On 21 November 1920 (
Bloody Sunday (1920)) Cooney was one of the Volunteers who shot six British Army
Intelligence officers (three were killed) at 28 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin. After the Anglo-Irish
truce of July 1921, Cooney was appointed Officer Commanding (O/C) of the 1st Kerry Brigade, IRA, and reorganised it. He opposed the
Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and in March 1922 was appointed Commandant of the 1st Eastern Division of the
anti-Treaty IRA in the
Irish Civil War. The same year he was captured by
Free State forces and interned in
Mountjoy Prison, where he became O/C of the prisoners in C Wing. He accepted responsibility for an attempted escape bid on 10 October 1922 in which a fellow prisoner Peadar Breslin was killed and another man was wounded. He was released in 1924. He succeeded
Frank Aiken as Chief of Staff of the IRA in 1925; after eight months in that role, he departed on a fund-raising trip to the
United States, but soon returned. Cooney won his only Fitzgibbon Medal with UCD in 1927. His service for the UCD team ended when he qualified as a medical doctor in 1928. In 1933, Cooney unveiled a memorial to
Terence Bellew McManus at the old
Republican plot in
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Thereafter, semi-retired from active republicanism, he continued to be a regular orator at gatherings, and he was a founder of the short-lived
Cumann Poblachta na hÉireann party in 1936. Cooney emigrated to the United States in the 1940s; he died on 4 August 1968 at Carroll County General Hospital,
Carroll County, Maryland, at age 71. Andy Cooney is buried in his native land at Neenagh, Co. Tipperary. ==References==