Civilian Patrick Goggin

Civilian Patrick Goggin (aged 7) of Carrigthomas near Macroom (Carrigthomas)

Date of incident: 21 April 1921

Sources: CE, 23 April, 11 May 1921; FJ, 2 June 1921; Ó hÉalaithe (2014), 153-54, 274.

Note: This very young boy was mortally wounded in the thigh by a soldier in a passing lorry. The boy, a son of the farmer John Goggin of Carrigthomas near Macroom, was shot on 21 April 1921 and died about a week later owing to ‘toxaemia following infection of the wounds’. Patrick Goggin was brought back to his father’s house by one of the soldiers who had fired at him. The soldier explained that ‘the boy would not have been fired at, only they thought he was bigger’. While giving evidence at a military inquiry into the boy’s death, his father broke down and cried, saying, ‘Heaven only knew what he had been robbed of by the loss of his son’. See CE, 11 May 1921. 

In his memoirs former Volunteer Jamie Moynihan vividly recalled the revulsion prompted by this killing: Of ‘all the thirty murders the Tans and the Auxiliaries committed throughout Mid-Cork, the killing that caused the greatest resentment, anguish, and sorrow was that terrible act by the Macroom Auxiliaries when they shot a seven-year-old boy, Patrick Goggin, near his home at Carrigthomas, Ballinagree, on 21 April 1921, as he returned to his parents’ home, having counted his father’s cows. His father, who heard the shooting, rushed to the scene, and the first sight that met his eyes was his son on the ground and an Auxiliary searching his pockets. The Auxiliaries refused the Goggin family permission to remove little Patrick to Macroom hospital that evening because of a self-imposed British curfew, but the child was rushed to that hospital the following morning as soon as the curfew was lifted, where he died from his wounds within a week and was buried [on 1 May] in Clondrohid cemetery in his First Communion suit.’ See Ó hÉalaithe (2014), 153-54.

Patrick Goggin was one of the children of the Carrigthomas (Kilberrihert) farmer John Goggin and his wife Margaret. In 1911 they had been married for only five years and already had three very young children (the oldest was just three). Patrick Goggin was born in about 1914.