Tag Archives: Irish civil war

Ahead of a special commemoration at Clooney Cemetery at 1pm on Sunday, January 23, at which he will be the guest orator, Dr Tomás Mac Conmara writes about the controversial Civil War executions of Clare republicans, Con McMahon and Paddy Hennessy.   Readers of the Clare Champion on 3rd March 1923 were informed of the outcome of a Clare GAA Convention, held over the previous week. It was announced that the new County Secretary of the GAA in Clare, a position of some significance, was twenty-three-year-old, P.V. Murphy, better known as Vincent, from Knockanimana, outside Ennis. No reference was made to the man he replaced. Five weeks earlier, when it carried a brief report on eleven Anti-Treaty IRA prisoners, executed by the Free State on 20th January, the Clare Champion referred to two men shot in Limerick as ‘C McMahon’ and ‘P. Hennessy’, with no elaboration on their identity. The men, both from Clooney, were IRA Volunteers, Con McMahon and …

Paul Minihan gives the background on the centenary of a significant action from the Civil War in Clare FROM July 1 to 25, 1922, Corofin was the focal point of the Civil War in Clare. In 1922, the Clare Brigades of East-Clare, Mid-Clare and West-Clare formed part of the 1st Western Division, that also comprised the South-East Galway, and South-West Galway Brigades. This latter Brigade included the city. In the wake of the Treaty, the IRA slowly began to rupture throughout the spring of 1922. On the eve of the Civil War, there were two opposing 1st Western Divisions – one Pro-Treaty or ‘Free State’, under Michael Brennan, and one Anti-Treaty or ‘Republican’, under Frank Barrett, former O/C of the Mid-Clare Brigade. As the British Army withdrew from various barracks from January to May 1922, many of these were occupied by the IRA – in some cases Pro, in some cases Anti-Treaty. In Ennis, Republican troops had occupied the main …

Two violent historical episodes in the years after Irish civil war are investigated by north Clare writer WHILE the Civil War ended in 1923, the division and bitterness remained for decades after. The fallout from the conflict forms the background to historian Joe Queally’s book, Echoes from a Civil War, which is about to be launched. It looks at two incidents in the years that followed; firstly the killing of Garda Thomas Dowling, a Kilkenny man, who was shot four times in Fanore on December 28, 1925, by people who ambushed him from inside a stonewall next to the graveyard in the townland of Craggagh. Four years later on June 11, 1929, in Tullycrine in the parish of Kilmurry McMahon, Garda Timothy (Tadgh) O’Sullivan, a Corkman, was blown to pieces by a bomb on the roadside. It is believed that neither man was the intended target. Joe’s exhaustive research finds the men who were supposed to be killed on the …