Four Killings

This account follows a single family through the Irish Revolution and traces four violent deaths that occurred between 1915 and 1922. Its subject is political killing and the fierce competition for land that drove people to violence. The author, Myles Dungan, uses these deaths as a lens on the period.

The first killing took place far from Ireland. Jack Clinton, a small farmer from County Meath who had emigrated, was murdered in the remote, lawless Arizona territory by a gunman hired by a powerful rancher. Three more deaths happened at home. Mark Clinton was killed by a band of agrarian 'bandits' who resented his family's hold on disputed acres, and his killer was later tried and executed by the dead man's relatives and fellow members of the Meath IRA. The third was a young man with an intellectual disability, shot as an informer by another relative of the author and buried in secret, with the matter left unspoken.

What connects these killings is the violence of the struggle against British rule, along with the bitter disputes over who should own the land. Dungan shows how the conflict also pitted landless farm workers against smallholders and wealthier farmers, a dimension of the War of Independence that has received little attention.

Because the book centres on one family, it offers a fresh angle on a period that remains contested in Ireland. Dungan examines the moral and personal toll of the violence and the struggle over land, showing how both play out in unexpected ways.