Bagpipes of murdered Tomás MacCurtain to be played at ceremony honouring his role in 1916 Rising
A pipe band parade will march from the former home of the commander of the Irish Volunteers’ Cork Brigade in Blackpool, Cork City, where he was shot by RIC officers on March 20, 1920, to the National Monument on Grand Parade to commemorate the mobilisation of some 1,000 Volunteers in Cork for Easter Week 1916.
Two US pipe bands — the New Mexico Police and Fire Pipe Band and the Amarillo Firefighters Pipe Band, whose founder Beau Hargrave’s great-great-grandfather Abraham Hargrave designed Cork’s Custom House — will join with the Newmarket Pipe Band for the parade. It will also acknowledge MacCurtain’s link with the Brian Boru Pipers, Cork’s first pipe band, and the Cork Volunteer Pipe Band, which he founded in 1914.
