Tomás
Mac Curtain

Cork elected a republican Lord Mayor in January 1920. Ten weeks later, gunmen shot him dead in his own home, in front of his wife and children, on the morning of his thirty-sixth birthday. Tomás Mac Curtain led the city and its IRA brigade at the same time, and both roles cost him his life.

He was a Corkman from the start. Born in 1884 at Ballyknockane, north of the city, he grew up around Blackpool and worked first as a clerk and then ran a small clothing business. The Gaelic League drew him in young: the Irish language and Irish music came first, then the politics that travelled with them. By his thirties he was one of the ablest republican organisers in Munster.

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 weapons.

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. The decision divided opinion and weighed on him, 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 elected Mac Curtain as Lord Mayor. He took the chain of office 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 and the extraordinary business of a war, and the authorities watched him do both.

The pressure on him sharpened through the spring of 1920 as raids and reprisals spread across the county.

Murder in Blackpool

In the early hours of 20 March 1920, his birthday, men with blackened faces 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 sure the police would not stop them.

They were right. The coroner’s inquest sat for weeks and returned a verdict that named names: wilful murder by the Royal Irish Constabulary, directed by the British government, with Prime Minister Lloyd George and a local RIC district inspector, Oswald Swanzy, cited by name. Swanzy was transferred north to Lisburn. Cork’s IRA tracked him there and killed him with Mac Curtain’s own revolver.

On the tour

We stop where he lived and died, in Blackpool, and trace the ten weeks between his election and his murder. His death and MacSwiney’s, seven months apart, did more to win sympathy for the Irish cause abroad than any single battle. You stand on the street where it began.