COAKLEY, DANIEL JOHN

Town planner and principal of the Cork School of Commerce, 1908-1944. Daniel John Coakley, one of the five sons of John Coakley, a farmer in Donoughmore, Co. Cork, and his wife Mary, née Hegarty, trained as a railway audit accountant and was sent by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction to study at the London School of Economics from 1904 to 1907.   He was awarded a diploma in business organisation and accountancy with first class honours, taking first place among the seventy students of his year. In 1908 he was appointed the first principal of the Cork Municipal School of Commerce, remaining in the post until his retirement in 1944.  When new premises on Morrison's Island were proposed in the early 1930s, he accompanied the architect, HENRY HOUGHTON HILL HENRY HOUGHTON HILL , on a tour of the Continent to study the design of similar institutions in other countries.

Coakley's preoccupation with housing conditions in Cork led him to initiate a series of lectures on citizenship and town planning.  One of the lectures which he gave was published in Cork circa 1917 as General principles of housing and town planning.  In 1922 he became honorary secretary of the Cork Housing and Town Planning Association, which was founded in the same year. Under the direction of LESLIE PATRICK ABERCROMBIE LESLIE PATRICK ABERCROMBIE , he organised a survey of Cork city, a report on which was published as Cork: a civic survey in 1926. He also published a booklet for the Cork Incorporated Chamber of Commerce & Shipping under the title Cork, its trade and commerce (1919), which is said to have achieved an international circulation.

Coakley's public-spiritedness also manifested itself in other ways.  He was a founder member and treasurer of the Cork branch of the National Council for the Blind, and secretary of the Cork Library Society and Cork Savings Committee.   He died in Cork on 7 March 1951.  He had married Agnes Murphy in 1912 and had a son and a daughter.

Address: Home: 5 Newenham Terrace, Cork.

All information in this entry not otherwise accounted for is from the biography of Coakley in IB 86, 22 Apr 1944, 170, and from the entry on him by Helen Andrews in Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. by James McGuire and James Quinn, 9 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 2009), II, 608-9.