Attendant Con Sheehan (called Long Con as he stood over six feet one inch in height) started work in the Cork District Lunatic Asylum in 1899. He was 32 years old when he started which makes him a little older than the average entrant. It is unknown what he worked at before entering the service. We know that in 1921 he was living at 229 Blarney Street with his wife Abina and his three teenage children [the house no longer exists].
On the 8th of January 1921, Long Con was walking home after a days work. He stopped and spoke to RIC Constable John Carroll outside the Good Sheppard Convent. While they were talking a number of shots were fired at them. Seven or eight men were seen running away from the scene. Con was wounded in the shoulder and Constable Carroll was hit in the wrist. Their injuries were not life threatening but the incident was enough to persuade Con that it was time to retire from the Asylum.
Two months later – on the 19th of March – Con was at home in Blarney Street. At about the eight o’clock in the evening, his wife answered a knock at the door. A number of gunmen pushed passed her. Con rush’s out the back door but was intercepted by men who were watching the back of the house. They shot him several times. This time the wounds were fatal and Long Con died where he fell.
The media reported that Con Sheehan had been shot because he had given information to the police which had resulted in the killing of the Clogheen Boys [see next story] a few days before. His family has denied this and continue to do so to this day. It has been contested that Con had been set up by his neighbour and landlady. Indeed, on the previous day – 18th March 1921 – his daughter gave evidence at the Police Court that his landlady – Anna Walsh – had threatened to have him shot oweing to an ongoing dispute about repossessing her house from him. The police do not seem to think that Con was giving information and took the claim that he had been set up very seriously- although no action was taken against Mrs Walsh.
The suggestion that Con had given evidence to Constable Carroll in January – the night he was wounded – doesn’t seem to make much sense either. Con would surely have known that the Blarney Street and surrounding area was a hotbed of IRA activity – as indeed was the Asylum inself – and to be giving information to a policeman in the immediate area would be foolhardy in the extreme. Young Denis Spriggs – himself to be murdered by the Black and Tans – lived just yards from where Con had been wounded in January.
On the other sid of the argument, it is notable that the board of management of the Asylum – thoroughly Sinn Finn in membership -failed to pass a vote of sympathy to his family and was harshly unsympathetic to Mrs Sheehan when she sought to be paid his pension – they refused her request.
it is difficult to tell if Long Con Sheehan as giving information to the police or not. On balance it seems unlikely. It appears to me that his troubles started when he was caught up in an attempt on Constable Carroll’s life and was compound d by the row with his landlady. He was an easy target to blame for the killing of the Clogheen Boys – and an easy target for revenge for their murder.
Con Sheehan worked as an attendant in the Asylum for 22 years.
For detailed discussion of the circumstances of his killing see the entry under his name on this site for 1899