Civilian Samuel Richard Shannon

Civilian Samuel Richard Shannon (aged about 24) of Lissaclarig, Aghadown, near Skibbereen (Lissaclarig)

Date of incident: night of 10-11 Sept. 1920 (shot by IRA after resisting an arms raid)

Sources: CE, 13, 14 Sept. 1920; IT, 13, 18 Sept. 1920, 31 Jan. 1921; CCE, 18 Sept., 2 Oct. 1920; CWN, 18 Sept. 1920; CE, 2 Oct. 1920; CCE, 2 Oct. 1920; II, 2 Oct. 1920; Nenagh News, 2 Oct. 1920.

Note: Shannon and his father Philip (aged about 62), a Protestant farmer at Lissaclarig, about 6 miles from Skibbereen, resisted an arms raid on the night of 10-11 September 1920 by ten to twenty armed and masked IRA men who tried to gain entry to their dwelling house. The raiders broke the door but were apparently driven off by the Shannons with sticks. Assuming that the intruders had left, the Shannons went out into their farmyard at about 7 a.m. on 11 September only to discover that the raiders had not departed. Samuel Shannon was shot at close range with a shotgun, with the full discharge entering his abdomen and causing terrible injuries from which he died a few weeks later at the South Infirmary in Cork city—on Friday, 1 October, at about 5 a.m. By that time his father had already sold the family farm at Lissaclarig. See CE, 2 Oct. 1920. 

Samuel Shannon was buried at Aghadown. ‘The [funeral] cortege was of very large proportions.’ See CCE, 2 Oct. 1920. His father Philip Shannon, who had escaped injury when his son Samuel was mortally wounded, was later awarded £5,000 at the Skibbereen quarter sessions in compensation for the murder of his son. Philip Shannon and his wife Lizzie had nine children according to the 1911 census, three of whom (a daughter and two sons, including Samuel, then aged 15) co-resided with them.