He fought in the 1916 Easter Rising under the command of his namesake Ned Daly, leading the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park.

[1] On 19 December 1919, Daly along with Dan Breen led an abortive ambush, at Ashtown railway station near the Phoenix Park, on the British Viceroy, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Supreme Commander of the British Army in Ireland, Lord French, as he returned from a private party which he had hosted the previous evening at his country residence in Frenchpark, County Roscommon.

[3] Daly and the men under his command were responsible for the killing of many British intelligence officers, in particular District Inspector Redmond, who had been putting increasing pressure on the squad.

[4] Daly himself personally killed several people, including Frank Brooke, director of Great Southern and Eastern Railway, who served on an advisory council to the British military, in June 1920.

He and his men hijacked a British Army Peerless armoured car in Clontarf at the corporation abattoir, while it was escorting a consignment of meat to a barracks and shot dead two soldiers in the process.

In August 1922, during the Irish Free State offensive that re-took most of the major towns in Ireland, Daly commanded a landing of 450 troops of the Dublin Guard at Fenit, County Kerry which went on to capture Tralee from the anti-treaty forces.

Statements by the Garda Síochána (stymied from procuring evidence), two Free State lieutenants on duty – W. McCarthy and Niall Harrington – and one survivor, Stephen Fuller, maintained the claims were fabricated.

[15] She was a sister of Elizabeth Murtagh, the first wife of Commandant Michael Love who served with Daly in the Collins Squad of the IRA, in the Irish Free State Army of the 1920s and during the Emergency period.