sullivan were reburied in Deans Grange Cemetery, Ireland.