History: Well over a century later, it's still an extraordinary story. Two of the most senior officials in the British administration of Ireland are strolling through the Phoenix Park in Dublin on their way to dinner when they are set upon by a group of men armed with surgical knives. Death is swift, silent, bloody and terrible, writes Deaglán de Bréadún.
The attackers make good their escape and, although the killings take place in broad daylight, the authorities are flummoxed and virtually clueless. It takes months of painstaking detective work to put a case together. Finally, a total of 27 suspects are brought to book but, in order to ensure conviction, six of them are induced to become informers. The most prominent of these is James Carey, a prime instigator of the original assassination plot. Five of "the Invincibles" are hanged and, as an act of revenge, Carey is shot dead on a boat off South Africa as he is about to start a new life.
In a sense, the Phoenix Park murders of May 6th, 1882 were the "9/11" of their day, causing a huge sensation and spawning acres of newspaper coverage. News reporters and court illustrators clearly worked every hour God sent, but with the consolation of knowing that this was one of the biggest stories they would ever cover in their lives.
The author of this new book about the murders is himself a journalist with a keen competitive instinct and one suspects that the sheer sensationalism of this epic saga is what drew him to the subject and led him to write about it. The result is a rattling good read and Molony has done us all a service by bringing this remarkable series of events back to life.
The broad outline of the story is fairly well-known, but Molony's narrative fleshes it out with intriguing and colourful detail. It is perhaps not generally realised that the sole target of the assassins was permanent under-secretary Thomas Henry Burke, head of Britain's civil service in Ireland, and that Lord Frederick Cavendish - an even bigger fish - was only on the scene as a result of a chance meeting. Indeed it appears that the killers did not even know their second victim was the chief secretary, newly arrived in Ireland that very day.
The idea has been put about in recent years that the Invincibles were some kind of proto-communists or ideological anarchists, but in Molony's account they come across as highly devout Catholics who saw themselves as the vanguard of Irish nationalism.
The Sherlock Holmes of this political whodunnit is Det Supt John Mallon, the guiding intelligence behind the investigation. Clever as some of the conspirators were, they met their match in Mallon, portrayed as a master of subterfuge and psychology. Ironically, we are told that his subsequent efforts to secure promotion were temporarily blocked by Dublin Castle prejudice against Catholics.
There are echoes of the more recent Arms Crisis of 1970 in the involvement of such figures as James Carey, outwardly a conventional businessman, elected councillor and Catholic sodality member who had an alter ego as a plotter and conspirator against British rule. The "turning" of Carey to give evidence against his colleagues was brought about by a combination of family pressures and false suggestions that the so-called "prime minister of the Invincibles" , Daniel Curley, was about to break first.
It can be a thin line between hero and traitor in the Irish revolutionary tradition, but Curley stood his ground to the last. His final letter to his " most ever-beloved wife" Jane illustrates the pressure he was feeling.
Curley asks her to "forgive me for the step that I took with regard to my trial - I mean for not trying to save myself as others did; but I could not stoop so low or bring myself to do so. My dear wife, I will die as I have lived, faithful to my principles and to my country's cause".
The story has a rich cast of characters, including cab driver "Skin the Goat" Fitzharris and the chief "enforcer" of the Invincibles, Joe Brady, one of a family of 25 children, who went to his death on the scaffold intoning prayers and kissing the crucifix. There are many striking black-and-white photographs but even more vivid are the drawings produced at the time, which convey a drama the camera cannot match.
Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Phoenix Park Murders: Conspiracy, Betrayal and Retribution By Senan Molony Mercier Press, 285pp. €12.99