Tomás Mac Curtain

Cork elected a republican Lord Mayor in January 1920. Ten weeks later, men with blackened faces shot him dead on the landing of his own home, in front of his wife and children, in the small hours of his thirty-sixth birthday. Tomás Mac Curtain ran the city and its IRA brigade at the same time, and the second job got him killed. If you walk up Shandon Street and on into Blackpool you will pass the spot, and most people do without knowing.

A Blackpool man

He was a Corkman from the start. Born in 1884 at Ballyknockane near Mourne Abbey, north of the city, he grew up around Blackpool, worked first as a clerk and then ran a small clothing business from a shop on Thomas Davis Street. The Gaelic League drew him in young. The Irish language and the music came first, then the politics that travelled with them, and by his thirties he was one of the ablest republican organisers in Munster: careful, well liked, and hard to rattle.

Soldier and organiser

Mac Curtain commanded the Cork No. 1 Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, later the IRA. He drilled and armed men across the city and county and he held the brigade together through the thin years after 1916, when the movement was small, watched, and short of guns. During Easter Week 1916 he mobilised the Cork Volunteers and waited for clear orders that never came. He stood his men down rather than march them into a massacre, a decision that divided opinion and weighed on him for the rest of his short life, but it kept the brigade alive for the war that followed. He spent stretches of the next three years in and out of prison. Each time he came out, he went straight back to the work.

Lord Mayor

In January 1920 Sinn Féin swept the Cork municipal elections and the new council made Mac Curtain Lord Mayor. He took the chain of office in the old City Hall on Albert Quay, the building in the photograph at the top of this page, while still commanding an army the same state called illegal. The contradiction was the point: the republic governing in daylight what it defended after dark. He had ten weeks. He spent them on the ordinary business of a mayor, rates and housing and the tramways, and the extraordinary business of a war, and the authorities watched him do both. Through the spring of 1920 raids and reprisals spread across the county and the pressure on him tightened.

Murder in Blackpool

In the early hours of 20 March 1920, his birthday, armed men broke into the house above the family shop on Thomas Davis Street and shot him on the landing. He died within minutes. Witnesses described raiders who moved like men certain the police would not stop them, and they were right. The coroner's inquest sat for weeks and came back with a verdict that named names: wilful murder by the Royal Irish Constabulary, directed by the British government, with the Prime Minister Lloyd George and a local RIC district inspector, Oswald Swanzy, cited in person. Swanzy was moved north to Lisburn for his safety. Cork's IRA tracked him there in August and shot him dead outside a church with Mac Curtain's own revolver.

On the walk

We tell the ten weeks between his election and his murder, and the seven months between his death and MacSwiney's. Between them the two Lord Mayors did more to win sympathy for the Irish cause abroad than any battle of the war, and you are standing in the city where it happened.