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Dunmanway (, official Irish name: Dún Mánmhaí) is a market town in County Cork, in the southwest of Ireland. It is the geographical centre of the region known as West Cork. It is the birthplace of Sam Maguire, an Irish Protestant republican, for whom the trophy of the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship is named. The town centre is built on and around two rivers, which are tributaries of the larger River Bandon, which passes by at the east end of the town.
The town is twinned with Quéven, France. Dunmanway won the Irish Tidy Towns Competition in 1982. The town came to national and international attention in 2009 when Liverpool Football Club played a pre-season soccer friendly in the area.
The population of Dunmanway at the 2011 census was 1,585, rising to 1,964 by the 2022 census.
Dunmanway Castle once stood on a bank of the Sally River on the left-hand side of present-day Castle Street. It was one of the chief residences of the MacCarthy Lords of Gleannacroim, cousins of the MacCarthy Reagh sept. Dating from the late 15th century, the tower house is recorded to have been built by Catherine Fitzgerald. There was likely a small settlement in the environs of the castle.
19th-century references date the founding of Dunmanway to the late 17th century, when the English crown settled a colony there to provide a resting place for troops marching between Bandon and Bantry. By 1700, about thirty families lived in the town.
Sir Richard Cox, Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1703 to 1707, was the town's most important early patron. In 1693, Cox obtained a grant from King William III to hold market days and fairs in the town and strongly encouraged the development of the local flax industry. To that end, Cox imported from Ulster to teach the required skills. He sponsored numerous incentives for local residents involved in making linen, including rent-free housing for top producers, bonuses for efficient labourers, rewards for schoolgirls who showed strong loom skills, and production contests with generous prizes. In 1735, the town consisted of forty houses and two to three hundred people. By 1747, the linen industry was well established, and Cox's personal census recorded 557 people. Two years later, it rose to 807.
Free market economic policies in England led to the removal of protective duties on linen in 1827. In 1837, Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland recorded a population of 2,738. It also recorded the town's changing economic fortunes:
"The manufacture of linen continued to flourish for some years, but at present there are very few looms at work. A porter and ale brewery, established in 1831, produces 2,600 barrels annually; there are also two tanyards and two boulting-mills, the latter capable of grinding annually 15,000 bags of flour, and there are two or three smaller mills in the vicinity. Since 1810 a considerable trade in corn has been carried on."
West Cork was hit hard by the 1840s Great Famine. On 9 February 1847, U.S. Vice President George M. Dallas chaired a famine relief meeting in Washington, D.C. where participants heard a letter addressed to the "Ladies of America" from the women of The Dunmanway Indian Meal Ladies' Committee:
"Oh! that our American sisters could see the labourers on our roads, able-bodied men, scarcely clad, famishing with hunger, with despair in their once cheerful faces, staggering at their work ... oh! that they could see the dead father, mother or child, lying coffinless and hear the screams of the survivors around them, caused not by sorrow, but by the agony of hunger."
In the early 1850s, following the migrations and evictions which characterized the famine's upheavals, more than seventy percent of Dunmanway residents did not own any land.
On 28 November 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921), seventeen British Auxiliary Division troops were killed by the Irish Republican Army at the Kilmichael Ambush (near Dunmanway). The subsequent sacking and burning of the city of Cork by the British forces is thought to be linked to the Kilmichael Ambush. On 15 December 1920, an Auxiliary shot dead the local priest, Canon Magner, for refusing to toll his church's bells on Armistice Day; a local boy, Tadhg Crowley, was also killed in an apparently random incident. There were numerous other actions in and around Dunmanway during the war. In addition, after a truce was declared in July 1921, the local IRA killed a number of alleged informers. Controversy continues in particular over the killing of ten men (including three residents of Dunmanway) in the spring of 1922, all of whom were Protestants. These events are sometimes known as the Dunmanway killings.
The 2016 census indicated that the majority of the population identified as Roman Catholic, while responses for the 2022 census indicated that approximately 70% of people were Catholic, 6% were of other religions, while 24% were of no religion or no stated religion.
The Dunmanway Agricultural Show, first held in 1946, takes place on the first Sunday in July each year, and with contested classes including horses, cattle and horticulture.
The Sam Maguire Festival runs in September, and focuses on the life and ethos of Sam Maguire.
As of 2023, Dohenys were competing in the Cork Senior A Football Championship. The club has produced a number of inter-county players, including Éamonn Young, who captained Cork to victory in the National Football League and the Munster Football Championship in 1952, having also been a part of Cork's All-Ireland-winning team of 1945. Although the club has historically had more success in Gaelic football, Dohenys became Munster Junior B Club Hurling Champions in 2006.
August 2010 saw the revived "Munster 100" motorcycle road race take place in Dunmanway. This was followed two years later by the first Dunmanway 'Lightning Sprint' Grand Prix motorcycle meet.
Like other parts of County Cork, road bowling events are held in the surrounding area, and the All-Ireland road bowling championships took place in Dunmanway in July 2011.
The construction industry and agriculture have also played a role in the economic environment of the town.
Dunmanway railway station opened on 12 June 1866 and closed entirely on 1 April 1961.
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