Qualla: Dunmanway Killings

Dunmanway Killings: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the night of 27 April 1922, Francis Fitzmaurice, a solicitor and land agent, was shot dead in Dunmanway. Hours later, in the same town, David Gray (a chemist) and James Buttimer (a retired draper) were both shot in the doorways of their homes. The next evening in the parish of Kinneigh, Robert Howe and John Chinnery were killed. In the nearby village of Ballineen, sixteen-year-old Alexander McKinley was shot dead in his own house. In Murragh, the Reverend Ralph Harbord was shot in the leg and survived. The same night in Clonakilty, on MacCurtain Hill, sixteen-year-old Robert Nagle was shot dead at home because his father - a Masonic Hall caretaker named on an IRA list - had gone into hiding. Across three nights between 26 and 28 April 1922, fourteen men were killed or disappeared in and around Dunmanway and the Bandon Valley. Thirteen were Protestant. One was Catholic. Most were ordinary tradesmen and farmers. Two were teenagers killed in their fathers' places.

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Dunmanway Killings: The Truce That Wasn't

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The killings happened in a tense interval that should have been peace. The Irish War of Independence had been brought to a close by the Anglo-Irish Truce of July 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty had been signed in December. A Provisional Government in Dublin was meant to take over fr...

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Dunmanway Killings: Ballygroman

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the night of 26 April 1922, a group of anti-Treaty IRA men led by Michael O'Neill arrived at the house of Thomas Hornibrook, a former magistrate at Ballygroman near Ballincollig. They wanted to seize his car. Hornibrook had removed the magneto - a key part of the engine - to p...

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Dunmanway Killings: Three Nights

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What followed across the next 48 hours was the killing of thirteen Protestant men and one Catholic. Some were named on a list found by the IRA when the Auxiliary Division evacuated their barracks at Dunmanway workhouse - a list that has since been re-examined and does not, in fac...

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Dunmanway Killings: Condemnation and Aftermath

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The killings were immediately condemned by Sinn Féin and the IRA leadership on both sides of the Treaty divide. Arthur Griffith spoke against them in Dublin. The anti-Treaty TD Sean T. O'Kelly associated his side with that condemnation. A general convention of Irish Protestant ch...

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Dunmanway Killings: A Wound That Will Not Close

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A century on, historians still argue about why this happened. Peter Hart, whose 1998 book The IRA and Its Enemies put the killings back into Irish public debate, called them primarily revenge attacks carried out by 'angry and frightened young men acting on impulse', with the fami...

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