Not-so-safe haven: Frank McNally on the murky 1923 murder of two Dublin Jews

Whenever the subject of anti-Semitism in Ireland comes up, it is often said in our defence that this is “the only country in Europe where not one Jewish person has been killed because of his religion”.

In fact, I heard those exact words in a talk once by the late Joe Briscoe (1928–2015), of the well-known Jewish Fianna Fáil family. That’s my own report of the event I’m quoting.

And his claim was almost true, but not quite. Because Briscoe seems to have been unaware of, or forgotten, the murders of Bernard Goldberg and Ernest Kahn, shot dead in Dublin a few years before he was born, in circumstances where religion played at least some part.

In the case of Goldberg, a 42-year-old salesman formerly of Manchester who was killed at St Stephen’s Green on Halloween night 1923, it may have been mistaken identity in a feud between republicans: unfinished business from the Civil War.

But the murder of Kahn, a fortnight later near his home in Portobello – “Little Jerusalem” then – appears to have been sectarian.

A 24-year-old civil servant in the Department of Agriculture, he was returning home with a friend from a Jewish social club on Harrington Street when they were stopped by gunmen.

[ Who shot Emanuel Kahn?Opens in new window ]

The friend, who was also wounded but survived, said afterwards that the attackers asked if they were Jews before opening fire.

The killers in both cases were pro-Treaty IRA men, attached to Beggar’s Bush barracks, where they were feared by supervisors and a law unto themselves. So there was no rush to investigate, and the murderers were eventually allowed to slip out of the country.

Although it’s surely only a coincidence, the names of Kahn and Goldberg always remind me of the mysterious protagonists in Harold Pinter’s debut play, The Birthday Party.

[ Harold Pinter’s connection with the Irish: 'They respect the truth and they have a sense of humour'Opens in new window ]

There, it’s a McCann and Goldberg who turn up at a boarding house in an English seaside town for an unspecified “job” involving the lodger, Stanley.

First, they join the landlady in celebrating what Stanley insists is not his birthday. And we never find out what their “job” is in an absurdist play that has been called a “comedy of menace”. After aggressive but erratic questioning, they bring him away to a fate unknown.

The Birthday Party is almost certainly unique as a work of Nobel Prize-winning literature for mentioning Carrickmacross, my hometown (albeit misspelt, without the middle “c”). It’s said to be where McCann, an ex-priest, is from too.

And critics have suggested that the town’s name appealed to Pinter mainly as an “aural cipher”, hinting at the Christian message “Carry-my-cross”. Hence also his choice of the Irish Catholic McCann and the Jewish Goldberg as the mysterious strangers.

In the words of Pinter’s biographer Michael Billington, they represent “not only the West’s most autocratic religions, but its two most persecuted races”.

Pinter can hardly have been familiar with the unfortunate Kahn and Goldberg, although you’d think Joe Briscoe would have known about them, growing up Jewish in another part of Dublin 6 a few years later.

In any case, when the murders resurfaced in the Dáil in 1934, it led to an absurdist drama of the parliamentary kind. The occasion was a debate on the “Blueshirts Bill”, outlawing the wearing of paramilitary uniforms in public.

And in Pinter’s absence, it fell to this newspaper’s Dáil sketch writer (unnamed but possibly a young Patrick Campbell, later to be Irishman’s Diarist and later still a BBC star in the early years of television) to describe the comedy of menace.

This included the Fianna Fáil minister for finance, Sean MacEntee, hinting darkly that various members of the opposition knew all about who had killed the two men, while the opposition invited him to name names.

“Mr MacEntee pursed his lips grimly and refused to say,” noted the sketch writer at one point. “All at once, however, he shot out an accusing finger and cried: “Deputy Higgins knows them well.”

That was Tom O’Higgins, TD and leading member of the Blueshirts, who countered that the charge was “not true”. Whereupon the minister backed down and said meekly: “I accept that.”

Then he suggested that other members of O’Higgins’s “organisation” knew them, and with that fingered Deputy Gearóid O’Sullivan, also opposite. But when O’Sullivan asked if he was being accused of sheltering murderers, the minister again reversed.

A turbulent Dáil session continued in this vein until another opposition member branded MacEntee a “coward” and added “I refuse to withdraw” before walking out.

It is now well known that the main culprit in the 1923 killings was James Conroy, a former member of Michael Collins’s “Squad” who was with Collins at Béal na Bláth.

His accomplices were the brothers Ralph and Fred Laffan, the former of whom was belatedly arrested in connection with the murders in 1925 but released because he so resembled his sibling they could be easily confused.

All three fled the country soon afterwards, to Mexico, although Conroy returned in 1932 to successfully claim an Army pension. Thereafter he settled in California, where he died in 1981.