Obscure Ireland With Peter

The Murder of Maria Kirwan | Scandal in Victorian Dublin | Ireland in 1852

In 1852 a scandal rocked the Victorian City of Dublin when accusations of murder, adultery and bigamy were levelled against a respectable middle class artist named William Bourke Kirwan. His wife Maria had died in an apparent case of accidental drowning on the island of Ireland's Eye in September but William was about to find himself on trial for her murder. This is the story of the death of Maria Kirwan and the trial of her husband William.
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In June 1961 the body of 5 year old Tommy Powell was discovered in the ruins of St. Kevin's Church on Camden Row. Tommy, who had been missing since the previous day, had suffered a severe head injury and an enormous manhunt ensued as 100 detectives frantically searched for his killer. Multiple theories were considered and 1000s of people were interviewed yet nobody could shed any light on what happened to the boy and to this day the murder remains unsolved. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For 100 years The Foundling Hospital on Dublin's James's Street cast a dark shadow over the city. Designed to be a place of refuge and care for the poorest and most vulnerable members of Irish society it instead became a place of mass death and burial. This podcast explores the dark history of hospital, how it came into existence, the shocking treatment received by it's inmates and the sad stories that led parents to leave their baby in it's cold cradle on James's Street. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Did This Dublin Woman Murder Her Husband? The Shocking Story & Murder Trial of Ellen Byrne. In the summer of 1842 the respectable neighbourhood of Rathmines in Dublin, Ireland was rocked by scandal when the decomposing body of Augustine Byrne was discovered in his bed. The bizarre circumstances surrounding his death and the secretive behaviour of his wife Ellen led to her being charged with his murder and put on trial for her life one month later. The question on everybody's lips that summer was- Did Ellen Byrne murder her husband? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the summer of 1963 Dublin’s dark and deadly tenement past returned to torment the residents of the inner city. Exactly 50 years after the catastrophic collapse on Church Street that claimed the lives of 7 people, a neglected tenement house on Bolton Street came crashing down, catapulting an elderly couple from their beds and burying their broken bodies under a pile of rubble. Just 10 days later the unthinkable occurred when a terrace of decaying Georgian homes on Fenian Street crumbled into the ground, killing two little girls who stood on the street below. The cataclysmic events sent a wave of fear and panic through the city’s tenements and a homelessness crisis ensued as house after house were condemned and scores of families found themselves on the streets surrounded by the belongings they had salvaged.
The year that John F. Kennedy came to Ireland, The Beatles played to an ecstatic crowd at The Adelphi and Gay Byrne presented the Late Late Show that had debuted the year before, the dire state of housing in the capital city was cruelly exposed. The tenements were not a thing of the past, they were thriving and were still home to thousands of people who lived in the same damp, mouldy and crumbling homes that had shattered the bones of their predecessors half a century earlier.
This is the story of the deadly tenement collapse of 1963, of the lives of those killed by the falling masonry and of how the disaster shed light on the lousy living conditions of those who called The City of Dublin home.
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