Civilian Jeremiah Coleman

Civilian Jeremiah Coleman (aged about 34) of George’s Quay, Cork city

Date of incident: 2 or 3 Sept. 1922 (Cork city)

Sources: CE, 4, 5, 12 Sept. 1922; SS, 9 Sept. 1922; Murphy (2010), Appendix 2, 338.

Note: Jeremiah Coleman’s dead body was found in a cart pulled by his own horse when the horse arrived at its stable at about 6:50 a.m. on the morning of 3 September 1922 near Elizabeth Fort on Keyser’s Hill in Cork city. Coleman had been shot twice in the back (lacerating the spinal column, with death instantaneous), and ‘it was evident that he had been dead for some hours’. Coleman had left the city ‘with a car-load of materials of a varied nature’ on 2 September for Crookstown and appeared to have met his death on the return journey. A native of Ballinhassig aged 34, Coleman was a carter by trade, with two horses and cars, and lodged on George’s Quay. He had frequently been ‘hired to take purchases to country districts, this being the readiest means of their conveyance nowadays owing to the railway interruption and the difficulty of procuring motor cars’. He was probably killed by the anti-Treaty IRA, whose forces intended to interdict or interrupt commercial and other traffic.