Andrew Cooney

Who was Andrew Cooney?

Andrew Cooney was an Irish republican from Nenagh, County Tipperary, who later settled in the United States. He studied medicine at University College Dublin just as the Irish War of Independence was getting underway, and he played for a brief spell with the College's hurling club. He joined the Third Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army.

After the Anglo-Irish truce of July 1921, Cooney was appointed Officer Commanding of the 1st Kerry Brigade, IRA, and reorganised it. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and in March 1922, and was appointed Commandant of the 1st Eastern Division of the anti-Treaty IRA in the Irish Civil War.

The same year he was captured by Free State forces and interned in Mountjoy Prison, where he became O/C of the prisoners in C Wing. He accepted responsibility for an attempted escape bid on 10 October 1923 in which a fellow prisoner Peadar Breslin was killed and another man was wounded. He was released in 1924. He succeeded Frank Aiken as Chief of Staff of the IRA in 1925; after eight months in that role, he departed on a fund-raising trip to the United States, but soon returned and won his only Fitzgibbon Medal with UCD in 1927. His service for the UCD team ended when he qualified as a medical doctor in 1928.