Two Offaly republicans were executed 100 years ago
Last Friday, January 27, marked 100 years since two members of the Offaly No. 1 Brigade of the Irish Republican Army were executed by the Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War.
Patrick Geraghty (33), a farmer from Oldtown, Rochfortbridge, an active officer in Irish Republican Army’s Offaly No. 1 Brigade during the War of Independence, was shot by a National Army firing squad at Maryborough (Portlaoise) on January 27, 1923.
Both Geraghty and his IRA comrade, Joseph Byrne (a native of Daingean, County Offaly), were alleged to have been in possession of firearms – an automatic pistol and a Webley revolver respectively – when they were captured by Provisional Government forces in November 1922.
Geraghty was apprehended after a firefight at a farmhouse in Croghan, County Offaly, near Tyrrellspass, and while he was certainly armed, republicans at the time charged that Byrne was unarmed, and was therefore unfairly sentenced to death under the Public Safety Act.
Both men were members of the Offaly No. 1 Brigade’s 3rd (Tyrrellspass) Battalion, of which Geraghty served as OC. The executions in Portlaoise led to a huge outpouring of grief in their native communities, and came as another demoralising blow to the anti-Treaty IRA, which by then had all been cleared out of every province but Munster.
In April 1923, Laurence Ginnell – then representing the anti-Treatyites in the United States – sent money from America to relieve the plight of the Byrne and Geraghty families. By that time, the Civil War was almost at its end.
Geraghty’s execution hit his family hard. Their father, Thomas, had died suddenly in 1913, leaving Patrick in charge of the family farm along with his four sisters. In 1932, following the ascent of Fianna Fáil and Éamon de Valera to power, Geraghty’s sister, Mary Anne, applied for a military service pension on her brother’s behalf, explaining the family’s degree of dependency on him.
Ms Geraghty said that her brother had first joined the Irish Volunteers in 1917 and served all the way through the War of Independence, Truce and Civil War periods.
In her 1932 application, she explained that she was her brother’s sole surviving dependant, and now lived with an old aunt in difficult circumstances. To add weight to her application, she recalled that in March 1926, “President de Valera, Art O’Connor [the former Sinn Féin TD for South Kildare] and Eamon Donnelly [a former Irish Volunteer and de Valera’s co-founder of Fianna Fáil] called at the house”.
Among Ms Geraghty’s referees was her fellow parishioner Alice Ginnell, wife of by then deceased Laurence Ginnell, who told the pensions board that the surviving Geraghty family members were “all in poor circumstances and are not of the loud-speaking variety, but did their work and suffered quietly and uncomplainingly”.
In 1933, Mary Anne Geraghty was granted a partial dependant’s gratuity of £112 and 10 shillings, and from 1954 until her death in 1973, was given a dependant’s allowance.