War of Independence: The strange case of Cruxy O'Connor

The latest in our War of Independence series tells the peculiar story of a freedom fighter, spy, and informer all wrapped-up in one individual

The funeral of Jeremiah O'Mullane, Daniel Crowley, William Deasy, Thomas Dennehy, Daniel Murphy, and Michael O'Sullivan who were killed in a fight with the RIC in Ballycannon. Picture: WD Hogan, National Library of Ireland.

THE next-door neighbours were far from neighbourly. In fact, the relationship between the O’Connors and the Deasys often amounted to a feud at 50 yards — the distance between their cottages in Mount Desert, on the edge of Cork.

How it all began is uncertain, but we know how matters ended — with the Deasys mourning their son Willie, killed in a 1921 police raid in nearby Ballycannon, along with five other local members of the Irish Republican Army. And the O’Connors wound up exiled to America, their son Paddy stalked through three nations by relentless IRA avengers who finally gunned him down in New York in 1922.