“Cold blooded murder doesn’t need an excuse” is a line from an old western movie and certainly there was never, nor could there be, justification, for the shooting of poor Eileen Quinn (24) in Corker only a short distance from Coole park in Gort on the 1st November 1920.
Eileen was pregnant, a mother of 3 young children and nursing her 9 month old child on her knee outside her house, when a party of Auxiliaries shot her from a passing lorry.
No one was ever held accountable for her murder. The poet WB Yeats was a regular visitor and one time resident in the area and remembered the incident in his poems Nineteen hundred and nineteen and also in Reprisals.
“Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;” –Nineteen hundred and nineteen
Flit to Kiltartan cross and stay
Till certain second thoughts have come
Upon the cause you served, that we
Imagined such a fine affair:
Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery
Are murdering your tenants there.
Men that revere your father yet
Are shot at on the open plain.
Where may new-married women sit
And suckle children now? Armed men
May murder them in passing by
Nor law nor parliament take heed.
Then close your ears with dust and lie
Among the other cheated dead.- Reprisals
Scot-free is considered by some to give an indication of the nationality of the shooter from D company Galway.
Wars lead to atrocities and this was undoubtedly one of the worst during the War of Independence. A moment of absolute madness that reverberates down through the years and still now one hundred years later leaves a lasting sorrow.
Tales and Scéals 