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AE-HN610 - Assassinations That Changed Modern Irish History
The history of political assassinations – designed to bring about seismic change or take revenge on a leading representative of an enemy force – is a rich one in Irish history. This course will analyse the employment of assassination as a tool by revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. The course begins by examining republican assassinations within the context of a wider international phenomenon of political decapitation in the late 19th century, the rise of terror tactics among groups seeking to overthrow governments across Europe. As well as dissecting the event itself, the stabbing to death in Dublin’s Phoenix Park of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the new Chief Secretary of Ireland, and Sir Thomas Burke, a senior civil servant, students will disentangle the relationship between such acts of republican political violence and parliamentary politics, including how the spectre of political violence was leveraged by the home rule movement led by Charles Stewart Parnell MP to win concessions from the British government. A similar approach will then be adopted in turn for other, later assassinations, including those of Tomás Mac Curtain, Owen McMahon and his four sons, Field Marshal Henry Wilson, General Michael Collins and Lord Louis Mountbatten. The assassination will be analysed – motive, means, opportunity and organisation – and then the immediate reaction and wider implications of the event will also be assessed. The course will also consider how the assassination of an Irish viceroy of India, Lord Mayo, in 1872 altered the history of South Asia (and that of the British empire).
| Dates | Schedule | Time | Venue/Location | Fee € | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Jan 2026 to 03 Mar 2026 | Sessions: Duration: 6 Tuesdays Time: 18:00-20:00 Dates: 27 Jan 3, 10, 17, 24 Feb 3, Mar |
18:00 | Belfield | 160.00 |
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Duration: 6 Tuesdays
Time: 18:00-20:00
Dates: 27 Jan 3, 10, 17, 24 Feb 3, Mar
• Murder in the Park: The Invincibles and the killing of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Sir Thomas Burke.
• ‘The first jihad’? The assassination of the Earl of Mayo, Viceroy of India.
• “I have paid them back in their own coin”: the killing of Tomás Mac Curtain and the emergence of the squad / the twelve apostles.
• The path to Eaton Square: murder in Belfast and the revenge killing of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson
• Killing a chief: The death of Michael Collins.
• Targeting an earl: The Provisional IRA and the assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten.
- Edward Burke, Ghosts of a Family: Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles (Dublin: Merrion Press, 2024).
- Rory Carroll, Killing Thatcher, (London: Mudlark, 2024).
- Anne Dolan and William Murphy, Michael Collins: the Man and the Revolution (Cork: Collins Press, 2018).
- Helen James, ‘The Assassination of Lord Mayo’, International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, 5/2 (2009), 1–19.
- Stephen Kelly, Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1975-1990 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
- Shane Kenna, The Invincibles: The Phoenix Park Assassinations and the Conspiracy that Shook an Empire (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2019).
- Ronan McGreevy, Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP (London: Faber and Faber, 2022).
Readings for this course will mainly be from electronic resources.
A reading list will be provided at the beginning of the course.
At the end of the course, students will have a firm understanding of the ideologies, networks and logics that fuelled political violence in Ireland and the wider British empire. Students will also have an in-depth knowledge of key debates and literatures on methods of political violence, anti-colonial resistance and insurgency. The emphasis on accessing and analysing primary source materials will also equip students with the skills to develop their own research outputs on this topic in the future.
Each class will be divided between a lecture a group discussion. The lecture will offer an overview of themes and key events relevant to the topic. An emphasis will be placed on access to, and analysis of, primary sources.
Dr Edward Burke is Assistant Professor in the History of War at UCD. In 2020 Edward was awarded a fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to conduct research on paramilitarism in Ulster. His recent publications include Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), Ghosts of a Family: Ireland’s Most Infamous Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2024), and An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2018).