While modern Ireland has no shortage of well-known stage scoundrels – from bankers, politicians and developers to murderers, rapists and paedophiles – if you go back a century or three you’ll find that almost all of the vile villains writ large in the annals of Irish history were foreigners. It’s not that there weren’t any homegrown bad guys, more that nobody wanted to remember them.
Murder, Mutiny & Mayhem, the fascinating debut offering from Cork journalist and broadcaster Joe O’Shea, seeks to rectify that historic imbalance. While the Irish are more usually celebrated at home and abroad as explorers, freedom fighters, writers and artists, his book features a cruel cast of native slavers, jailers, conmen, grave-robbers, pirates and killers, who wreaked havoc around the globe.
“Part of the inspiration for the book came from having a drink with my brother about four years ago and talking about [explorer] Tom Crean,” the 42-year-old author explains. “A book had just come out about him, and a play, and there was even a Guinness ad. People were eulogising him, and he practically became a secular saint. Because Crean is exactly what we want from our heroes, straight out of central casting. He was a son of the soil who went off and had this incredible adventure and endured terrible ordeals, but never said a word about it or sought glory. A big, strong-jawed guy, he looked like everybody’s idea of a heroic Irishman.
“Anyway, I was having a conversation with my brother about him, saying, ‘Look, there’s a flipside to this. We have guys who went off and did terrible things as well, but we never talk about them’.”
Even as a Cork schoolboy, O’Shea had always been interested in history.
“I had the standard Christian Brother education, where they were very focussed on Irish history – you got it from Brian Boru to Michael Collins, basically. It stopped just at the Civil War because nobody wanted to be talking about the Civil War in Cork in the ‘70s or ‘80s. So I got a very good basic education and that kind of fed my obsession with the subject.”
Whatever about the Irish Civil War, they definitely don’t teach this shit in school. Amongst the black-hearted villains featured within his book’s pages are bloodthirsty buccaneer and pirate Luke Ryan (from Rush), psychopathic New York mobster Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll (born in Donegal, above the pub now owned by Clannad), heartless Kilkenny slave-trader Antoine Walsh, and the murderously brutal Sir Hugh Gough, the Limerick man who commanded the British forces in the first Opium war against China.
Unlike many history books, it’s a brisk, enjoyable read. O’Shea isn’t an academic: the book’s strengths lie mainly in his storytelling abilities.
“I didn’t go to university. I did journalism in Rathmines College for eight months. I dropped out when I got a newspaper job at 19.”
Although always in demand as a freelance journalist, he found the time to research and write the book after he left his job as co-host of daytime RTÉ chat show Seoige & O’Shea, which he presented alongside Grainne Seoige for two years until 2008.
He had never sought out a TV career, and says the gig basically landed in his lap.
“It’s funny because I was a last minute addition to that show,” he recalls. “They were doing screen tests for various people, and I was a pretend guest for those. Then they asked me to come back to do one myself. So I did a screen test on a Sunday afternoon: the Sunday after that I was offered a job, and the Sunday after that I was getting ready for the first show.”
It took him a while to settle in.
“I was very, very far out of my comfort zone because I’d never been on TV before. I’d never done anything like that and suddenly I’m doing 90 minutes of live TV, five days a week, with a very high-profile person. I was very nervous for the first few months. Then I got some time off at Christmas and went away and sat on a sun lounger in Lanzarote for a week. I thought it through and kind of went, ‘There’s no point being afraid of this’. So once I’d processed it, and decided to enjoy it no matter what happened, I was fine.”

The first chapter of Murder, Mutiny & Mayhem tells the story of James ‘Sligo’ Jameson, scion of the famous whiskey family, who caused a massive scandal in the late 1880s following a shocking incident in darkest Africa. When word leaked back to the press that the talented Irish artist had bought a young slave girl in order to sketch her being murdered, prepared and eaten by Congolese cannibals, there was public uproar.
“The Jameson story was where the book started really,” O’Shea explains. “I came across his name in a biography of Henry Morton Stanley, who led the exhibition. Jameson was mentioned in it quite extensively, but he was still a bit player. Most of these guys in the book are bit players in wider stories, but Jameson was a fascinating one. His grandfather was the Jameson who founded the whiskey distillery and he was a real Victorian gentleman. Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness was inspired by the Jameson story.”
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, he didn’t have to travel far to do his research.
“I made a few trips to the National Library, which was really interesting. They’ve some great stuff in there. But most of it was done online,” he admits. “The amount of material now available on the internet for research purposes is unbelievable. For the Jameson story, I was able to read the published version of his journal that went out of print in 1894. It’s online now as an e-book. So I looked at a lot of original documents online. I was also able to read The Gentleman’s Magazine from 1778, which mentions Luke Ryan, the pirate from Rush. So that was amazing.”
While there was an abundance of material about some of his more notorious subjects, others’ lives were less well-documented. History may be written by the victors, but nobody wants to talk about the losers...
“Some of them were difficult to research because they were very marginal characters and not the kind of people that anybody wanted to remember. If they were heroes, poems and ballads would have been written about them. But a lot of them, even their families wanted to forget they’d ever existed.”

Murder, Mutiny & Mayhem is published by the O’Brien Press.