The Limerick Curfew Murders 1921

The night of the 6/7 March 1921 was, in the words of historian Thomas Toomey, ‘one of the most tragic in the tortured history of Limerick city and county during the period 1919-1921’.  

Between 11.30pm and 1.30am, three men – the Mayor of Limerick George Clancy, his immediate predecessor, Michael O’Callaghan, and an IRA Volunteer named Joseph O’Donoghue – were brutally shot dead at their homes.

Although blamed by British officialdom on radical elements of the local IRA, these shootings were the work of Crown Forces and were widely recognised as such at the time.

Dubbed the ‘Curfew Murders’, they sent shockwaves through the city and country and made headlines around the world, and they remain the central event in Limerick’s social memory of the War of Independence today.

This exhibition tells their story.