The Killings at Coolacrease

Introduction from Chronology

A party of IRA men raid the farm of the Pearson family at Coolacrease, Co. Offally.  They kill two members of the family – brothers Richard and Abraham Pearson - and burn the farmhouse.  The family were members of the Cooneyites - a small Protestant sect.  These killings became very controversial in the 2005 to 2008 period.

 

More Detail

In 2005, Alan Stanley published his monograph I met Murder on the way – The Story of the Pearsons of Coolacrease.  In October 2007, RTE broadcast a documentary called ‘The Killings at Coolacrease’.    The documentary put forward the hypothesis that the killings were due to ‘ethnic cleansing’ and/or ’land grabbing’. A controversy ensued in the press, online and elsewhere with quite a number of people disagreeing with propositions put forward in the documentary. 

The reasons for their refutation of these propositions were brought together by Paddy Heaney and his co-writers in their 2008 publication Coolacrease: The true story of the Pearson executions – an incident in the Irish War of Independence.  Their key argument was that the Pearsons had challenged IRA Volunteers who were trying to block a road by felling a tree on their land.  When the Volunteers IRA refused to stop, the Pearsons got two guns and fired at the Volunteers wounding three IRA men, one of them seriously.  According to the IRA, the killings were in response to these woundings.  However, it is clear that there was animosity between the Pearsons and local Volunteers predating this incident.  Also, there is little doubt that the botched way that the killing of the two brothers was carried out added to the controversy.

O’Halpin and Ó Corráin note that “The obvious sectarian and agrarian resonances of these killings were an embarrassment to the IRA in Offaly, an area of operations where precious little was achieved against Crown forces during the War of Independence.”

 

A similar incident had happened on March 28th 1921 (See Mar-28-21/2) when two members of the Protestant Fleming family in Co. Monaghan were killed by the IRA for having killed an IRA man when the IRA were trying to a raid their home for arms the previous September (See Aug-31 to Sep-01-20/1).  Perhaps, because the Flemings had actually killed an IRA man (as distinct from the Pearsons only wounding IRA men), the Fleming killings have not aroused the same level of controversy. On the other hand, the Flemings were defending their home.  What both cases illustrate is the state of lawlessness in different parts of the country with little evidence of due process. In these two cases, it looks like the IRA were carrying out revenge killings rather than acting as a disciplined military force which recognised the right of due process of those who opposed them.  Also, as O’Halpin and Ó Corráin note, the “obvious sectarian” undertones to these killings are difficult to ignore.  With its non-sectarian ideology (“unity of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter”), the IRA should have been extra-vigilant to accusations of being sectarian.  However, in these two cases, it is obvious that they were not.

 

Another similar case was to occur on April 26th 1922 on Co. Cork in a different context.  The IRA broke into the home of Thomas Hornibrook at Ballygorman.  One of the people in the house shoot dead an IRA man.  The IRA left but returned and lay siege to the house. Three of the Hornibrook  family (Thomas, his son Samuel and his son-in-law Capt Herbert Woods) surrendered - they were taken away and shot dead. The different context was that the IRA, in April 1922, was in the process of splitting.  Also, more ominously, the killing of the three members of the Hornibrook family were the first killings in what became known as the Bandon Valley Massacre (see Apr 26 to 28-22/1).  The Bandon Valley Massacre had a strong sectarian dimension. 

 

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