The Killing of Major Denis Mahon: A Mystery of Old Ireland

by Peter Duffy

Book Overview

The Killing of Major Denis Mahon is the riveting true story of a controversial murder that casts new light on the Great Irish Famine. At the height of the famine now considered the greatest social disaster to strike nineteenth-century Europe, Anglo-Irish landlord Major Denis Mahon from County Roscommon was assassinated as he drove his carriage through his property, which was filled with thousands of starving tenants. Mahon had removed 3,000 of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060840501
• ISBN13: 9780060840501
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Insightful and Well Researched History

I was fortunate enough to encounter a list of Irish writer's work put together around the time of St. Patrick's this year (2009). With well over twenty books listed, I knew I couldn't get to them all, but was most drawn at the time to Joseph O'Connor's novel _Star of the Sea_, a most intriguing novel that brought me back into close touch with the events of the Great Famine. It is an even more micorcosmically told tale of the whole horrific trajedy than Duffy's since the bulk of it is set aboard a ship full of immigrants and their "betters" above in first class. Though fiction, I was impressed with his research. After finishing it, I wanted more information and searching led me to Peter Duffy's excellent book, which I can't say enough for. It is a very complex subject, with all the politics that was going on at that time, and the recounting of the glacially slow and nearly totally insufficient measures put forth through the labyrinthine channels of the British bureaucracy and writing it in such a way that the reader (this one anyway) was reading avidly to find out what happened next, puts Peter Duffy in a rare catagory of historical writer. This subject is a daunting task, I quake thinking of taking all this on, yet he delivers in spades. Never losing himself in emotionalism as he reveals the most arrogant bigotry and totally insensitve assumptions on the part of some British policy makers is more than I myself could ever have managed. The losses on so many levels are incalculable, yet the Irish went on, and made very positive impacts in and on their various adoptive countries, though I feel the yearning for what they were so cruelly wrenched away from has never really been erased. To his credit, Peter Duffy helps those many generations away from the events retold here, to connect to the strands of history that brought them to where they find themselves now. I personally feel I could have devoted the time to half a dozen histories of the Famine and not had any fuller understanding of it that what I got here with this book.

Fine writing, impressive scholarship

In the year of 1847, homicides numbered ninety six in Ireland. This dispassionate book is the history of one murder in one small Irish town, Strokestown, in the County of Roscommon which reverberated through Ireland and England. In his telling of the murder of the landlord, Peter Duffy weaves a revealing story of the Irish Famine, its causes and effects, the awesome power of the landlords over the lives of the poor tenants and the meager, ineffectual attempts by the British and the Anglo Irish landed gentry to save a million Irish lives. Its strength lies in the plodding march of specificity and focus; the widespread agony of the Irish tenant during the Famine is clear. From shipping the poor overseas on death ships bound for Quebec out of Liverpool to the disappearance of the small plots on which the poor tenants survived, i.e, "the landlord - engineered replacement of tillage plots for grazing land," Duffy is the master of detail and factual control;. the death of Major Dennis Mahon while never losing center stage, ultimately plays second fiddle to the British governmental ennui bordering on hostility to the tenants, the Famine and the starving masses. A.N. Wilson, the English historian, captures the nineteenth century spirit of the times with his broad brush: "the moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots." Peter Duffy paints with finer and more vivid detail.

Review

The book was in excellent condition and was shipped in a timely fashion. Great service!

Excellent History of the Irish Potato Famine. Culiminating in the Killing of a Protestrant Land Ow

Duffy writes a fascinating account of the Irish potato famine during 1846-49 by examining a local community in Ireland that during the famine, now defined as genocide, suffers severely, as all of Ireland does. The severity of the famine is made even worse by actions of large land owners and the English government to remove small plot farmers, to reduce dependence on potatoes and increase alternative agricultural production, that rent by eviction and mass forced immigration during the heights of the potato famine that resulted in over a million deaths and 1.5 million forced or coerced immigrations, many of whom died in transit on over populated ships. Massive relief efforts are slow and not efficient as England initiates limited relief requiring landlords to fulfill part of the financial obligations but what is fascinating was that the famine was widely known in the western world about the level of death as many countries (including the U.S.) offer private or governmental assistance although limited. Soup dispensaries are set up effectively in many cases but are under funded and struggle to stay open and poor houses virtually act like a prison system and are severe on the populace. In Stokestown, Major Mahon, a sometimes absent landlord carries out evictions with less severity than many landlords, pays some subsidies and limited fees for immigration, but still turns many poor out leaving them little in shelter but the ability to remove their thatched roofs to set up as temporary cover. A conflict over relief funding with the local parish priest allegedly fuels the priest to target open criticism on Major Mahan resulting in the priest being accused of inflaming the suffering to commit a severe act of violence. Duffy tells the history virtually before Cromwell to the mass deaths of the Irish famine leading up Mahan's killing and the aftermath. Duffy expertly tells the story of the killing of Major Mahon that shocked England all the way to Parliament, along with the slow revelation of controversial witnesses, resulting in conviction by circumstantial evidence. The strength of this unique telling is the concentration on this local community that reflects what as happening in all of Ireland with the exception of the notable killing of a local elite well connected to England. Duffy covers the trials extraordinary well and this is a great telling of a horrific time in our world history told on virtually a local level of the Irish community.

Excellent book

This book paints an extraordinary portrait of a time and place in history that can arguably be called one of the greatest human tragedies in modern history. Duffy sheds light on not only the grim physical facts of the Famine, as expected, but plumbs the depths of the social structures that amplified it's effects. It is refreshing to read, in today's media culture of quick conclusions and black/white reasoning, a book which acknowledges the complexity of the interplay of forces that create history, and assumes the reader is intelligent enough to draw conclusions for themselves.