Yeats wrote that “out of Ireland we come. Great hatred, little room.” The story of the Phoenix Park murders of 1882 is another of those grim markers of the hatred that has poisoned much of Anglo-Irish history.
In The Irish Assassins, Julie Kavanagh takes up the story of the murder of Thomas Burke, a leading civil servant of the Irish government, and Lord Frederick Cavendish, the chief secretary for Ireland, by a group of Irish revolutionaries known as the “Invincibles” as the two victims walked to their offices in Phoenix Park in May 1882.
Kavanagh’s motivation is interesting. Her father, the distinguished journalist Christopher Kavanagh, had become fascinated by the Phoenix Park murders. He had accumulated notes for a book but died before he could write his version of the story. His wife picked up the trail but was thwarted when in 1968 Tom Corfe’s The Phoenix Park Murders provided a detailed examination of the crime. Julie Kavanagh, herself the former editor of Vanity Fair in London and a biographer of Nureyev, later discovered her father’s notes and became determined to finish his project.
In the late 1870s, Ireland experienced another failure of the potato crop, with production falling by three quarters. Starvation loomed, and the Irish responded by launching a protest movement called the “New Departure,” which brought together the major strands of Irish radicalism. Mass protests were organized, built around an attack on the English landlord class in Ireland. These
