On the outskirts of East Belfast is a house that might be considered as one of the most important houses in modern Irish history; Craigavon House.
Built for James Craig senior in 1870 to the designs of the Waterford-born architect Thomas Jackson it was once a glorious mansion but now sits in a state of semi-dereliction off the Holywood Road.

For me, Craigavon House evokes the imagery of the Home Rule crisis in Ulster, whether that be the unveiling of Edward Carson as the leader of Unionism in September 1911 on the lawns outside, or whether that be the footage of Carson reading the text of the Ulster Solemn League & Covenant from the steps outside to assembled journalists in September 1912, or indeed the audacious gunrunning operation by the Ulster Volunteers in April 1914 which was planned and executed from the Billiard Room of this house. This place acted as a nerve-centre for Unionist’s resistance to home rule in Ireland.

However, its history goes back much further than 1911 and I’m very grateful to have been shown around this wonderful house by Carol Walker – Director of the Somme Association – and I began by asking her about the origins of the house…

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On the evening of 23 March 1922, in the context of a bloody sectarian conflict that had been raging for almost two years, Owen McMahon locked up his pub on Ann Street with the assistance of his bar manager Edward McKinney. The Capstan was one of several pubs owned by Owen McMahan in Belfast, the others included the International at the corner of Donegall Street, the Century on Garfield Street, and the Great Eastern on the Newtownards Road in the east of the city.

McMahon and McKinney made their way towards the Antrim Road and to Kinnaird Terrace where McKinney was living with the McMahon family who had tea together before retiring to bed for the night. As they slept, loyalist gunmen posing as police officers sledgehammered their way into the house before gathering together the eight male occupants in the parlour room where they were chillingly advised “you boys say your prayers”. The gunmen opened fire murdering Owen McMahon, his three sons Thomas, Frank and Patrick, as well as Edward McKinney the bar manager. His other son, Bernard, survived the initial shooting but later died of his injuries on 2 April. Such was the horrific scene at Kinnaird Terrace that an ambulance man collapsed with shock on his arrival at the house. ‘The McMahon Murders’, as the incident became known, had ‘shocked almost the entire world’ according to Joe Devlin MP in the House of Commons who went on to quote from the pages of the Belfast Telegraph which reported the incident as ‘the most terrible assassination that has yet stained the name of Belfast’.

In retaliation for these and other Belfast murders, the IRA assassinated the former head of the British Army, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, and a subsequent British ultimatum to the Irish government sparked the first salvos of the Irish Civil War days later. The reluctance of the unionist Belfast government to pursue loyalist killers drove the rift between Northern Ireland’s two main communities even deeper, laying the foundations for the Troubles at the end of the twentieth century.

For this edition of the Historical Belfast I’ve been speaking to Ed Burke, Assistant Professor at University College Dublin about his latest book Ghosts of a Family where he has expertly uncovered the likely murderer of the McMahons in a case that has remained unsolved for over 100 years.

I began by asking him what it was that attracted him to this topic as a subject for his new book…

Buy Ghosts of a Family here.

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More Stories from Belfast City Cemetery is the latest addition to Tom Hartley’s ‘Written in Stone’ series of books that use the story of each of Belfast’s cemeteries to explore the dynamic history of our city and its people. From Catholic to Protestant to Muslim and Jew, from the great and the good to the poor and the destitute, each grave has multiple stories to tell. Since the publication of the previous edition of his Belfast City Cemetery book in 2014, Tom Hartley has continued to research the graves and the stories connected to them.

The new edition looks at further stories that tell the history of Belfast from the political strife of internment and conflict related deaths to those who lost their lives in industrial accidents in its shipyards and linen mills. It is the story of a dynamic city shaped by many fascinating and remarkable people.

Tom Hartley is, arguably, one of those fascinating and remarkable people himself.

He is perhaps best known for his political activism spanning over 50 years which saw him serve as General Secretary and the National Chairperson of Sinn Fein before being elected for the party as a City Councillor in 1993 and going on to be the city’s Lord Mayor from 2008-2009.

In his spare time, however, Tom pursues his love of history and is one of Belfast’s foremost public historians delivering tours and authoring books which highlight the importance of our burial sites as a repository of the political, social and economic history of Belfast.

Tom is supremely wise and endlessly witty – an absolute pleasure to sit down and talk history with. We met at the James Connolly Visitor Centre on the Falls Road, and I began by asking him about his first memories of the Belfast City Cemetery…

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