A History of Ireland in Song

Nixon Murder Gang

Around 1 a.m. on March 23, 1922, a gang of masked men stopped outside the door of the three-story house at 3 Kinnaird Terrace, Belfast, and used sledge-hammers to smash their way in. Rousing the occupants from their beds, they forced 50-year-old Owen McMahon and his five sons, ages 11 to 24, and a 25-year-old male boarder to line up against a living room wall. Then they opened fire. McMahon and three of his boys died outright, as did boarder Ed McKinney. Another McMahon son died of his wounds a week later. 11-year-old John McMahon survived by sheltering under a couch as the killers fired at him, then running for his life. He later identified the killers as uniformed, but masked, police. As indeed they were. In fact, not only were they members of the RIC, soon to become the RUC in the six counties, but this and other gangs were organised and directed by a senior police officer, Inspector John Nixon. For this outrage was no isolated thing, but one of a wave of attacks in the pogroms that took place during and after the Irish "War of Independence". For example, a few days after the Kinnaird Terrace attack, Nixon visited a house in Arnon Street with some of his men. There they dragged the man of the house, Joseph Walsh, from his bed, and, before the eys of his two of his children, Micheal, 7, and Brigid, 2, smashed his head in with a sledgehammer. They then shot the two children, killing the boy. Before leaving, they also shot 14-year-old Frank Walsh. Nixon, an Orangeman, was honoured by King George in 1923 for services such as these, and was later elected to the British Parliament.

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