Volunteer Captain Timothy Hennessy

Volunteer Captain Timothy Hennessy (aged about 35) of Ahabeg (Rose), Killonan, Co. Limerick (Knockanevin/Shraharla near Mitchelstown)

Date of incident: 1 May 1921

Sources: CE, 3, 4, 7 May 1921; FJ, 21 May 1921; Death Certificate (Cork No. 1 Urban), 17 May 1921; Denis Noonan’s WS 992, 13-14 (BMH); Daniel F. O’Shaughnessy’s WS 1435, 87-95; Appendix B, 2-6 (BMH); Morgan Portley’s WS 1559, 27, 30-31 (BMH); Last Post (1976), 85; Shraharla IRA Memorial. 

Note: Hennessy was mortally wounded in the encounter at Knockanevin/Shraharla and ‘died in Cork under military detention about a week later’. See Daniel F. O’Shaughnessy’s WS 1435, 89 (BMH). Actually, Hennessy survived for seventeen days; he died of gunshot wounds at the Central Cork Military Hospital in the city on 17 May 1921. See Death Certificate (Cork No. 1 Urban), 17 May 1921. Like Volunteers Patrick Starr and James Horan, Hennessy was a member of the Flying Column of the Mid Limerick Brigade. See Morgan Portley’s WS 1559, 30-31 (BMH). The Hennessys of Ahabeg (Rose), Killonan (Caherconlish), were stalwarts of the IRA campaign in Mid Limerick.

In 1911 Michael Hennessy (then aged 29) and his younger brother Tim (then aged 25) were the two co-resident sons of the widowed farmer Margaret Hennessy of Ahabeg (Rose) in the Ballysimon district. Both were later republican activists, as were their sisters Margaret and Mary. Volunteer Timothy Hennessy was buried at Killonan.