7/19/2023 0 Comments Patrick blown away![]() They held the boys and their mother at gunpoint until the boys were identified. The Auxies were able to creep up on the Loghnanes and the neighbours while they were working in the field. The truck carried at least fifteen heavily armed Auxie men. At 3pm on Friday, November 26, the noise of the threshing machine made it impossible for the Loughnanes to hear the armoured truck of the Auxies pull up onto their farm. They also burned several homes to the ground. As a reprisal for this attack, the RIC murdered a twenty-three year old local woman named Ellen Quinn. Patrick’s IRA Company, just a month earlier on October 30, had been involved in the Castledaly ambush near Gort, where they had killed one RIC member and taken four others prisoner. It was threshing season, so on that particular Friday the Loughnanes, as well as roughly 12 other neighbours and family members were in the field picking corn and tossing it into the steam powered threshing machine. She was a widow and when the brother’s siblings left Ireland to find work in the States and Britain, Pat and Harry stayed to tend to the land. ![]() The two boys were farming in Shanaglish in a field close by their mother’s home. The 26 th of November in 1920 was a Friday. As part of the IRA, Patrick was a company commander in the local parish of Beagh. Both men were also volunteers in the IRA. Both were members of Sinn Féin, Pat was the head of the local Sinn Féin cumann and Harry was its secretary. Pat was twenty-nine and Harry was twenty-two. Patrick and Harry Loughnane were two young Galway lads from a little village called Shanaglish. “ Nothing remained of his face except his chin and lips and the skull was entirely blown away.” – Paul O’Brien
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