Through her research, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania is unearthing a nearly 100-year-old murder mystery, a government cover-up and silenced justice in Northern Ireland. 

Through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring program, junior Anna Garson traveled to Belfast for two months to assist political science professor Brendan O’Leary with archival research and co-wrote the article “Sectarian Violence in Northern Ireland: Recounting & Understanding the Events of June 23, 1922, in Cushendall, Northern Ireland.” 

Garson recounts the incident in Cushendall, a small village about an hour north of Belfast, where Ulster Special Constabulary officers killed three civilians, 18-year-old James McAllister, 22-year-old John Gore and 30-year-old John Hill, early in the evening on June 23, 1922. 

During an inquiry, the officers said that they were acting in self defense, but Garson says in all likelihood the killings were retaliation for the assassination of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, the man responsible for the repression of Catholics in the region during the early 1920s. He was killed on his doorstep in London the day before. 

The Protestant government of Northern Ireland dismissed all evidence against the officers, finding no fault in the special police force and awarding no compensation to the families of the deceased. 

Garson says that this is when political factors came into play. The British government threatened to publish the findings of its inquiry, which blamed the police, but the next election cycle brought in more conservative legislators who were more aligned with the leadership in Northern Ireland. 

“There were newspapers at the time that reported the event and called for the publication of the British report, but the story died only a few months after the incident,” Garson says. “Today, the reaction to the incident in Cushendall would be different. Social media and technology can keep an issue relevant.” 

The government filed the investigation under the Official Secrets Act, keeping it quiet for 50 years. Scheduled to go public in 1972, it was delayed because of the ongoing conflicts in the region. Garson says the second “reclassification” makes sense. 

“In 1972, the conflict between Protestants and Catholics, Unionists and Nationalists, was at its peak. Violence and crime were rife,” says Garson. “If the files were declassified in 1972, the sensitive nature of its contents, the government hid the truth because it could easily incite riots.” 

The documents were made available to the public in 1997, 75 years later. 

“This incident is a unique example of political intrigue and favoritism that the Northern Irish government showed for its Protestant/Unionist citizens and historical perspective on how the sectarian conflict has persisted in Northern Ireland long after this particular event was forgotten,” Garson says. 

A plaque stands at the location where McAllister, Gore and Hill died. 

“This project taught me a great deal about the history of Northern Ireland and the Anglo-Irish conflict,” says Garson. “The sectarian strife in the 1920s is not nearly as well known as that of the 1960s and 1970s. It was fascinating to learn about the roots of this conflict as a whole but even more interesting to glean insights into the trouble from the primary sources I examined.” 

She spent hours working in the archives and sorting through hundreds of government documents, memos, letters, telegrams and cabinet meeting minutes housed in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. She also combed through microfilm of newspapers from the 1920s at the Belfast Central Newspaper Library, searching for anything related to the incident in Cushendall. 

Because there were no longer any living witnesses, it was Garson’s duty to piece together the facts about what happened. As a part of an independent study course, she used the information to construct a narrative timeline of the incident. 

“It was an exceptional opportunity to conduct this research in Belfast and it was particularly meaningful to walk through the streets where these events took place,” Garson says. “By living and working in Belfast, I was able to gain a unique awareness of this history and the work that I conducted.” 

While she was in Belfast, Garson met weekly with O’Leary. 

“He never colored my perception of events with his own views and always let me come to my own conclusions,” Garson says. “His knowledge and experience in completing archival research has been invaluable and his advice on how to construct a serious academic narrative has been outstanding.” 

After a successful summer in Ireland, she applied for and received grants from the College Alumni Society and the Browne Center for International Politics to conduct complementary research in Washington, where her research focused on whether any United States diplomats were aware of the Cushendall incident. But she was unable to come to any conclusions based on the documents in the Library of Congress and the National Archives. 

“They did show that both the U.S. press and diplomats were keenly watching Ireland and, in my opinion, had to have known about the incident, even if this knowledge wasn’t directly expressed in writing,” Garson says. 

“Undergraduate research has been the most important thing I’ve done at Penn,” Garson says. “It has changed the methods I use for my schoolwork and maybe even helped me become a better student.” 

Garson hopes to conduct additional research on the topic next summer and use it as the basis of her senior honors history thesis, “Deaths in the Diamond: Cushendall, 23 June 1922.”