Show Notes
On this episode of the show we looked at the McMahon murders. The murders occurred on 24 March 1922 when six Catholic civilians were shot dead at the home of the McMahon family in Belfast. The victims were businessman Owen McMahon, four of his sons, and one of his employees. Two others were shot but survived, and a female family member was assaulted. Owen McMahon (50), Gerard McMahon (15), Frank McMahon (24), Patrick McMahon (22) and Edward McKinney (25) were killed outright while Bernard McMahon (26) died later. The youngest McMahon son, 12-year-old Michael, survived the attack by hiding behind furniture and pretending to be hit. John McMahon (30) survived despite serious gunshot wounds.
Nobody was ever prosecuted for the murders but it is believed the killers were members of the police and Ulster Special Constabulary.
We spoke to Dr. Edward Burke about his recent book, Ghosts of a Family: Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles. Dr. Burke investigates the circumstances of the murders and places it in the context of the extreme violence in the city at the time which became known as the Belfast Pogrom.
Edward Burke is an Assistant Professor in the History of War since 1945 at University College Dublin (UCD). He is currently the Director of the International War Studies MA programme and Director of Graduate Teaching at the School of History. Prior to joining UCD, he was an Assistant/Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Nottingham (2017-2022). From 2015 to 2017 Edward was a Lecturer in Strategic Studies at the University of Portsmouth, attached to RAFC Cranwell. He received his PhD in International Relations in 2016 from the University of St. Andrews.
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Intro / Outro music “Sliabh” from Aislinn. Licensed under creative commons from the free music archive.
More from The Irish History Show
On this episode of the Irish History Show we have part three of our series on the Fenians. By the late 1890s, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was led by an older, cautious Supreme Council that prioritised self-preservation over direct military action. They officially banned individual assassinations and spent much of this period maintaining a low-profile underground network to survive British intelligence surveillance.
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On this episode of the Irish History Show we returned to the subject of the Fenians. We traced the movement from the end of the 1867 Rebellion onwards. We covered such subjects as the Amnesty Campaign, the Catalpa rescue, the New Departure, splits in the American movement, the Land War and the growth of cultural nationalism in the 1880s and 1890s.
On this episode of the Irish History Show we discussed the Fenians. The Fenians were Irish republican revolutionaries that sought to achieve the independence of Ireland from the British Empire in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. The main Fenian organisations were the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and their affiliate in the United States, the Fenian Brotherhood. In 1867, they attempted a rising in Ireland which was co-ordinated with raids into Canada from the United States. Although the rising failed, the IRB continued in existence and played a central part in the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State.
On this episode of the Irish History Show we discussed the Penal Laws in Ireland. The Penal Laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on the kingdom’s Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant “Dissenters”. Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy.