Easter Rising Stories

ON THIS DAY

17 October

1920. Michael Fitzgerald dies in Cork Gaol

Michael Fitzgerald, commandant of the Fermoy battalion. He was about thirty-four.

On 17 October 1920 Michael Fitzgerald died in Cork Gaol. He had taken no food since 11 August, sixty-seven days. He was about thirty-four, from Fermoy, and commandant of the 1st Battalion of Cork No. 2 Brigade. He had been held since the Fermoy raid of 9 September 1919, when Volunteers took rifles from the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry and Private William Jones was killed. At the Cork summer assizes in 1920 the jurors did not appear, so the trial collapsed. He was not released. He struck because he was still in custody without a completed trial. A prison doctor told the later inquest that he had asked for Fitzgerald’s release on medical grounds in early September, and had got no answer.

He was the first hunger striker to die in the War of Independence, and the first to die in an Irish prison since Thomas Ashe in 1917. Ashe had been forcibly fed. Fitzgerald was not. Terence MacSwiney was still fasting in Brixton. Joseph Murphy was still fasting in Cork. Both died on 25 October. Fitzgerald died first.

Crowds prayed outside the gaol. He was buried at Kilcrumper, outside Fermoy. After the military left the cemetery, John Fanning, Daithí Barry and Patrick Ahern went back with revolvers and fired three volleys over the grave. The inquest found that he had deliberately caused his own death while of sound mind. That was the authorities’ verdict. Republicans called it a sacrifice. The two readings are both part of the record.