Obscure Ireland With Peter

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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At 2:25pm on the 30th March 1835 Lucinda Sly, a 57 year old Carlow woman was taken from her cell in the county gaol to begin the short walk to the gallows that awaited outside. As the executioner placed a noose around her neck and she took her final glance of this mortal realm the events of the previous months that led to this terrifying moment raced through her mind. She thought of her young lover, John Dempsey whose feet she could hear shuffling behind as he too felt the hangman’s rope tighten around his neck, she thought of the years of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her brutish husband Walter Sly, she thought of the bullet that had passed through his skull, freeing her from his tyranny and how quickly her hopes of a happy life with John had slipped from her grasp.

Outside the prison a crowd of 10000 people jostled for position as they bayed for her blood. Lucinda Sly, despite her suffering, had become a figure of hate. In the eyes of many of those who gathered to watch her demise she had betrayed her vows of marriage, she had betrayed her Protestant faith by taking a young Catholic lover and was responsible not only for the death of her husband but for the impending hanging of 27 year old John Dempsey whom she had led so far from the path of righteousness. As the clock struck 2:30 pm Lucinda and John walked out onto the gallows together as the crowd mocked and jeered, the hangman inspected the rope around their necks, raised his arm and pulled a lever and together the ill fated couple were launched into eternity.

This is the story of the unfortunate life and death of Lucinda Sly, her marriage to a violent drunkard, her desperate bid for freedom with her illicit lover and her conviction for murder that led to an execution so brutal that she became the last woman to ever be publicly hanged in the County of Carlow.

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Investigating The Murder of Lavena Ball in Dublin, Ireland 1936.

In February 1936 a shocking crime was uncovered on Corbawn lane in Dublin when an abandoned and bloodstained car belonging to Mrs. Lavena Ball was discovered in Shankill. The thorough police investigation that followed could find only one suspect, Lavena's own son Edward. Join me as I investigate this shocking and largely forgotten crime from 1930s Dublin.

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