Major Denis Mahon was the Irish landlord of Strokestown in County Roscommon who was shot and killed during the Great Famine of Ireland.
Mahon's murder caused panic among the aristocracy and turned English public opinion against the Irish in the midst of the Black ‘47.
[1] His son Thomas succeeded him in 1819 but had no children and died in 1835, passing on the title of Baron Hartland and the Strokestown estate to his youngest brother Maurice.
Maurice allowed the lease to lapse for a portion of the estate and the Mahon's stopped collecting rent from the town of Ballykilcline and its surrounding area.
Denis soon began trying to fix the estates issues and renewed the lease with the crown, sending notice to the people of Ballykilcline that they were required to pay their rent including the 3 years of arrears.
[1] Mahon chose to serve evictions to the increasing number of tenants who refused to pay their taxes, forcibly removing them from their homes.
[1] At the advice of his cousin and estate agent, John Ross Mahon, Denis began a mass "assisted emigration scheme."
[8][6] He wrote that 106 of the passengers were ill, 158 had died on the journey and "the few that were able to come on deck were ghastly yellow looking specters" This ship was followed by three more filled with Mahons tenants.
[6] At the end of August 1847, Mahon returned from England to Roscommon where he had left local Catholic priest Michael McDermott in his place filling in as the chairman of the Strokestown famine relief committee.
[10] McDermott denied the accusation and stated the sole cause of Mahon's murder was "the infamous and inhuman cruelties which were wantonly and unnecessarily exercised against a tenantry, whose feelings were already wound up to woeful and vengeful exasperation by the loss of their exiled relatives, as well as by hunger and pestilence".