National Army Soldier Patrick Corcoran Jr

National Army Soldier Patrick Corcoran Jr (aged about 20) of Station View, Saint Patrick’s Street, Castlerea, Co. Roscommon (near Macroom)

Date of incident: 10 Aug. 1922

Sources: MSPC/2D31 (Military Archives); O’Farrell, Who’s Who, 203; Keane (2017), 296, 416; http://www.irishmedals.ie/National-Army-Killed.php (accessed 1 July 2017).  

Note: Private Patrick Corcoran Jr was severely wounded in the right leg (reportedly by a dum-dum bullet) near Macroom on 10 August as National Army forces captured that town from the retreating IRA. He died of his wounds in the South Infirmary in Cork city on 20 August. He had served for two years in the British army before enlisting in the National Army. See http://www.irishmedals.ie/National-Army-Killed.php (accessed 1 July 2017). He was interred in Castlerea.

His mother Mary Corcoran was awarded a gratuity of £40 by the Army Pensions Board under the 1923 legislation; this sum was increased to £50 on appeal. Mary Corcoran wrote a series of piteous letters to the Army Pensions Board over its delays in hearing her original claim and over the inadequacy of its awards, given her impoverished circumstances. She was ‘in delicate health’; her husband Patrick Sr was disabled in his right hand (described as ‘powerless’) by a serious accident at work in 1920, and neither of them was in employment by May 1924, when the Civic Guard reported on their financial condition. They lived in a cottage with no land attached and paid a weekly rent of 1s. 6d. According to the Chief Garda Superintendent’s Office in Roscommon town, ‘The general financial position of the applicant is fair, as it is believed a large portion of the £320 compensation received by [the] applicant’s husband [for his work injury] had been spent in trying to effect his recovery.’ See MSPC/2D32 (Military Archives).

Patrick Corcoran Jr was in 1911 one of the three children of the general labourer Patrick Corcoran Sr and his wife Mary, who resided in house 5 in Arm in the town of Castlerea. Patrick Jr was then aged 9. His mother worked as a charwoman.