Volunteer Bartholomew Hegarty

Volunteer Bartholomew Hegarty(aged 23) of Dunbulloge near Killeagh (Dunbulloge)

Date of death: 29 Aug. 1921

Sources: Death certificate (Killeagh District, Union of Youghal), 29 Aug. 1921; Timothy Sexton’s WS 1565, 7 (BMH); Keane (2017), 272-73. 

Note: Bartholomew Hegarty was an IRA Volunteer in the Carrignavar Company, 5th Battalion, Cork No. 1 Brigade. According to the witness statement of Timothy Sexton, Hegarty was engaged, like many Volunteers in this period, in the common activity of trenching roads to impede the operations of crown forces in the locality. At some point between 1 April and 11 July 1921, following a trenching operation at night, Hegarty fell into one of the trenches dug and was fatally injured. His death certificate indicates that Hegarty finally succumbed to his injuries on 29 August 1921 at Dunbulloge; the cause of death was given as ‘meningeal haemorrhage [with] secondary compression of [the] brain’. His older brother David was present at his death. See Death Certificate (Killeagh District, Union of Youghal), 9 Aug. 1921. Although Bartholomew Hegarty was not commemorated on the official Roll of Honour of the Cork No. 1 Brigade, Timothy Sexton’s witness statement nonetheless recorded that Hegarty had been ‘buried with military honours’. See Timothy Sexton’s WS 1565, 7 (BMH).

Bartholomew Hegarty was in 1911 a scholar aged 14 living with his farming family, including three older brothers, two sisters, and his parents John and Kate, in the townland of Dunbulloge in the Killeagh district. His parents had eight children, but only six of them were co-resident in 1911.