Cork's Kilmainham Ep. 5: \"X\" Marks The Cell

Watch Davy Holden's excellent video on Cork Military Detention Barracks:

https://youtu.be/MhgbDqtgB_o?si=RXX7LIzU5wv7SldP

Cork's Kilmainham, Episode 5: X Marks the Cell

On the evening of 27 April 1921, Diarmuid O'Leary noticed something on the two prison cells beside his own.

Each door had been marked with a large X.

His had not.

By the following morning, he would understand why.

In this episode we follow the aftermath of Clonmult and Mourneabbey into Cork Military Detention Barracks, where Patrick O'Sullivan, Maurice Moore, Patrick Ronayne and eighteen-year-old Sonny Mulcahy waited under sentence of death.

We hear from Patrick O'Sullivan's remarkable final letter home, including his description of death as simply "going by an early train."

We also follow the story of Major Geoffrey Lee Compton-Smith, the British officer held by the IRA in an attempt to prevent the Cork executions, and Diarmuid O'Leary, the condemned prisoner whose own cell door remained unmarked.

The episode then follows Patrick Casey and Daniel O'Brien, as the final firing squads of the War of Independence fall silent inside the barracks.

But the death sentences were not finished.