Military service pensions delvin man among civil war deaths

A Delvin man was among those killed as Free State soldiers attempted to clear Cork of anti-Treaty IRA guerrillas in late 1922, newly released archival material has revealed.

William McNeice died after an ambush in the Ballymakeera area of Cork in early December 1922, and in newspaper reports at the time, was inaccurately described as a native of Carlow.

Private McNeice’s story came to light among the latest tranche of military service pensions applications, which were released online by the Irish Military Archives last Thursday.

The files state that between 1924 and 1933, under the Army Pensions Acts, McNeice’s mother – a Mary McNeice of Ballinvalley, Delvin – applied and reapplied for a pension in light of her son’s death in service.

Mrs McNeice initially sought the pension after a dependents’ allowance she received following her son’s death stopped in March 1924. She said that the withdrawal of the allowance had caused her “a great hardship”.

However, further investigations found that Mrs McNeice – then in her late 50s – was only partially dependant on her late son, and that of her eight children, four were still at home, and some of them in gainful employment. Her husband, James, was employed as a handyman, earning £3 per week.

The McNeices made further efforts to obtain a pension in 1927, when it was raised in the Dáil by the Mullingar TD, PW Shaw. Officials from the Army Pensions Board, however, insisted that Mrs McNeice was not a dependent of her son’s, and that she had no further entitlements; the fact that the case was mentioned in the Dáil “should not make us jumpy about decisions”, one official said.

Correspondence from the McNeices tailed off after 1933, when another application was made, and rejected, under the terms of the 1932 Army Pensions Act.

William McNeice was around 26 or 27 years old at the time of his death. According to the 1911 Census, his father James was a herdsman, and a native of County Monaghan, who lived in a labourer’s cottage on an acre of land at Ballinvalley.

William joined the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence, and according to IRA membership rolls, he was a member of the Delvin Company, 4th Battalion, No. 4 Meath Brigade at the time of the Truce in July 1921.

His membership of the burgeoning Irish Free State’s National Army suggests that unlike many of his comrades in Delvin, he supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty and took the pro-Treaty side during the ensuing Civil War.

As a private (or Volunteer) attached to Gen Sean Boylan’s 1st Eastern Division, McNeice found himself at the thick of the fighting, as Free State forces moved south for the non-conventional phase of the war. This phase is generally considered to have started around September 1922, when anti-Treaty forces were cleared out of all major towns and cities, and forced into a Munster redoubt.

Facing capture and execution by the Dublin government, the anti-Treaty forces resorted to guerrilla tactics honed during the War of Independence. One such operation led to the 'Irregulars’ – as they were labelled by the Free State authorities – commandeering an armoured car and attacking the village of Ballymakeera, in the heart of the west Cork Gaeltacht.

The assault, which started on the morning of Monday December 4, 1922, involved the strafing of several buildings in Ballymakeera by gunfire from the armoured car.

With bullets and bombs flying to and fro, one National Army soldier – Sergeant Thomas Nolan – was killed in the fighting, with another 15 injured, according to the Southern Star newspaper of December 9, 1922.

The anti-Treatyite action was followed by the surrender of the company of National Army troops, and the Red Cross was brought in to tend to the wounded. According to the Southern Star, “Volunteer McNeiss [sic] is in imminent danger of death, having been terribly wounded in the abdomen”.

After-action reports revealed that the Delvin man was part of a squad defending the post office in Ballymakeera, when he took several shots to the stomach. He later died in Mercy Hospital, Cork.

The online release of the latest military service pensions application records is one of a number of such releases planned between now and the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Rising.

The files – hundreds of thousands in all – offer a wealth of information about the composition of the Irish Volunteers, the IRA, the Irish Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan, Na Fianna Éireann and the National Army between 1916 and 1923.

Several Westmeath applicants are in the new tranche of files, including files pertaining to the Drumraney IRA leader Michael McCormack, and several other applicants from Moate, Mullingar, Rathowen and Ballynacargy.

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