Editing Irish Civil War (section)

===Guerrilla war===
{{Main|Guerrilla phase of the Irish Civil War}}
Government victories in the major towns inaugurated a period of [[guerrilla warfare]]. After the fall of Cork, Lynch ordered IRA units to disperse and form [[flying column]]s as they had when fighting the British. They held out in areas such as the western part of counties Cork and Kerry in the south, [[county Wexford]] in the east and counties [[County Sligo|Sligo]] and Mayo in the west. Sporadic fighting also took place around [[Dundalk]], where [[Frank Aiken]] and the [[Fourth Northern Division of the Irish Republican Army]] were based, and Dublin, where small-scale but regular attacks were mounted on Free State troops.

August and September 1922 saw widespread attacks on Free State forces in the territories that they had occupied in the July–August offensive, inflicting heavy casualties on them. Collins was killed in an ambush by anti-treaty Republicans at [[Béal na Bláth]], near his home in County Cork, in August 1922.<ref name="fn_1">In the 1996 film ''[[Michael Collins (film)|Michael Collins]]'', de Valera meets the killer of Collins prior to the ambush that leads to his death. However, although de Valera was in the area at the time, he is not thought to have ordered the assassination.</ref> Collins' death increased the bitterness of the Free State leadership towards the Republicans and probably contributed to the subsequent descent of the conflict into a cycle of atrocities and reprisals. Arthur Griffith, the Free State president, had also died of a brain haemorrhage ten days before, leaving the government in the hands of W.T. Cosgrave and the Free State army under the command of General Richard Mulcahy. For a brief period, with rising casualties among its troops and its two principal leaders dead, it looked as if the Free State might collapse. However, as winter set in, the Republicans found it increasingly difficult to sustain their campaign, and casualty rates among National Army troops dropped rapidly. For instance, in County Sligo, 54 people died in the conflict, of whom all but eight had been killed by the end of September.<ref>Michael Farry, ''The Aftermath of Revolution: Sligo 1921–23''</ref>

In the autumn and winter of 1922, Free State forces broke up many of the larger Republican guerrilla units – in Sligo, Meath and Connemara in the west, for example, and in much of Dublin city.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.freewebs.com/duleekmonument/meathhistory19221958.htm |title=Duleek Hunger Strike Monument |access-date=2009-01-17 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090808224831/http://www.freewebs.com/duleekmonument/meathhistory19221958.htm |archive-date=8 August 2009}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.curragh.info/articles/executions.htm |title=Civil War Executions |work=curragh.info |access-date=7 February 2009 |archive-date=5 February 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120205161507/http://www.curragh.info/articles/executions.htm |url-status=live}}</ref> Elsewhere, anti-treaty units were forced by lack of supplies and safe-houses to disperse into smaller groups, typically of nine to ten men. Despite these successes for the National Army, it took eight more months of intermittent warfare before the war was brought to an end.

By late 1922 and early 1923, the anti-treaty guerrilla campaign had been reduced largely to acts of sabotage and destruction of public infrastructure such as roads and railways.{{sfn | Hopkinson | 1988 | p=199}} It was also in this period that the Anti-Treaty IRA began [[Destruction of country houses in the Irish revolutionary period|burning the homes]] of Free State Senators and of many of the Anglo-Irish landed class.

In October 1922, de Valera and the anti-treaty [[Teachtaí Dála]] (TDs) set up their own "Republican government" in opposition to the Free State. However, by then the anti-treaty side held no significant territory and de Valera's government had no authority over the population.