Volunteer Jeremiah Delany

Volunteer Jeremiah Delany (aged about 29) of Ballincolly/Kilbarry (Dublin Hill, Blackpool, Cork city)

Date of incident: 12 Dec. 1920

Sources: Death Certificate, 13 [recte 12] Dec. 1920; CE, 13, 14 Dec. 1920; II, 14, 16, 20 Dec. 1920, 1 Jan. 1921; CWN, 25 Dec. 1920; Military Inquests, WO 35/149A/4 (TNA); WS 719 of Maurice Ford et al., 10 (BMH); IRA Roll of Honour, Cork No. 1 Brigade (Cork Museum, Fitzgerald Park, Cork); Who Burnt Cork? (1921), 20, 65-67; Rebel Cork’s FS, 25, 124; Last Post (1976), 76. 

Note: At about 2:30 a.m. on the night of the burning of Cork city, and in the wake of the IRA ambush at Dillon’s Cross, a party of armed men burst into Volunteer Jeremiah Delany’s home on Dublin Hill in Cork city; one of the gunmen rushed upstairs and shot Delany dead in his bed. He also shot his brother Cornelius Delany in the shoulder and the abdomen, from which wounds Cornelius later died. Their uncle, W. Dunlea, was only slightly wounded in the shoulder and hip and would recover. See II, 20 Dec. 1920. The assailants were described as ‘a party of uniformed men’. Jeremiah Delany (called Joseph in this report) was shot nearly at point-blank range in the chest, ‘almost over the heart and, [with the bullet] passing through, he was killed instantly’. See CE, 13 Dec. 1920. He was a member of E Company of the First Battalion of the Cork No. 1 Brigade. He was interred in the Republican Plot in St Finbarr’s Cemetery in Cork.

Volunteers Jeremiah and Cornelius Delany were two of the six children (four daughters and two sons) of the Ballincolly farmer Daniel Delany and his wife Julia. All six children co-resided with their parents in 1911. Jeremiah Delany (then aged 20) was their third child and second son. To judge from the 1911 census, the family preferred to spell their surname as Delany. Their residence at Ballincolly lies in the parish of St Anne’s Shandon.