The story of the Phoenix Park murders and ensuing killing of an informer

On May 5th, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire and brother to Lord Hartington, and husband of the niece of William Gladstone, the prime minister, speaking “with a slight impediment in his speech”, took the oath of office as chief secretary for Ireland before the Irish Privy Council in Dublin Castle.

It was the beginning of what was to have been a new phase in the Irish policy of Gladstone’s government, in the wake of Charles Stewart Parnell’s release from Kilmainham Gaol, and the understanding that became known as the “Kilmainham treaty”. The next evening he walked from the castle towards the Phoenix Park. On his way he was overtaken by Thomas Henry Burke, the under secretary for Ireland. Burke descended from his cab, and they walked together into the Phoenix Park.

Lying in wait for their target – which was Burke – were members of the Invincibles. The approach of Cavendish and Burke was signalled by one of the conspirators, James Carey, who waved a handkerchief and departed the scene. Of the seven who participated in the actual attack, Joe Brady and Tim Kelly wielded the surgical knives acquired for the purpose. Within sight of the viceregal lodge that is now Áras an Uachtaráin, Burke and Cavendish passed by, and Brady inflicted the first savage stab on Burke from behind. Burke was hacked down, as was Cavendish when he tried to come to Burke’s aid.

The barbaric and politically senseless slaughter of the chief secretary and the under secretary created a wave of revulsion in Britain and throughout Ireland, and the profoundly destabilising political effects were contained only by the strenuously applied political skills of Parnell and Gladstone in concert.

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One can be quite certain that Joseph Biggar, Parnell's plain-spoken ally in obstructionism, did not meet emissaries from America to discuss the formation of a murder society

The aftershocks of the assassinations did not die with the conviction of the Invincibles, and the executions of five of them in the jail Parnell had vacated shortly before the assassinations. The murders flared back into political attention and controversy with the Pigott forgeries, implicating Parnell in the murders published by the Times, which led to the establishment of the Special Commission (colloquially known as the Parnell Commission, a term Parnell objected to) which sat and reported from 1888 to 1890.

The Phoenix Park murders are at the centre of The Irish Assassins. The author of biographies of Frederick Ashton, Rudolf Nureyev and Marie Duplessis, Julie Kavanagh, was inspired by the unfinished researches of her father, Christopher Kavanagh, a South African journalist and editor who worked on the South African sequel to the assassinations, to look into the murder by Patrick O’Donnell of James Carey, the prime (though not the sole) Invincible who “turned”.

Kavanagh’s is a sweeping and compelling narrative of a story that more than bears retelling. What she has sought to do, which has not been done before, is to try to connect in time the political and social lives of what is an extended and diverse cast of characters in Britain and Ireland, spanning from the Gladstone household (of which Lucy Cavendish, wife of the murdered Frederick, was a close member), to Parnell’s relationship with Katharine O’Shea, and encompassing the poverty-stricken background in Gweedore of Patrick O’Donnell and his people.

The approach certainly yields benefits, but it comes at a price, principally in crowding out the analysis of historians. This is a problem chiefly in relation to the treatment of the fraught issue of physical force movements in late 19th-century Ireland, especially in their relation to the Land League and Parnell, which has been the subject of meticulous scholarly analysis for decades. Broadly Kavanagh gets this right but is not always sure-footed: one can, for example, be quite certain that Joseph Biggar, Parnell’s plain-spoken ally in obstructionism, did not meet emissaries from America to discuss the formation of a murder society in London in October 1881, as a source informed Insp John Mallon, and Kavanagh appears to accept.

In Finnegans Wake Joyce writes of: 'ignorant invincibles, innocents immutant'

The remarkable, if not altogether lovable, Mallon is one of the most arresting figures in the book. Mallon is also the subject of a fine biography by Donal P McCracken, and Kavanagh quotes a striking passage from a speech of Parnell in the House of Commons referring to Mallon as “an Irish police officer” who had broken the Invincibles, but “whose name was studiously kept in the background” in favour on the security side of Edward Jenkinson, whose role as assistant under secretary for police and crime in Ireland is part of the institutional history of the British intelligence services, who had done nothing to bring about the conviction of the conspirators.

The personal complicity with the Invincibles of Patrick Egan, the chief treasurer of the Land League who ended up as the United States minister to Chile, taken as read by Kavanagh, remains disputed.

In the never-failing coincidences of publishing, Seán Ó Cuirreáin’s The Queen v Patrick O’Donnell covers part of the same ground as Kavanagh. It is a short biography of Patrick O’Donnell, that is lucid, well-researched and tells a beguiling story. Born in Gweedore to a family that was impoverished, but not of the poorest, O’Donnell spent a period of his childhood in the US, before his father, seemingly affronted by American moral depravity, took the family back to Donegal. O’Donnell had thereafter a nomadic career in England and the US. He shunned the Land League, and had no politics beyond that of the deprivations of his family and neighbours; he had not the remotest connection to the Invincibles.

On July 1st, 1883, O’Donnell embarked for Cape Town. On board he struck up a relationship with an Irish man called James Power, whom he seems to have sensed approvingly was in some sort of flight from the authorities in Ireland. When the ship docked in Cape Town, Power had persuaded O’Donnell to go on to Durban. In Cape Town O’Donnell came into possession of a graphic portrait from the Freeman’s Journal of James Carey. Carey was by now an execrated figure in Ireland, because of his status as an informer, and because of the revulsion generated by the execution of five Invincibles.

O’Donnell recognised the portrait as that of his on-board acquaintance. He re-embarked for Durban and on board the Melrose confronted and shot Carey dead on July 19th, 1883, in the presence of Carey’s wife and son. Because he did so more than three miles from land, so that the offence was committed “on the high seas”, he was unluckily amenable to trial in England. He was taken there and convicted. His US citizenship did not avail him, and he was hanged in Newgate prison on December 17th, 1883. He was hailed as a martyr. The heroic pro-Land League parish priest of Gweedore, Fr James McFadden, refused to permit a memorial in the church: “As far as I am personally concerned I loathe the very mention of the murder of Carey and it would be my earnest desire that it should be forever buried and forgotten”.

In Finnegans Wake Joyce writes of: “ignorant invincibles, innocents immutant”. Perhaps he was recalling the sweet youth of Tim Kelly, apprentice coachmaker, who was extinguished in Kilmainham on June 9th, 1883.

Frank Callanan is completing James Joyce: A Political Life,to be published by Princeton University Press