Murder plots to memorabilia

BROGANS Bar at 75 Dame Street, in the heart of Dublin, is today famed for housing the largest collection of Guinness memorabilia outside the brewery. However, in the 1880s, when it was known as Swanns, the pub was infamous as a meeting place of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).

Sitting directly across from the gates of Dublin Castle—then the administrative centre of British rule in Ireland—the location was both daring and ironic. Over pints of porter, plots were whispered and schemes hatched, including a plan to assassinate the much-hated Chief Secretary, William ‘Buckshot’ Forster, from an upstairs window. Forster, notorious for his harsh enforcement of the Coercion Acts, survived multiple attempts on his life and these discussions in Swanns never came to fruition.

The Invincibles

On May 6, 1882, however, Swanns Bar became the departure point for a dramatic and bloody act that would shape Irish politics for decades. That afternoon, members of the Irish National Invincibles—a splinter group from the IRB with a more radical agenda—set out from the pub determined to strike at the very heart of British authority in Ireland. Their target was Thomas Henry Burke, the Permanent Under-Secretary and a Galway man widely despised as the ‘Castle Rat’ for his zeal in enforcing coercion measures.

Burke was walking through Chesterfield Avenue in Phoenix Park with the newly appointed Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, when the Invincibles attacked. Armed with surgical knives, they fatally stabbed both men. Though Cavendish was not the intended victim, his murder alongside Burke shocked Britain and Ireland alike, throwing politics into turmoil, with Home Rule being removed from the table for a

generation. Cavendish remains the most senior British Government official ever assassinated in Ireland.

Aftermath

In the aftermath, the Dublin Metropolitan Police arrested scores of suspects. Through careful interrogation and by playing prisoners against one another, they identified the culprits. The Invincibles’ leader, James Carey, turned informer and testified against his comrades. Joe Brady, Michael Fagan, Thomas Caffrey, Dan Curley, and Tim Kelly were convicted and hanged in Kilmainham Gaol between May 14 and June 4, 1883. Their bodies were buried in quicklime graves within the prison grounds, where they remain to this day.

Campaigns led by groups such as the Cabra Historical Society, spearheaded by Nicky Kehoe, continue to call for the men’s remains to be exhumed and given a proper burial. The Society has also unveiled plaques near the homes of several of the executed men, ensuring their memory endures.

As for James Carey, his betrayal sealed his fate. Fleeing Ireland under an assumed name, he boarded the Melrose Castle bound for South Africa. But when recognised by a fellow passenger, Patrick O’Donnell, Carey was shot dead before ever reaching his new life.

One other figure tied to the episode, the cab driver James ‘Skin the Goat’ Fitzharris, was sentenced to 16 years for conspiracy. Though never proven to have taken part in the killings, his association with the Invincibles made him a symbol of the cause.

A solitary cross of white gravel marks the spot where the assassinations took place, no one knows if this grim memorial is in memory of the victims or the assassins. It is maintained annually by the OPW.

Today, Brogans is remembered less for its revolutionary conspiracies than for its pints and its Guinness artefacts. Yet the echoes of those turbulent days in the 1880s linger still within its walls, where plans for Irish freedom and acts of violence that shook an empire were set in motion.