Written on the gates of Bandon at this time was a warning "Entrance to Jew, Turk or Atheist; any man except a Papist".

After an uprising by Protestant inhabitants who expelled the Irish Army garrison, a larger force under Justin McCarthy, Viscount Mountcashel arrived and retook the town.

Sir John Moore, who was later leader of the British Army and was killed at the Battle of Corunna in Spain in 1809, was governor of the town in 1798.

In the 19th century, the town grew as a leading industrial centre which included brewing, tanning, distilling, corn and cotton milling.

[15] Major General Arthur Ernest Percival was commander of the British garrison in Bandon in 1920–21 during the Irish War of Independence.

Irish army leader Michael Collins was killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, about 9.6 km (6.0 mi) outside Bandon.

[20][18] Hart wrote, "the truth was that, as British intelligence officers recognised, "in the south the Protestants and those who supported the Government rarely gave much information because, except by chance, they had not got it to give".”.

[21] Murphy observed, "Hart does not give the next two sentences from the official Record which read": an exception to this rule was in the Bandon area where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information.

Although the Intelligence Officer of the area was exceptionally experienced and although the troops were most active it proved almost impossible to protect those brave men, many of whom were murdered while almost all the remainder suffered grave material loss.

Murphy, therefore, concluded in a 1998 review of Hart's research, "the IRA killings in the Bandon area were motivated by political and not sectarian considerations".

That city was founded in 1873 by Lord George Bennet, a native of the Irish Bandon who named the American one after it, and who is known especially for having introduced gorse into the US ecology with some disastrous results.