Civilian James Roche

Civilian James Roche (aged 38) of Key House, Passage (Passage West)

Date of incident: 15 Dec. 1922

Sources: Death Certificate (Carrigaline District No. 1, Union of Cork), 15 Dec. 1922; CE, 16, 20 Dec. 1922, 15 Dec. 1923; Sunday Independent, 17 Dec. 1922; FJ, 18, 20 Dec. 1922; Keane (2017), 139-40, 420.

Note: In a visit to Passage on the night of 15 December 1922 that was prompted by local activity among Irregulars, a party of Free State troops wound up killing civilian James Roche. Near O’Leary’s public house the troops called on a group of civilians to halt. Instead, the civilians moved away, and after ‘several further challenges’ they were fired upon. James Roche, who had ventured out merely to buy cigarettes, was badly wounded and died shortly afterwards. He was an engineer by trade and had worked at the Passage Docks for more than six years. He left a wife and three children, the eldest of whom was 5 years old. According to his wife, who testified at a subsequent court of military inquiry, Roche ‘took no part in politics. In fact he was disgusted with politics.’ The evidence in court suggested that there had been much noise and confusion at the time that repeated orders to halt were shouted out by an officer in charge and by all his men, and that Roche and several other civilians right outside the pub were merely trying to avoid the possibility of arrest by squeezing inside the door of the pub. No order to fire was given, but an officer insisted that his soldiers had the right to shoot without such an order if three calls to halt were ignored. The court attributed no blame to the officers or soldiers involved. See CE, 20 Dec. 1922.

In 1911 James Roche was one of the two children of the widower Eliza Roche of house 2.4 in Small’s Well in Queenstown/Cobh. He and his much younger sister Eliza (then aged 13) co-resided with their mother, who was a native of County Waterford. James Roche was then 26 years old and single. As previously noted, he later married and had three children. In 1911 he told the census-taker that he was a ‘labourer H.M.D. [His Majesty’s Dockyards]’ in Cobh.