Civilian Daniel Hanlon or O’Hanlon

Civilian Daniel Hanlon or O’Hanlon (aged 38 or 39) of Ballynamaddree near Carrignavar (Knockboy near Carrignavar)

Date of incident: 4 Oct. 1922

Sources: Death Certificate (Carrignavar District, Union of Cork), 5 Oct. 1922; FJ, 9, 10, 17 Oct. 1922; Evening Herald, 9, 17 Oct. 1922; Belfast Newsletter, 10, 17 Oct. 1922; CE, 11, 17 Oct. 1922, 5 Oct. 1923; SS, 14 Oct. 1922; II, 17 Oct. 1922; Dail Debates, 4 Nov. 1924, col. 643; Boyne (2015), 399, fn. 16; Keane (2017), 311, 418; http://www.irishmedals.ie/Civilians-Killed-Civil-War.php (accessed 8 Aug. 2017).

Note: Two young men named Daniel O’Hanlon of Ballynamaddree and Patrick Byrne of Knockboy ‘were on Wednesday night [4 October] taken from their homes and were not heard of until Saturday [7 October], when their bodies were found tied together in a turnip field. Both were Catholic farmers and were well-known supporters of the Treaty.’ See Evening Herald, 9 Oct. 1922. O’Hanlon’s death certificate indicated that his body and that of Patrick Byrne had been discovered at Knockboy near Carrignavar. See Death Certificate (Carrignavar District, Union of Cork), 5 Oct. 1922. 

At the military inquiry held on 16 October 1922, O’Hanlon’s solicitor stated that ‘the motive [for the killings] was very obscure, and the only one that was apparent was that it had been alleged that these two men had been in conspiracy to refuse to assist in threshing work for certain neighbours’. The armed men who had called to O’Hanlon’s house on the night of 4 October (supposedly seeking accommodation for seven of their number) had clearly been Irregulars. One witness present at O’Hanlon’s house on that night, having identified the intruders as Irregulars, stated, ‘I have no doubt of it . . . , for they were always tormenting us, and they had been there before, taking forcible possession of the place.’ This same witness was among those who had found the bodies of O’Hanlon and Byrne in the turnip field, which was located about 2 miles away from O’Hanlon’s house. Daniel O’Hanlon had been a Volunteer during the War of Independence, and his brother was then a serving member of the National Army. This witness concluded his testimony by declaring that he ‘thought the whole thing was a local conspiracy over the threshing’. He explained that O’Hanlon and Byrne had been in the habit of going to a certain neighbouring farm to assist with the threshing, but that this year they had refused to go ‘because all the irregulars were around that house and were being harboured there. That was the reason.’ See CE, 17 Oct. 1922.

Daniel Hanlon was in 1911 one of the five resident children of the Ballynamadree farmer Hannah Hanlon. He and his two brothers and two sisters assisted their widowed mother in the management of the family farm. Daniel (then aged 27) was the second youngest of the five resident children, who ranged in age from 23 to 33. All of them were single.