The press put the attendance at 20,000, not including military and police. It was August 26th, 1824. The occasion was the execution of six men for a murder committed five months earlier, close to where they would be hanged, on the hill of Knockshinraw in Galmoy, in the northwest corner of Co Kilkenny. A mass execution such as this was a sensation and a rarity.
At dusk on the eve of St Patrick’s Day 1824, John Marum and his son were making their way on horseback across Knockshinraw when they were ambushed. The son, Edmund, took the brunt of the shot fired from a blunderbuss, but managed to continue on down the hill. His father’s horse stood still long enough for its rider to be knocked to the ground and killed with a bayonet. John Marum was 52.
Galmoy was the murder triangle of its day. Since 1819 over 20 killings had taken place in the area, for which no capital convictions were secured. The approver (or informer) system, heavily relied upon by the authorities, proved futile without corroborating evidence. Such evidence would never be forthcoming from anyone who valued his life or the lives of his family.
Drawn mostly from the agricultural labouring class, none of the previous victims were of the status of John Marum. He was one of eight brothers who distinguished themselves in business, in agriculture and in the Catholic Church. Two were in holy orders; one – Kyran – was Bishop of Ossory.
Murder triangle – Pádraig Ó Macháin on a mass execution in Kilkenny in 1824
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John farmed in Galmoy. Between 1819 and 1824 he added considerably to his holding at the expense of tenants whose leases he took over and whom he subsequently evicted. In response, his cattle were maimed and killed, his remaining tenants intimidated, and his own life threatened. “There is not one day passes,” he wrote in 1820, “but one friend or other comes to tell me of the fate that awaits me.” “But if I am shot oh my helpless young family!”, he added, “What will they do?” On Knockshinraw, on March 16th, 1824, John Marum met the fate that he had feared.
There is little doubt that the social status of the victim gave impetus to the vigour with which the authorities pursued their investigations. Within a few weeks the six primary suspects had been rounded up and an informer recruited. For the first time since the trouble began, corroborating evidence was to hand. It came from John Marum’s two young servants. In what today would be an appalling infringement of rights, they were taken into custody and coerced and bullied into giving evidence.
The trial took place in Kilkenny on August 23rd. It lasted all day until a guilty verdict was returned and the chief justice, Charles Kendal Bushe, pronounced sentence. The six condemned men were to be hanged close to where the crime had been committed and their bodies returned to the county infirmary for dissection. The law that allowed for such a sentence was crafted of purpose to set an example and to install maximum fear in people who believed that the human body should be intact on the Last Day.
On Knockshinraw on August 26th the cordon of military and police separated the locals from the high sheriff of Co Kilkenny, the gentry of the grand jury, the priests, the condemned men and the hangman. The introduction of scientific calculations for the hanging process was still decades away, and so the crowds that gathered in their thousands witnessed the spectacle of six young men, suspended by their necks, being choked to death.
Contemporary sources for what happened on Knockshinraw are to be found in state papers and in newspaper reports. A further source was being created even as the events unfolded. This was a ballad that uniquely enshrined the perspective of the local community, who believed that a miscarriage of justice had taken place. It concentrated on the trial and on the perceived corruption of those involved on the state side, from Judge Bushe (“on a bed of fire and sulphur racked and tortured may you be”) down to the two servants. Names and dates were given with such accuracy that the song’s contemporary nature cannot be doubted.
For all its richness, it was a ballad that proved elusive in later years, as if the trauma of March and August 1824 had dulled the communal memory. Yet it must have been popular in its day. Versions of it crossed the Atlantic to Newfoundland, where fragments were recorded by the late Aidan O’Hara in 1978. In 2000, I recorded a performance from my neighbour Paddy O’Neill, aged 96. He was the only person in Galmoy who knew the song, a unique oral record of terrible events that occurred 200 years ago.