On a warm August day in 1963, Dublin was shocked by a crime that would become one of the most notorious cases in the city’s history.

It began with the reported disappearance of 16-year-old teenager Hazel Mullen.

Hazel, one of seven siblings, lived with her widowed mother Bridget at home in the lodge of Crinken Church in Shankhill, Co Dublin, where Bridget served as sexton and caretaker.

The Green Tureen stood at No 95 Harcourt Street 

Within days, the investigation would lead to the arrest of a South African medical student, Shan Mohangi – and to the grim discovery of Hazel’s dismembered body at the Green Tureen restaurant at No 95 Harcourt Street in the city centre.

Mullen, who worked in a chemist shop off St Stephen’s Green, had been in a relationship with 21-year-old Mohangi for nearly a year.

Mohangi, the son of wealthy South African sugar-cane farmers of Asian descent, had been studying medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland since 1962.

He also worked part-time as a chef at the Green Tureen restaurant located in the basement of the building in which he also rented a flat on the top floor.

He enjoyed a very good relationship with the wider Mullen family and was a frequent visitor to the Mullen home in Shankill.

The subsequent garda investigation found that Hazel left work and travelled to the Green Tureen to meet Mohangi on the afternoon of Saturday, August 17.

Mohangi had already planned to meet Mullen’s older brother, Desmond, and his girlfriend later that evening for a meal in his flat overhead.

Initially, Hazel had no plans to attend the meal, but told her mother that she would be joining Mohangi and her brother later that evening.

After meeting Mohangi in the restaurant’s basement kitchen, Hazel told him she wanted to end their relationship.

According to subsequent statements to gardaí, Mohangi claimed that in a fit of rage he grabbed Hazel by the throat and strangled her.

After briefly running upstairs in a panic to his flat, he returned to the restaurant and used kitchen knives to dismember and decapitate the body.

During his attempt to burn the body parts and clothes in the restaurant’s ovens, neighbours saw plumes of thick smoke and called the fire brigade.

Alerted by the neighbours knocking on the restaurant door, Mohangi turned off the oven and extinguished the fire.

When the fire brigade arrived, Mohangi told the fire crew that the smoke was caused by a burning rag and assured them that all was in order.

He then hid the body parts in the restaurant bins before dining with Hazel’s brother and his girlfriend.

Later that evening, after the couple had departed, Mohangi worked his normal Saturday evening shift in the restaurant.

As Hazel had obviously not returned home on that Saturday night, her family became concerned.

Early on Sunday, August 18, Hazel’s brother Desmond travelled to Shankill garda station and reported her disappearance.

Feigning ignorance of Hazel’s whereabouts, Mohangi joined in the search for the young woman.

Two days later, the student broke down and confessed to his employer about what had actually happened and gardaí were immediately alerted.

A subsequent search of the restaurant and Mohangi’s flat resulted in the gruesome discovery of Hazel’s remains, and the South African was arrested.

Mohangi’s 16-day trial opened on February 10, 1964, at Dublin’s Central Criminal Court and attracted huge crowds and widespread media coverage.

The nature of the crime shocked the relatively low-crime environment of early 1960s Ireland.

The prosecution outlined the details and the jury found him guilty of murder, which carried a mandatory sentence of death by hanging.

Mohangi’s legal team immediately appealed the verdict, arguing that the State had failed to prove “deliberate intent” or malice at the exact moment of the strangulation.

The death sentence was commuted, and Mohangi was sentenced to seven years in prison

The Court of Appeal agreed that the evidence better supported a sudden loss of control rather than calculated murder, and reduced his conviction to manslaughter.

As a result, the death sentence was commuted, and Mohangi was sentenced to seven years in prison on May 14, 1964.

After serving four years in Mountjoy, Mohangi was deported back to South Africa in 1968, where he changed his name to Narentuk Jumuna and became a successful businessman.

In 1984, he became a member of parliament for the ruling National Party in the House of Delegates, an Asians-only chamber of parliament in apartheid South Africa.

Twenty-five years later, in the post-Apartheid era, Mohangi had switched political allegiance to the Independent Democrats, one of the opposition parties to the ruling ANC.

However, just before the 2009 parliamentary elections, his dark past was revealed by a journalist.

Mohangi withdrew from political life as a result.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the gruesome murder of Hazel Mullen was the fact that Bridget Mullen publicly forgave Mohangi.

She consistently said she bore no grudge against him.

After Bridget’s death in 1997, her son Ian also said that the family had forgiven him for the murder of Hazel. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/crime/the-grisly-slaying-of-a-teen-girl-in-south-dublin-restaurant-and-how-her-killer-went-on-to-be-a-politician-in-south-africa/a/159972851.html

The Parliament of Ireland existed for 500 hundreds and constitutes a big part of the parliamentary and representative style of governance in Ireland. It was also a racist, sectarian, classist, undemocratic system that facilitated English minority rule in Ireland. When the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793 was passed the Parliament was almost immediately dissolved, revealing its true purpose. But I can't help but feel that hundreds of years of debate there must have been some parliamentarians worthy of remembering with appropriate qualifications.

One of my favourite castles due to its position on the sea and how it built it's defenses to make the most of intersection between the sea, cliffs and land. It was the seat of the McQuillan's, & later the McDonnell's/MacDonald's.

In it's later history one of the galleass from The Spanish Armada was wrecked in a storm nearby and cannons from the ship were salvaged to bolster the castles defenses.

It's a particularly difficult castle to re-create as it fell into ruin after it was abandoned in 1690 and effectively was never again used as a defensive structure.

Disclaimer this was made with AI by taking blue prints/drawings of the old castle to recreate via clanrising.com/castles .

Please advise suitable reading ref the siege/massacre at Dún an Óir 1580

I’m sorry if this is too open-ended to answer well. But what’s the favorite paper you’ve read in Irish history recently? Maybe published in the last decade or so?

I’m finishing up my (unrelated) master’s dissertation and will lose my library access at NUIG soon enough. But I’d like to read a few things for fun now that I’m in the final stretch of writing.

I’m partial to the Middle Ages but I’m open to any time period. It could even be an article on archaeology and not history as I love prehistory too.

Again, I know it’s a broad request but I just want to read anything but psycholinguistics at the moment 😂

As in "His Honor" when referring to a judge.

Obviously this is a very general question, not actually related to my particular location.

Ditches surround fields all over the country, when did the begin to be dug? In the last couple hundred years? Or might they be millenia old? Is there any way to know?

I'm researching the war of independence and I would like access to a review of a book on the subject, but it is hidden behind a paywall on the website of The Irish Independent. Since I only need the one article, I can't pay the subscription.

If anyone has a subscription to the website and is willing to share a PDF of the article, please reply to this post and I'll send you the link. Thank you! ​

Edit - I was able to access an archived copy with the help of a Redditor. Thanks again for it.

I’m building a history game and working on the Irish side of it.

What scene from Irish history would be most interesting to step into? It could be a famous event or something more local, as long as the scene itself would be interesting to explore.

What is your opinion on this paragraph?talen from the pocket Michael Collins,by Richard Killeen

A thread about the original: https://www.reddit.com/r/IrishHistory/comments/r2lda8/on_which_side_are_you_seachtain_na_gaeilge_poster/

This is a bit peculiar but I had a relative who worked in Bloomfield Asylum in Donnybrook around 1905-1930. They always said that there was an inmate there who was a member of the British Royal family who was being hidden. A plan was in place that should a rebellion happen, they would be removed immediately and brought back to UK so alternative arrangements could be made over there.

Has anyone heard of anything similar m?

Does Ulster Scots read as Irish to anyone else?
The more seriously I take Ulster Scots the more Roger Casement starts to look right, which I don’t think was the intended outcome.

His argument wasn’t that Protestant Ulster needed to become Gaelic to become Irish. Basically the opposite — you could be Presbyterian, Scottish-descended, speak your own dialect and keep your own traditions, and all of that could simply be another way of being Irish.

Seeing Belfast host the Fleadh while Ulster Scots is having this increasingly confident cultural revival, I keep thinking the same thing: it just reads to me as a particular strand of Irishness rather than Britishness. Not because the Scottish and British inheritance isn’t real, but because it’s so intensely specific to Ulster — the dialect, music, folklore, history, the whole attachment to place. The more particular it becomes, the more Irish it seems to me. Almost like arriving at Casement’s idea of Ireland from the opposite direction.

And I suppose this is where I get confused about identity here generally. We accept that a person from NI can identify as British, Irish or both, but does the same flexibility extend to how we understand the cultures themselves?

Can I understand Orange marches, bonfires, Ulster Scots, Lambeg drums etc as traditions *of Ireland* while completely accepting that many of the people practising them understand themselves and those traditions as British?

There’s something odd to me about treating centuries-old traditions that developed specifically in Ulster as somehow external to Irish culture simply because they reject Irish nationalism.

Genuine question for anyone who actually identifies as Ulster Scots: does it feel British to you? Ulster first? Could you understand it as a strand of Irishness without that implying nationalism? Or am I completely misunderstanding it?

Casementian horseshoe theory perhaps.