Easter Rising Stories

ON THIS DAY

14 October

1920. Seán Treacy is killed on Talbot Street

Seán Treacy, about 1919. He was twenty-five. This is not Talbot Street.

On 14 October 1920 Seán Treacy was shot dead on Talbot Street. He was from Tipperary, and he had been at Soloheadbeg in January 1919 and at the rescue of Seán Hogan at Knocklong. Two days after the raid at Fernside, on Upper Drumcondra Road, he was still in Dublin. Dan Breen was wounded and hidden. Treacy met Dick McKee and other IRA men at the Republican Outfitters. They were trying to move Breen. British forces arrived. Treacy took a bicycle that was too big for him. His feet could not reach the pedals. A gun battle broke out in the street. Lieutenant Arthur Gilbert Price, an intelligence officer, was killed. So were two civilians, Joseph Corringham and Patrick Carroll.

Treacy was engaged to May Quigley. They were to have been married on 25 October, eleven days later. His comrades later gave her a locket with his photograph. His body was brought home and buried at Kilfeacle on 18 October. The civilians matter as much as the two armed men. By the autumn of 1920 the war in Dublin was being fought in a crowded street.

The railways, the same day

On 14 October 1920 Sir Eric Geddes, the Minister of Transport, was in Dublin. Railway workers and dockers were refusing to carry troops, weapons and military stores. Men who refused could be dismissed. The companies faced the loss. The government feared that a strike was becoming another way of stopping the army from moving. Geddes had come to try to settle it. It was not an ambush. It still obstructed the Crown.

1797. William Orr is hanged

On the morning of 14 October 1797 William Orr was hanged at the Three Sisters, outside Carrickfergus. He had spent the previous day waiting in the gaol. He was a Presbyterian farmer and a United Irishman, convicted of giving the oath to a soldier. He would not sign a confession. The cry afterwards was “Remember Orr.” It was heard in the rebellion the next year.