In the early hours of March 24th, 1922, a group of five men in police uniform broke into the north Belfast home of Catholic publican Owen McMahon. McMahon, his five sons and an employee, Eddie McKinney, were lined up in the front room of the house – and their assailants opened fire, killing McMahon, four of his sons and McKinney. Northern Ireland had only recently come into existence – and the McMahon murders were notorious even by the bloody standards of the time. State agents were involved and, in the aftermath of the killings, the Northern Ireland authorities showed no interest in pursuing justice. The killers were never brought to justice, and the episode confirmed in the minds of many Northern Catholics and nationalists that this new entity of Northern Ireland never would be governed in their interests.
[ Will extent of British state collusion in Pat Finucane’s murder be revealed?Opens in new window ]
Edward Burke’s superlative book sets the McMahon case in its broadest context, evoking three deadly intertwined phenomena: the extreme and often uncontrolled nature of the security systems operating within unionist-governed Northern Ireland in a time of unparalleled violence; the deeply disturbing relationship between the Northern Ireland state and loyalist paramilitary groups; and the repercussions of the northern security situation upon an Irish Free State on the edge of civil war. Burke traces the stories of a variety of potential suspects (invariably state actors) before alighting on an individual he considers the most likely murderer: a decorated British military veteran and loyalist paramilitary. Fascinatingly, he builds a compelling picture of guilt by drawing on records wrestled from archives reluctant to release material still, many decades later, considered deeply sensitive.
A cold-case investigation, then, a century and more after the event – but when viewed against a wider background, of course, anything but cold: for the McMahon case is just one of many atrocities in Northern Ireland’s baleful lifetime that bear the unmistakable hallmark of state collusion. The authorities move heaven and earth in such cases to avoid due scrutiny and justice – and the great value and authority of Edward Burke’s book lies in its illumination of this dark thread. Dark – and persistent, too: collusion has after all not yet been consigned to history, and yet more patient, tenacious work will be required in the future to bring about truth, and justice.
