RIC Constable Joseph Boynes

RIC Constable Joseph Boynes (aged 23) from Northumberland (Scart near Kildorrery)

Date of incident: 10 April 1921

Sources: CC, 11 April 1921; CE, 15, 16 April, 6 May 1921; Military Inquests, WO 35/160/2 (TNA); George Power’s WS 451, 19 (BMH); William C. Regan’s WS 1069, 11-12 (BMH); Abbott (2000), 220-21.

Note: Constables Woodward and Boynes were walking while unarmed at Scart near Kildorrery on 10 April 1921 when both of them were shot and killed by members of the Castletownroche Battalion of the Cork No. 2 Brigade. Among the Volunteers who participated were Maurice Cronin, Paddy Cronin, and Jim Cronin (all three from Rockmills) and another IRA man named Jackson. See William C. Regan’s WS 1069, 11 (BMH). Constable Boynes had been a member of the RIC for less than five months; he had been a soldier and a labourer before joining the force. 

In connected acts of reprisal, British forces ordered the burning of ten homes of republicans and certainly burned down the houses of six farmers in the Kildorrery district on 13 April on the grounds that ‘their owners must have known of the intention of certain unknown rebels to murder’ Contables Woodward and Boynes three days earlier. See CE, 16 April 1921. The IRA retaliated on the night of 30 April-1 May, when Volunteers burned three mansions in north-east Cork, including Convamore at Ballyhooly, owned by the Third Earl of Listowel; Ballywalter House near Castletownroche, the property of S. G. Penrose Welsted; and Rockmills House near Glanworth, owned by Charles Deane Oliver. These bonfires of loyalist Big Houses prompted the British to destroy the houses of six more farmers in north-east Cork ‘on the grounds that their owners are active supporters of armed rebels’. See CE, 6 May 1921.