The Duggan sisters

Owing to their well-known political leanings, Peg and Annie’s Parliament St florist and the family home on Thomas Davis St were regularly raided by the British military.

Following a 1919 military order to close the florist, Peg readily gave its keys to IRA Volunteers for use as an arms dump.

Setting up a market stall instead, she continued her role as a vital rendezvous contact for Volunteer dispatches.

As lone men walking through the city were more likely to draw Crown forces’ suspicions, Peg and Annie often personally escorted Volunteers to the safe houses the pair skilfully sourced. Well aware that raids and searches by Crown forces could happen at a moment’s notice, the sisters would even take and conceal the Volunteers’ arms too.

Being neighbours and friends of Cork’s first Republican Lord Mayor and Commander of Cork IRA’s No 1 Brigade, Tomás MacCurtain, on the night of the Lord Mayor’s murder the sisters played a pivotal role in his last moments. With the IRA and Crown forces engaged in ongoing attacks and reprisals, MacCurtain was aware he was a target and received many warnings that his life was in danger.

On the night of March 20, 1920, two Volunteers killed Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Constable Murtagh on Pope’s Quay. The men responsible quickly made their way to Peg’s home.

Peg and Brighid then escorted them to separate safe houses and took their arms.

On their way home, Brighid noticed suspicious-looking men near MacCurtain’s house. Later that night, the sisters heard “a thundering knock at a door followed by shots up and down the street”.

From the window, Annie saw that the commotion was coming from the MacCurtains’ house and heard Tomás’ wife call for a priest. Hours after the killing of Constable Murtagh, disguised RIC members had burst into MacCurtain’s home and shot him dead.

Throwing coats over their night clothes, the Duggans ran for the priest and were then present for MacCurtain’s Last Rites and subsequent death.

“Tomás was lying there where he was shot, but was conscious. We were present while he was being anointed and, after the anointing, he died where he lay. An ambulance arrived and the ambulance men lifted the remains on to a bed in the house.”

The sisters were still in the house when members of the British military and RIC returned to search it, including around the bed where MacCurtain was now laid out.

“We all knelt down by the bedside to say the Rosary when a party of British military arrived, accompanied by uniformed RIC… Before leaving, they disclaimed all knowledge of what had happened. My sisters, Sara and Brighid, and I stayed with Mrs. Mac Curtáin until morning,” said Peg Duggan in her 1957 witness statement to the Bureau of Military History.