November 15th, 1847: Denis Mahon is shot dead on his way home from a meeting of Roscommon board of guardians. His assassination, one of a half-dozen murders or attempted murders of landlords or their agents this autumn, alarms the gentry.
The sharp reaction by press, peers and parliament hardens opinion against further expenditure on Ireland. A local priest is accused of having incited the assassins. Sectarian tensions are inflamed and the Catholic priesthood replaces Irish landlords as scapegoats.
Lord Farnham claims in the House of Lords that the parish priest of Strokestown, Michael McDermott, had declared at Mass on the Sunday before the murder that "Major Mahon is worse than Cromwell and yet he lives". The allegation of Farnham, a leading Orangeman, causes a sensation.
Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, asserts that the best way to stop the assassination of landlords is to hang the local priest. The Times announces the formation of a combination, whose members swear "that for the life of every Protestant . . . we will take the life of the parish priest where the deed was committed".
The assassination of Mahon occurs against a background of rent strike, clearances, forced emigration and coffin ships.
The major had clashed at meetings of the Strokestown relief committee with Father McDermott, who accused him of amusing himself in London while his tenants starved. Mahon retorted that "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."
Like other landlords with congested estates, Mahon turned to a land agent. He employed his cousin John Ross Mahon, of the Dublin firm of Guinness and Mahon [the future bankers]. The major was advised to clear his 30,000acre estate of two-thirds of its population: "If you do not there is no prospect of your getting any rent for years . . . "
He was informed that the cost of emigration, while considerable, would be half that of maintaining paupers in Roscommon workhouse. This political economy led to the disaster which ignited murderous passions in Strokestown.
Bonfires burn for miles around on the night of the crime.
Father McDermott denies indignantly that he denounced Mahon from any altar. He goes on to assert, however, 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 woeful and vengeful exasperation by the loss of their exiled relatives, as well as by hunger and pestilence".
Bishop George Browne of Elphin affirms that he can find no evidence against the priest. He publishes a list of 3,006 tenants dispossessed by Mahon's agent, most of whom are now dead.