In late June 1921, Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers came under fire at a roadblock in the rural area of Coolacrease (near Cadamstown).
In the Irish War of Independence military hostilities between the IRA and British forces developed into a bitter guerrilla conflict in 1920 and 1921.
In Kinnitty, about five miles (8 km) from Coolacrease, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC, the militarized police force which was the principal agency of the British state in Ireland) were killed in an ambush by the IRA on 17 May 1921.
[8][11] In June 1921, the Kinnitty Company of the South Offaly No 2 Brigade IRA was ordered to construct a roadblock as part of county-wide military manoeuvres.
[8] According to one alternative account,[2] the Pearsons fired a single shotgun cartridge in the air as a warning to rebels who were damaging their property while Alan Stanley wrote,[13]"A cousin of my father's, Oliver Stanley, told me that after the tree had been felled, a number of men came to man the barricade thus created, and were shortly afterwards surprised by security people (police and auxiliaries presumably).
On 30 June 1921, about a week after the roadblock shootings, a party of about thirty IRA men arrested Richard and Abraham Pearson.
The brothers Richard and Abraham Pearson were shot by a firing squad of about ten men, and the house was burned.
Had told the men concerned to go away, and when they refused had fetched two guns and fired and wounded two Sinn Feiners, one of whom it is believed died.
[21][22][23] On 9 July 1921, the British Government in Dublin Castle issued a statement[8][24] claiming that an atrocity had been committed against the Pearsons.
Claims of murder and atrocity were made by William Stanley, "a loyalist fugitive and distant cousin of the Pearsons.
[8][9] He was living under an assumed name, "Jimmy Bradley", at the time of the roadblock incident and escaped by running away when the Pearson brothers were arrested.
[23] Coolacrease: The True Story of the Pearson Executions was published in 2008 by the Aubane Historical Society and historians from Offaly.