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1922-167

Civilian Eileen O’Driscoll

 

Civilian Eileen O’Driscoll (aged 3) of Brookhill, Riverstown, near Cork city (Brookhill, Riverstown)

Date of incident: 13 Nov. 1922

Sources: CE, 14, 15 Nov. 1922; II, 14 Nov. 1922; Evening Herald, 15 Nov. 1922; Keane (2017), 323-24, 419; http://www.irishmedals.ie/Civilians-Killed-Civil-War.php (accessed 8 Aug. 2017).

 

Note: Eileen O’Drisoll’s two step-brothers had picked up cartridges on the morning of the day of her death (Monday, 13 November 1922) in a graveyard near her house in Riverstown and soon afterwards placed one of them in a fire at home, with tragic results. The explosion filled the house with smoke, and the little girl ran to her mother, ‘falling at her feet bleeding’. Her mother got a pony and trap and took her badly wounded daughter to the Mercy Hospital. When the mother broke down in grief while telling this story to the court of military inquiry, the president of the court declared that she ‘might rest perfectly sure that the ammunition had not been left there by any of the National Army’. The mother responded that ‘she was certain of that’. The victim had two large abdominal wounds and died on the evening of her admission to the hospital. The court found that little Eileen O’Driscoll had died ‘from shock and hemorrhage caused by a bullet wound accidentally inflicted’. The bullet had gone right through her intestines. See CE, 15 Nov. 1922.

The Irish Revolution Project

Scoil na Staire /Tíreolaíocht

University College Cork, Cork,

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