Civilian Madge Daly

Civilian Madge Daly (aged 24) of 37 Cathedral Walk, Cork (Mulgrave Road, Cork city)

Date of incident: 20 Nov. 1922

Sources: Death Certificate (Cork Urban District, Union of Cork), 20 Nov. 1922; CE, 21, 22 Nov. 1922; Evening Herald, 21 Nov. 1922; SS, 25 Nov. 1922; Murphy (2010), Appendix 2, 338; Keane (2017), 327, 419.

Note: Madge Daly was killed instantly on 20 November 1922 by a shot fired from the direction of Devonshire Street in Cork city at a Free State sentry on Mulgrave Road, nearly opposite St Mary’s Church and Priory on Pope’s Quay. Daly was passing down the street from the direction of the cathedral when she was struck by a bullet in the head. The same bullet apparently struck and killed Private Daniel Desmond. The other National Army Soldiers at the scene refused to fire at the attacker ‘as there were many people on the street at the time’. Daly was a Child of Mary—her name was found engraved on the Child of Mary medal she wore around her neck. She was returning with two other girls to her sisters’ home from the religious devotions of this confraternity at St Mary’s Church when she was killed. Her mother and father were both deceased. She was an orphan and was employed as a waitress at the Edinboro’ Hotel in the city. (She lived with one sister at 37 Cathedral Walk, and she had two other sisters who resided in a ‘little house’ elsewhere on Cathedral Walk near Mulgrave Road.) In finding a verdict of wilful murder against an unknown attacker, the subsequent court of military inquiry noted that the Free State military authorities had ‘pointed out again and again that those attacks on National troops in the streets of Cork invariably resulted in injury, and in some cases in death, to the ordinary peaceable citizens of Cork’. See CE, 22 Nov. 1922