IRA Volunteer William Creedon

IRA Volunteer William Creedon (aged 29) of Sleaveen East near Macroom (Cork Military Barracks)

Date of death: 2 July 1921

Sources: Death Certificate, 2 July 1921; Pension Claim for William Creedon (MSP 34/REF DP2295); O’Halpin and and Ó Corrain (2020), 504. 

Note: William Creedon’s family later claimed that he had been an IRA Volunteer in A Company of the Macroom Battalion of the Cork No. 1 Brigade. There is some doubt about this matter in the pension-claim correspondence (dated 5 June 1921), where he is said by one source to have been a non-combatant. One Volunteer witness, however, asserted that Creedon had been detailed to observe a bridge near Macroom (within a short distance from where he was employed as a farm labourer). At this bridge two Auxiliaries were sometimes seen in the company of local women, and an IRA active-service unit was planning an ambush. This scouting activity led to his arrest by crown forces on 28 May 1921; he was taken to Macroom Castle, the Auxiliary base. There he was detained and badly beaten by the Auxiliaries, causing severe internal injuries. He was transferred to Spike Island Internment Camp, where his condition further deteriorated, prompting his removal to Cork Military Hospital in Victoria Barracks, where he survived only a few more days and died on 2 July 1921. His death was not registered, but documentation in the pension claim later made by his family indicated that he had contracted peritonitis. William Creedon is not commemorated in the returns of the Cork No. 1 Brigade, and the claim was not supported by senior IRA figures in Macroom. Nevertheless, he may well have acted informally as a scout, so that some local Volunteers were prepared as act as witnesses in support of his family’s claim. See Pension Claim for William Creedon (MSPC 34/REF DP2295); O’Halpin and Ó Corrain (2020), 504. In 1911 William Creedon (then aged 19) lived in a household headed by his aged grandfather John Devonshire of Sleaveen East near Macroom, an agricultural labourer. He had two younger brothers and three younger sisters; his mother (then aged 43) was a fairly young widow. One of the pension applications submitted after his death gave William Creedon’s year of birth as 1895, which if correct would mean that he was four years younger than the 1911 census indicated.