Obscure Ireland With Peter

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The Murder of Maria Kirwan | Scandal in Victorian Dublin | Ireland in 1852

In 1852 a scandal rocked the Victorian City of Dublin when accusations of murder, adultery and bigamy were levelled against a respectable middle class artist named William Bourke Kirwan. His wife Maria had died in an apparent case of accidental drowning on the island of Ireland's Eye in September but William was about to find himself on trial for her murder. This is the story of the death of Maria Kirwan and the trial of her husband William.

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In the summer of 1963 Dublin’s dark and deadly tenement past returned to torment the residents of the inner city. Exactly 50 years after the catastrophic collapse on Church Street that claimed the lives of 7 people, a neglected tenement house on Bolton Street came crashing down, catapulting an elderly couple from their beds and burying their broken bodies under a pile of rubble. Just 10 days later the unthinkable occurred when a terrace of decaying Georgian homes on Fenian Street crumbled into the ground, killing two little girls who stood on the street below. The cataclysmic events sent a wave of fear and panic through the city’s tenements and a homelessness crisis ensued as house after house were condemned and scores of families found themselves on the streets surrounded by the belongings they had salvaged.

The year that John F. Kennedy came to Ireland, The Beatles played to an ecstatic crowd at The Adelphi and Gay Byrne presented the Late Late Show that had debuted the year before, the dire state of housing in the capital city was cruelly exposed. The tenements were not a thing of the past, they were thriving and were still home to thousands of people who lived in the same damp, mouldy and crumbling homes that had shattered the bones of their predecessors half a century earlier.

This is the story of the deadly tenement collapse of 1963, of the lives of those killed by the falling masonry and of how the disaster shed light on the lousy living conditions of those who called The City of Dublin home.

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At 2:25pm on the 30th March 1835 Lucinda Sly, a 57 year old Carlow woman was taken from her cell in the county gaol to begin the short walk to the gallows that awaited outside. As the executioner placed a noose around her neck and she took her final glance of this mortal realm the events of the previous months that led to this terrifying moment raced through her mind. She thought of her young lover, John Dempsey whose feet she could hear shuffling behind as he too felt the hangman’s rope tighten around his neck, she thought of the years of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her brutish husband Walter Sly, she thought of the bullet that had passed through his skull, freeing her from his tyranny and how quickly her hopes of a happy life with John had slipped from her grasp.

Outside the prison a crowd of 10000 people jostled for position as they bayed for her blood. Lucinda Sly, despite her suffering, had become a figure of hate. In the eyes of many of those who gathered to watch her demise she had betrayed her vows of marriage, she had betrayed her Protestant faith by taking a young Catholic lover and was responsible not only for the death of her husband but for the impending hanging of 27 year old John Dempsey whom she had led so far from the path of righteousness. As the clock struck 2:30 pm Lucinda and John walked out onto the gallows together as the crowd mocked and jeered, the hangman inspected the rope around their necks, raised his arm and pulled a lever and together the ill fated couple were launched into eternity.

This is the story of the unfortunate life and death of Lucinda Sly, her marriage to a violent drunkard, her desperate bid for freedom with her illicit lover and her conviction for murder that led to an execution so brutal that she became the last woman to ever be publicly hanged in the County of Carlow.

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Investigating The Murder of Lavena Ball in Dublin, Ireland 1936.

In February 1936 a shocking crime was uncovered on Corbawn lane in Dublin when an abandoned and bloodstained car belonging to Mrs. Lavena Ball was discovered in Shankill. The thorough police investigation that followed could find only one suspect, Lavena's own son Edward. Join me as I investigate this shocking and largely forgotten crime from 1930s Dublin.

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The Largest Mass Murder in Irish History & The Hanging of Henry McCabe | Malahide, Dublin 1926.

In March 1926 the largest mass murder (excluding political violence) in the history of The Irish State was discovered at a house named La Mancha in Dublin. Six victims were found, some with brutal head wounds while others were burnt almost beyond recognition by a fire that was set to cover up the crime. Four members of the McDonnell Family and two of their servants laid side by side on the lawn as the eyes of the law began to focus on the gardener Henry McCabe, the only survivor of the tragedy. Henry was subsequently found guilty of the murder and hanged in Mountjoy Prison. The question is, was he really capable of carrying out such a crime?

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At 6:30am on the morning of the 18th April 1956 a milkman named Patrick Rigney made a shocking discovery on the steps leading to the basement of a Georgian town house on Dublin’s Hume Street. Before him lay the body of 33 year old Helen O’Reilly, her legs bound together and a silk stocking tied tightly around her neck. As Rigney tried to make sense of what he was seeing he was startled by a noise that seemed to emanate from the basement below. Fearfully he peered over the wrought iron railings where he saw a woman pressing her back up against the wall and staring back up at him. Rigney left the scene in search of a Garda and the blonde haired woman climbed back up the steps as quickly as her arthritic knees would allow and fled to her cramped and cluttered flat two doors down the street.  How could this have happened again she thought, it was only 5 years since she had dumped Bridget’s body on Hume Street and those poxy detectives had nearly collared her for murder. Mamie Cadden paced up and down in her flat as she frantically concocted a story to tell the guards who were bound to come knocking on her door. It was hardly her fault that those pregnant women had died, she thought, sure they had sought the famous Nurse Cadden out themselves, she was only providing a service the women desperately wanted but which the law strictly forbade. She gathered up her medical equipment and hid it as best she could in the small space and braced herself for what was to come.

When Patrick Rigney discovered the body of Helen O’Reilly on Hume Street he exposed an underworld of backstreet medical practitioners that many people knew about but in a deeply conservative 1950s Ireland were practically forbidden from discussing. It set in motion a police investigation and a dramatic trial that would find Mamie Cadden guilty of murder and see her sentenced to death. 

From her birth in Scranton Pennsylvania, to her childhood in Mayo and her glory days at her prestigious nursing home in Rathmines where she excelled as an independent business woman in a repressive 1930s Dublin, her multiple convictions and prison terms and her death sentence in a Dublin court room this is the story of one of the most notorious women in Irish history and also the lives of the two women whose bodies were discarded on a Dublin Street. 

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