Life
?-1847 [Capt., later Major Mahon]; proprietor of Strokestown, Co. Roscommon,
estate from which 3,000 cottiers dwelling in 27 townlands were evicted
in May 1847, an event succeeded by his assassination on 2 Nov. 1847 [acc.
museum], when returning from meeting of Roscommon Board of Guardians,
five months after; Strokestown was reopened in the 1990s as a Famine Museum
under the direction of Luke Dodd; Dillon-Mahon papers donated to National
Library.
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Criticism
James S. Donnelly, ‘Mass Eviction and the Great Famine’, in
Cáthal Portéir, ed., The Great Famine [Thomas Davis
Lecture Series] (Mercier 1995).
Susan Hood, Strokestown, The Urban History 1660-1994 (Dublin: Four Courts 2000).
‘Ejectment Murder’, in The Nation (Dublin,
6 [sic] November 1847); Cited on Conrad Bladey,
Irish Potato Famine Commemoration Page, formerly at WWW2.toad.net - “No Surrender”.)
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Notes
Lord
Farnham, a leading Orangeman, speaking in the House of lords accused
local priest Michael McDermott of inciting the murder by declaring at
mass that ‘Major Mahon is worse than Cromwell and yet he lives’;
Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, called for the hanging of the
priest as the best way to stop the murder of landlords, while a notice
in The Times announced the intention ‘that for the life of
every Protestant … we will take the life of the parish priest where
the deed was committed’; previously McDermott had clashed with Mahon
at the Strokestown Relief Committee, alleging that the proprietor amused
himself in London while his tenants starved, to which Mahon replied, ‘whatever
I did with regard to my property I conceived rested with myself, and desired
the reverend gentleman not to presume to meddle in my private affairs’;
employed John Ross Mahon as his agent; advised to clear 30,000 off his
estate; McDermott denied being the cause of the murder or the author of
the words alleged to have been spoken; counter-claimed that ‘the
sole cause’ of the shooting was ‘the infamous and inhuman cruelties
which were wantonly and unnecessarily exercised against a tenantry whose
feelings were already wound up to the woeful and vengeful exasperation
by the loss of their exiled relatives, as well as by hunger and pestilence’;
Bishop George Browne reports that he can find no evidence against the
priest and published a list of 3,006 disposed by Mahon, most of whom are
now dead.’ (Breandan Ó Cathaoir, ‘Famine Diary’,
Irish Times, 15 Nov. 1997.)
Luke Dodd [curator of the Strokestown Famine Museum] is quoted as saying, ‘if the proximity makes the rifts of more recent history difficult to flatten out and depoliticise, one can always take refuge in prehistory. The further back things go, the less complicated they become!’ (‘Famine Echoes’, South Atlantic Quarterly, No. 95, [Winter] 1995, pp.99-100; cited in Charles E. Orser, ‘Archaeology and Modern Irish History’, in Irish Studies Review, No. 18 (Spring 1997).
Relatives: Capt. Denis Mahon was related to the Magan family (see William Magan, The Story of Ireland: A History of an Ancient Family and their Country, Element Books 2000; reviewed in Irish Times, 8 July 2000). For the role of Francis Magan in the death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, see infra.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)