Galway In Days Gone By

1920

Young mother killed

Rev. J. Considine, B.A., C.C., Gort, sent the following telegram to the Press on Tuesday:

“Married woman, twenty-three years’ old, within two months of child-birth, holding child of nine months in her arms, shot in abdomen here yesterday afternoon by armed forces. Died a few hours afterwards. Whole country, police and military stationed here, shocked.”

In a somewhat similar telegram to Mr. A. Griffith, T.D., Fr. Considine said he had telegraphed to Sir H. Greenwood.

The victim of the appalling occurrence is Mrs. Eileen Quinn, of Kiltartan, wife of popular farmer, and daughter of Mr. M. Gilligan, Raheen. She was sitting by a stile in front of her house with her baby in her arms when a lorry of uniformed men passed by at a rapid rate. Suddenly there was a burst of fire and Mrs. Quinn was hit in the right groin, and a number of fowl in the yard were killed. Mrs. Quinn staggered to the door with her baby, which she handed to a servant, and she then collapsed in a pool of blood.

Mrs. Quinn, says another report, was in great agony for two hours before she died. She leaves three children, the eldest of whom is not yet four years of age. Her husband was in Gort at the time, and a messenger, who summoned a priest and a doctor, acquainted him of the occurrence. Another messenger, going to Ardrahan for Doctor Foley, was wounded by a stray bullet.

Uniformed men passed into Gort subsequently, firing shots about the place. When the lorry passed the house where Mrs. Quinn lay dying the grief-stricken inhabitants fled the back way.

Father Considine, asked for an interview, said: “Please don’t ask me – I cannot. I feel unable to give it. It is too awful, too unhuman to contemplate.”

At first, Father Considine broke down and cried bitterly, “I have heard of Turkish atrocities,” he said. “I have read of the death of Joan of Arc, I have read of the sufferings of Nurse Cavell, and as I read those things I often felt my blood boil, and I often prayed that the good God would change the hearts of the perpetrators, but little did I then dream that I should witness a tragedy more cruel than any of those things, and out here in our own little peaceful parish. My God, it is awful.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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