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Ghosts of a Family:

Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder,

the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles

Lecture by

Dr Edward Burke

on

Thursday Oct 23 2025

at

8pm

in

Clonakilty GAA Club, Ahamilla, P85 WN84

Cover charge: €5.

 

This lecture presents a gripping true crime story of Ireland’s most infamous unsolved murder – the sectarian massacre of six Catholic civilians in 1922.

 

At 1.20 a.m. on 24 March 1922, five men, four dressed in British police uniforms, broke into the North Belfast house of Owen McMahon, a well-known Catholic publican. They fatally shot McMahon, four of his sons and Eddie McKinney, an employee of the family. Nobody was ever charged for these ruthless and cold-blooded murders.

 

In retaliation for these and other Belfast murders, the IRA assassinated the former head of the British Army, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, and a subsequent British ultimatum to the Irish government sparked the first salvos of the Irish Civil War days later. The reluctance of the unionist Belfast government to pursue loyalist killers drove the rift between Northern Ireland’s two main communities even deeper, laying the foundations for the Troubles at the end of the twentieth century.

 

From a West Cork perspective, it is interesting to note that Patrick O’Driscoll, Michael Collins’s brother-in-law, was a key gatherer of information / intelligence in Belfast during the ‘pogrom’ there. Over 100 years later Edward Burke, in his recently published book, has expertly uncovered the identity of the McMahons’ likely murderer. This is a riveting cold-case investigation that invokes the smoke-filled streets of Belfast during the cataclysmic violence of 1920–22, and explores how the ramifications of the McMahon killings are still being felt to this day.

 

Dr Edward Burke, who is a native of Rosscarbery, is an Assistant Professor in the School of History at University College Dublin, specialising in the study of political violence, insurgencies and paramilitarism. His previous books are An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland (Liverpool, 2018) and Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920 (Cambridge, 2024).