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Last updated:
Sun 25 Jul 2021, 2:34 AM
IRA casualties from the ongoing War of Independence across the city continued all the way into the July 1921 truce.
On 21 June, Commandant Walter Leo Murphy was shot dead at Waterfall (a few miles from Ballincollig) when an IRA meeting in a local public house was encircled by two carloads of British undercover officers. He shot his way out of the public house but was subsequently killed.
A commemorative plaque erected at Turnerâs Cross to D Company 2nd Battalion commemorates Company Adjutant Charles Daly of 5 Glenview, Douglas Road, who was captured by British forces at Waterfall on 28 June 1921.
The atmosphere of Cork city in the winter of 1920 was tense. In March, Lord Mayor Tomás MacCurtain had been assassinated by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Terence MacSwiney, his successor, was arrested in August on charges of sedition and died on hunger strike in a London prison in October. About 30 miles west of the city on November 28, the IRA killed 17 members of the Royal Irish Constabulary’s Auxiliary Division at Kilmichael.
Unsanctioned reprisals against Irish civilians and their property were privately supported by British prime minister David Lloyd George. At a speech in Carnarvon in October 1920, he made his support of this approach public when he excused the conduct of the British forces in Ireland. General Macready, the British commander-in-chief in Ireland, declared martial law in counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary on December 10, 1920. Under martial law, a curfew of 10pm was imposed each night. The military was allowed to carry out ‘official’ repri