A Lethal Legacy: A History of Ireland in 18 Murders - Exploring dark deeds to shed light on the past

The sensational murder of a young Co Sligo woman in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1894, and the unprovoked and unpunished shooting dead of two Jewish men in Dublin in 1923 are among the many violent crimes recalled in this book.

Mollie Gilmartin, from Carrowreilly, near Ballymote, was aged 21 when she was shot dead on her way to work by a Catholic priest who had become infatuated with her and who had followed her to the United States from their home parish in Sligo. Fr Dominick O’Grady was charged with first-degree murder, but deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. After a number of attempts to kill himself, he escaped from Long View Asylum in 1899 and avoided recapture.

The murder received scant coverage in contemporary Irish newspapers “presumably because of Fr O’Grady’s clerical background”, writes Fin Dwyer in one of the book’s reviews of individual or multiple killings of Irish people during the 19th and 20th centuries. He also suggests that the actions and reputations of some senior Irish Free State army officers in late-1923 meant that the killers of Bernard Goldberg and Ernest Kahn, who were shot dead on Dublin streets within a week of each other, were never convicted.

Dwyer, creator of the Irish History Podcast, uses a broad definition of murder, “where intentional violence resulted in the death of a civilian”. Most of his 18 cases did not result in murder convictions, but he chose them as emblematic of the changing times in which they occurred. “While these individual acts of violence are rarely the decisive turning points of history in and of themselves, through an understanding of them I believe it’s possible to illuminate the darker recesses of the past, and gain a greater understanding of the context in which they took place”, he writes.

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Hunger, poverty, eviction, land, greed, emigration, war, Empire, Partition, the Troubles, infanticide, insanity and homophobia are the backgrounds to most of the killings he chose.

The book’s subtitle is misleading and its captions and text are not error-free, but it is an interesting and readable chronicle of 18 individual or multiple killings, many of which are overlooked or underreported in broader histories.