Whoever killed them 124 years ago was never brought to justice. Mairéad O’Brien remembers when Athenry was rocked by The Cashla Murders

 

Neighbours Frank Shawe-Taylor and Tom Egan were shot dead in two separate incidents in Cashla, Athenry, in 1920. Although these killings occurred during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of east Galway, their savagery rocked the county.

Frank, born in 1869, was the youngest of the three children of Walter Shawe-Taylor and Elizabeth Persse of Castletaylor, Ardrahan, Co Galway. Married to Agnes Ussher, he was a successful farmer, auctioneer, valuator, and land agent. In 1892, he acquired grazing lands in Athenry, which included 588 acres in Castlelambert and 611 acres in Moor.
This acquisition caused resentment among local farmers who had hoped to lease and farm the land.

The Wyndham Land Act, passed in 1903 through no small effort from Frank’s brother, John, allowed small farmers to expand their acreage through a massive land purchase scheme. Its implementation put pressure on landholders and graziers to relinquish some or all of their holdings. Frank, along with other graziers, faced boycotts, property damage, assaults on employees, death threats, and eventually required police protection.

Efforts to buy land from him failed, because either the price was too low for him or the amount of land he offered to sell was too small.
The long campaign of intimidation against Frank started in 1905 with a failed assassination attempt on himself and his wife, Agnes, near Ardrahan. It ended in his ambush and murder as he made his way from his home at Moorpark, Athenry, to a cattle fair in Galway in the early hours of March 3rd, 1920.

Although his chauffeur, James Barrett, was with him, Frank drove the car himself. As he approached Tom Egan’s public house in Cashla on the Galway to Monivea road, he noticed a cart and a wooden gate blocking the road just beyond it.

James got out of the car and as he approached the barricade to remove it, gunfire rang out from behind a roadside wall. He turned around to see his boss slumped across the car seat with blood pouring from his blackened face, shot at point-blank range. Another volley rang out, and he found himself lying on the grass at the side of the road with five pellets in his jaw.

The gunmen asked if he was hurt and ordered him to get up and walk away without turning around. He fled to the nearby home of William Broderick, Shawe-Taylor’s herd.

A message was sent to Agnes, who displayed remarkable courage in the immediate aftermath. Although terrified for her life, she made the short trip on her own to retrieve her husband’s remains – her servants refused to accompany her.

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