Anti-Treaty Soldier (Sergeant Major) Thomas Kavanagh

Anti-Treaty Soldier (Sergeant Major) Thomas Kavanagh (aged about 20) of 10 Hanover Street East, Dublin (Victoria Barracks, Old Youghal Road, Cork city)

Date of incident: 25 Oct. 1922

Sources: II, 31 Oct., 1 Nov. 1922; CE, 2 Nov. 1922; MSPC/2D344 (Military Archives); FSS Cork Civil War Deaths; http://www.irishmedals.ie/National-Army-Killed.php (accessed 2 Aug. 2017).

Note: Sergeant Major Thomas Kavanagh died on 25 October 1922 of a gunshot wound accidentally inflicted at Victoria Military Barracks in Cork. In an extraordinary coincidence his father, also a serving member of the National Army, was interred with him in the same grave in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin on the same day—31 October 1922. The father, Edward V. Kavanagh, a member of the Marine Inquiry Department in Dublin, had died on 27 October as a result of injuries sustained in a motor accident on the North Wall. His son Thomas had died two days earlier. A newspaper report claiming that the son was ‘killed in action in County Cork’ is contradicted by an official report of his death and burial. See II, 31 Oct., 1 Nov. 1922; CE, 2 Nov. 1922.

Thomas Kavanagh was in 1911 one of the seven living children (ten born) of Edward Kavanagh (then aged 43) and his wife Mary. All seven of these children (four daughters and three sons) were co-resident with their parents in that year at house 11.5 in Hanover Street East in the South Dock district of Dublin. The father Edward Kavanagh was then a seaman. Like his son Thomas (then aged 9), he was to join the National Army in 1922, and in an extraordinary coincidence the two men were to die in separate accidents only two days apart in October 1922 while wearing the National Army uniform.