Walter L. Cole

Who was Walter L. Cole?

Walter Leonard Cole was an Irish merchant and politician in the early twentieth century. Prior to the foundation of the Irish Free State, he was an alderman for a period. An active republican, he was a founding director of the Sinn Féin Printing & Publishing Company. He also led the Sinn Féin grouping in Dublin Corporation in the early 1900s.

As a well-off supporter of the underground Irish republican movement in the early twentieth century, his house on Mountjoy Square seems to have been a regular meeting place for senior figures within that movement. The notes of Seamus Reader, an Irish Volunteer from Glasgow, record a meeting in January 1916 at Cole's house:

Shortly after 5pm on the 2nd, January 1916, I went to Cole's house, Mountjoy Square, Dublin, where, while waiting in the kitchen for tea, I jotted my coded notes for my report to Scotland. I then went to the room where I met Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, J Connolly, P Pearse and McDonagh

all of whom were signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and all of whom were executed the following May, as leaders of the Easter Rising.

Cole is also documented as having hosted provisional Dáil meetings at his home, the assembly having been driven underground in September 1919. He was arrested by the military at his home at No. 3 Mountjoy Square in 1920.