Volunteer Daniel or Donal Dennehy

Volunteer Daniel or Donal Dennehy (aged about 23) of Ballynona South near Midleton (Clonmult)

Date of incident: 20 Feb. 1921 (killed after surrender)

Sources: CE, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 Feb. 1921; II, 24, 25 Feb. 1921; Military Inquests, WO 35/155A/53 (TNA); Seán O’Mahony Papers, MS 44,047/3 (NLI); Joseph Aherne’s WS 1367, 52-58 (BMH); Michael Kearney’s WS 1418, 21-23 (BMH); Patrick J. Whelan’s WS 1449, 51-58 (BMH); John P. O’Connell’s WS 1444, 15 (BMH); John Kelleher’s WS 1456, 23-24 (BMH); Patrick J. Higgins’s WS 1467, 3-7 (BMH); Diarmuid O’Leary’s WS 1589, 4-8 (BMH); Roll of Honour, Cork No. 1 Brigade (Cork Public Museum, Fitzgerald Park, Cork); Last Post (1976), 81; O’Neill (2006), 62, 96-100; Borgonovo (2007), 88; ‘The Irish Rebellion in the 6th Division Area’, Irish Sword, 27 (Spring 2010), 84-85, 143; Rebel Cork’s FS, 190-95; Sheehan (2011), 125; Midleton IRA Memorial, Main Street, Midleton; Cork No. 1 Brigade Memorial, Holy Rosary Cemetery, Midleton; Clonmult Ambush Site Memorial; Clonmult Village Memorial; http://midletonheritage.com/2015/12/11/few-families-suffered-as-we-did-war-of-independence-pension-files-associated-with-midleton/ (accessed 13 March 2016).    

Note: Volunteer Daniel Dennehy was killed after surrendering at Clonmult. He was one of the eight living children (ten born) of the Ballynona South agricultural labourer Daniel Dennehy and his wife Kate. All eight children were co-resident with their parents in 1911. Daniel (then aged 13) was their fourth son. Two of his older brothers were also agricultural labourers like their father. Volunteer Dennehy was interred in the Republican Plot of Holy Rosary Cemetery in Midleton.

According to a Garda report in the 1924 pension application of his father Daniel Dennehy Sr of Bilberry, Midleton, Volunteer Daniel or Donal Dennehy ‘was employed at the Gardes [of Ballinacurra House] and used to return each night [to the family home] and was earning twenty-five shillings per week, which he used to give for support of the household’. His father ‘had no private income prior to the death of his son, but had regular employment at the Gardes’, where he had worked for the previous eleven years. He still worked there ‘every day’ in 1924 and earned about thirty shillings a week, though at age 63 he was ‘not in very good health’. He was awarded a gratuity of £100 under the Army Pensions Act of 1923. Similar awards were made to five other Clonmult-related applicants, and smaller ones to at least two more. See http://midletonheritage.com/2015/12/11/few-families-suffered-as-we-did-war-of-independence-pension-files-associated-with-midleton/ (accessed 13 March 2016).