The first people to die in the 1916 Easter Rising weren’t shot in Dublin. They drowned in the dark off this quiet stone pier on the River Laune, a couple of kilometres outside Killorglin, three days before a shot was fired in the capital. That’s the reason to come to Ballykissane – not the pier itself, which is a plain working jetty, but what happened at the end of it on Good Friday night.
What happened here
On the night of 21 April 1916, a car carrying four men – the driver Tommy McInerney with Con Keating, Dónal Sheehan and Charlie Monahan – was on its way west to Cahersiveen. Their job was to seize a wireless set and get radio contact going with Roger Casement and the Aud, the German ship bringing rifles for the Volunteers. At a junction outside Killorglin, in the pitch dark, McInerney took the wrong road – the one that runs straight out onto Ballykissane Pier – and the car went off the end into the Laune.
A man named Timothy ‘Thady’ O’Sullivan, who lived beside the pier, heard the engine and then a sudden silence. He went down to the water’s edge with a candle, heard shouts, and guided one man ashore: McInerney, the driver, the only survivor. Keating, Sheehan and Monahan drowned. The radio link was never made, the Aud was intercepted and scuttled off Cork, and the Kerry end of the plan came apart – but it’s the three drowned men, widely counted as the Rising’s first fatalities, that the place remembers.
The memorial beside the pier was commissioned by the 1916 Centenary Committee and designed by the Valentia Island sculptor Alan Ryan Hall – a wall of deep-relief bronze carrying the three names. Each Good Friday the Friends of Ballykissane gather here for a wreath-laying, a reading of the Proclamation and talks on the night’s events.
The pier itself
Long before 1916, this was the working harbour for the town: Ballykissane was once the main point for goods in and out of Killorglin, and coal ships docked here to supply Kerry. Today it’s a fishing and sitting spot. There’s some decent bottom fishing for flounder and the occasional bass off the stone edge, and locals also take sea trout and bass from it – bring your own bait and tackle, as there’s nowhere to hire any, and check the tide, because the estuary rises and falls a good deal through the day.
The Centenary Loop walk
If you want more than a look at the monument, the Ballykissane Centenary Loop is a 6.5 km circuit out of the Fair Field Car Park in Killorglin, taking roughly two hours. It runs along minor roads, the bank of the Laune and a raised flood-defence embankment, with the pier as the turning point and views out over Callinafercy, Castlemaine, Keel and Cromane. Information boards along the way cover the river’s wildlife, the old fishery, and the 1916 story. It’s dog-friendly and easy going.
Practical information
- Entry: Free, and open at any hour – it’s an open pier.
- Parking: Very limited at the pier itself, room for only a handful of cars. For the loop walk, park at the Fair Field Car Park in Killorglin; the pier is the far point of the circuit, not a short hop from the car park.
- Getting there: Signposted just outside Killorglin, about 2 km from the town centre, which has the nearest shops, cafés and fuel. Bus and Local Link services stop in Killorglin.
- Underfoot: The pier is level, but the riverside paths are unpaved and get muddy after rain – wear proper footwear.
Come at low evening light, when the Laune goes still and the Reeks catch the last of the sun behind the town – it’s an easy place to picture how quiet, and how dark, that Good Friday night would have been.