“From the Anglo Irish Treaty in December 1921 until June 1922 when the Civil War began is the single most violent six month period in Northern Ireland’s history - there’s nothing else like it,” advises historian and author Dr Edward Burke of how Belfast had already been blighted by an outbreak of sectarian murder and mayhem almost 50 years before the Troubles officially began.
“It was just absolute fulcrum of sectarian violence, on a scale and with an intimacy that I think is quite shocking when you look into it.”
Anyone doubting the veracity of this claim need look no further that Dr Burke’s new book, Ghosts of a Family: Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles, for ample evidence that very bad things were happening in Belfast long before the late 1960s - including collusion between loyalists and elements of the police force.
As its title suggests, the book centres on one particularly horrific incident, the murder of prominent Catholic publican Owen McMahon, four of his sons and one of his employees, at the family’s home at 3 Kinnaird Terrace in the early hours of March 24 1922.
Shortly after 1.20am, five men - four of whom were dressed in Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) uniforms and carrying revolvers - forced their way into the north Belfast property and ordered McMahon and his sons from their beds. Owen and his six sons, Bernard (26), Frank (24), Patrick (22), John (19), Thomas Gerald (15) and Michael (11) were brought downstairs to the living room along with employee Edward McKinney (26).
The men and boys were lined up in front of the fireplace, told to say their prayers, and then shot.
Miraculously, 11-year-old Michael McMahon escaped the firing squad by hiding under the dining room table. By the time two ambulances arrived from the nearby Mater Hospital at 2am, Frank, Patrick, Gerald and Edward were dead.
Owen died shortly thereafter, while Bernard survived for another 11 days before succumbing to his wounds.
John, shot in the neck and chest, eventually recovered and was able to provide an eye-witness account of what happened.
“Four of the five men were dressed in the uniform of the RIC, but from their appearance I know they are ‘Specials’, not regular RIC,” John told investigators acting on behalf of Michael Collins in Dublin, who had ordered the Belfast IRA to keep him briefed on the ongoing atrocities in the city, many of them so-called ‘reprisal killings’ by loyalists in response to IRA attacks
The McMahon murders occurred in the wake of the Irish War of Independence at the height of a prolonged period of deadly sectarian violence between Belfast loyalists and republicans.
While the IRA were staging arson attacks and assassinations against Crown forces and the Hibernians-affiliated paramilitary group ‘the Knights’ attempted to defend Catholic areas, on the loyalist side were the Belfast branches of the Ulster Imperial Guards, aka ‘the Imps’, a paramilitary group mostly comprised of former British servicemen, and the Ulster Special Constabulary - ‘the Specials’ a part-time and overwhelmingly Protestant/loyalist police force which vastly outnumbered the Royal Irish Constabulary it supposedly answered to.
As Ghosts of a Family explains, the McMahon murders and other sectarian atrocities against Catholics in early 1922 prompted the London IRA’s assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the former head of the British Army, in June 1922 - a major catalyst for the outbreak of the Irish Civil War just days afterward.
With James Craig’s newly established unionist government unable/unwilling to clamp down on loyalist-perpetrated violence, the British Army’s resident battalion in Belfast, 1 Norfolks, was tasked by Westminster to keep some sort of order amid the chaos. Thus, its soldiers frequently found themselves at odds with loyalist groups as well as under attack from the IRA.
“There were horrific atrocities in the Troubles that are well remembered, but I think these atrocities from the early 1920s are much more forgotten,” explains Dr Burke, a historian at University College Dublin specialising in the study of political violence, insurgencies and paramilitarism, of what drew his attention to this notorious Belfast murder case.
“I became quite obsessed with the granular detail of political violence in early 1920s Belfast and the sheer variety of armed groups that were clustered in working class areas of west and north Belfast - it wasn’t just the IRA versus the police or the British army, you had the Hibernian Knights and the Imperial Guards engaged in extremely intimate violence in really tiny areas of the city.”
Indeed, one likely motive for the murder of Owen McMahon, one of Belfast’s most successful and well-connected Catholic publicans who lived in an affluent area of the city, was to show that no Catholic was ‘untouchable’.
“It struck to the heart of the nationalist sense of power, if they had any, in the north of Ireland,” comments Dr Burke, who has also published another book this year, Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920.
“It sent a message that everybody was now a target.”
Despite an official RIC inquiry, no-one was ever charged with the murders at the McMahon house, and for many years it has been widely accepted that the killers were led by RIC District Inspector John Nixon, a much-feared policeman in the city at the time.
However, in Ghosts of a Family, Dr Burke makes a compelling case for why Nixon is unlikely to have been one of the execution squad at Kinnaird Terrace. Instead, he offers ample evidence that the key perpetrator was most likely a notorious north Belfast Imp with close links to Unionist MP Tom McConnell and a personal grudge against the McMahon family.
“Even the IRA commanders and Sinn Féin in Belfast at the time concluded that Nixon actually wouldn’t be present at murders,” explains Dr Burke, who managed to gain access to previously sealed British military intelligence reports from the 1st Norfolk battalion as part of his research for the new book.
“Nixon was far too careful and far too clever. Yes, the British government and the British Army certainly believed he was complicit in murder. But that doesn’t mean that he was present at Kinnaird Terrace on the night of March 24 1922.”
However, David Duncan, a paranoid schizophrenic First World War veteran and former ‘Black and Tan’ who ended his days in a Canadian mental hospital, was definitely known to the Norfolks as a volatile and violent loyalist character with a very visible history of attacks on Catholics.
This leading Imp also had a direct connection to the McMahons: Duncan had previously attempted to shoot dead Patrick McMahon, another north Belfast publican whom Dr Burke believes was Owen McMahon’s brother, just two months prior to the deadly attack on Kinnaird Terrace.
Although Patrick McMahon named Duncan to police in his murder attempt, resulting in the loyalist’s arrest and trial, he was eventually acquitted.
“Once I found that out, it was like ‘well, hang on, here we potentially have somebody who has real motives to target the McMahons,” explains Dr Burke, who hails from Dublin but spent four years living in Belfast.
“His propensity to nurture violent grievances over very long periods is later remarked upon by his Canadian doctors. This is a man who will settle scores in the most extreme way possible, and if he can’t find Patrick McMahon, he’s going to find another target he believes is closely linked to him.
“Unfortunately, in 1922, I think Duncan was simply considered too dangerous and too connected to elite people to actually prosecute.”
Sadly, the north was doomed to repeat such history in the years that followed.
Ghosts of a Family: Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles by Edward Burke is available now, published by Merrion Press. Dr Burke will launch the book at No Alibis in Belfast tomorrow evening at 6.30pm with special guest speaker Noel Doran. Free tickets via info@merrionpress.ie
5 years of research into the veterans who led loyalist gangs in Belfast in 1921/1922.
— Edward Burke (@Edward__Burke) September 12, 2024
In some ways they resembled Birmingham's 'Peaky Blinders' or Glasgow's 'Billy Boys'. Except they were more violent.
Noel Doran @irish_news will speak at the @NOALIBISBOOKS launch. All welcome. pic.twitter.com/0gmyKeclWL
