Clodagh Finn: Restoring some honour to Honour Bright, 100 years on

Irish Examiner

07-06-2025

I will be thinking of Lizzie O'Neill, also known as Honour Bright, this Monday on the centenary of her murder on June 9, 1925, aged just 25.
Her death — caused by a single bullet to the heart — rocked the new Irish state, not least because Leopold Dillon, a former superintendent of the Civic Guard, and Patrick Purcell, a doctor from Wicklow, were tried for her murder.
It was a sensational trial which recounted 'a hideous tale of a night of debauchery', as prosecutor William Carrigan described it, to a packed Central Criminal Court in Dublin in February 1926. Yet, it took the jury just three minutes to acquit the high-profile defendants. Three minutes.
That is not to say they reached the wrong decision. The revolver owned by one of the accused, Dr Purcell, could not have been the one used to kill Ms O'Neill, the court heard.
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And while the men were freed, their reputations were in shreds; Dr Purcell was forced to leave his Wicklow practice and emigrate to the UK, while Dillon was dismissed from the police and is thought to have left for Canada.
What has always bothered me, though, is that Lizzie O'Neill's reputation was also left in shreds. In court, she was described as 'an unhappy girl of the unfortunate class' and 'a woman who, through some cursed necessity, was compelled to seek her livelihood on the streets at night'.
It didn't help that the only surviving image of her was the police photo showing her dead body in a field in Ticknock on the outskirts of Dublin, surrounded by gawping onlookers
Nobody has ever been convicted of her murder in a case that has generated much fevered speculation. But that is not the focus of this week's column which, instead, is dedicated to trying to restore a little bit of respect to a young woman on the centenary of her death.
Let's start by recalling this single, overlooked detail. During the trial, Superintendent Reynolds gave evidence that her pockets contained a purse, some other small articles and a rosary beads.
A rosary beads. Interpret that as you will, but it is a tiny shred of evidence that helps us to counter the reductive image of a woman so misrepresented during the trial. She not only lost her life but her dignity and good name, a phenomenon that endures to this very day.
There was no mention during the court case, either, that Lizzie (as her friends called her) was the mother of a young son. Kevin Barry O'Neill was born on November 9, 1920, in the Coombe Hospital in Dublin. The fact she named him for the IRA volunteer and medical student executed just days before says something about the new mother.
Like Barry, she had a link to Carlow. Perhaps she was acknowledging that shared connection or maybe she was voicing her support for an independent Ireland.
Artist Holly Christine Callaghan restores some dignity to Lizzie O'Neill, aka Honour Bright, in her portrait of the young woman whose murder caused a sensation a century ago.
Census returns tell us that Lizzie, born Elizabeth, O'Neill was living with her parents, Elizabeth and John O'Neill, a printer, lino-operator, in College Street, in Carlow in 1911. She was the second eldest of the couple's seven children, three boys and four girls.
All the family, and the boarder Patrick Hanrahan, a sacristan, are listed as Roman Catholic and, we can see that 11-year-old Elizabeth was going to school. She's listed as a 'scholar' who can speak Irish and English.
She moved to Dublin when she was about 18 and, according to an account in a book by John Finegan in 1995, she got an apprenticeship at a drapery store in Lower Camden Street.
He offers this uplifting, though unattributed, vignette: 'People who knew Lil [she was known as Lil and Lily] O'Neill when she first arrived from the country described her as an attractive, fresh-complexioned, warm-hearted girl, with brown hair and deep brown eyes.'
She loved dancing too, a detail mentioned by Finegan and her granddaughter, and was apparently a regular at the city's dance-halls and ballrooms despite the political turbulence of the time.
Pregnancy
We know she got pregnant a year after her arrival in Dublin, but nothing of the man she may have hoped would support her. When he did not, she lost her job and the accommodation that went with it. It is hard to find documentary proof of what happened next, but it seems Lily found a foster mother for her child and paid for his upkeep weekly.
We know from court reports that she was living in Newmarket in the Liberties at the time of her death. On the night of June 8, she and her friend Madge 'Bridie' Hopkins were working on St Stephen's Green when they met the two men later accused of her murder.
She had assumed the name Honour Bright a few years before. Some said it was because she was fond of the colloquial phrase, 'honour bright', which meant 'on my honour' or 'honestly' (for example: 'I'll do that, honour bright'). It adds another layer of poignancy to think of this young woman adding her bond of honour to the end of her sentences.
Or perhaps her pseudonym was her attempt to separate her work persona from her private one, a mother who one day hoped to earn enough money to care for her son.
We will never know but what we can do is attempt to pick her up from that lonely field in Ticknock and remember her as she might have been in life
Newspaper reports described her as a woman of about five foot four, with chestnut brown hair. She was wearing a black hat, a grey tweed suit with a mauve silk blouse, black patent leather shoes with T-straps and silk stockings.
Her hair was in a bob. That in itself says something because, on the same day her trial opened, the Irish Independent ran an article by suffragist Agnes Maude Royden, observing that many women were bobbing their hair even though men, in general, preferred them to wear it long.
It was a sign, she said, that women were thinking for themselves and acting accordingly.
We might think of Lizzie O'Neill, then, as a young woman who was trying, against the odds, to be independent so that she might raise her son.
To help us imagine — and remember — the woman she was, artist Holly Christine Callaghan completed this beautiful portrait: 'Her story really moved me,' she says. 'It reminds me a lot of Black Dahlia (Elizabeth Short, an American woman whose murder in 1947 was highly publicised because of the mutilation of her body), and similar 'discarded women'. I was really struck by how victims are just erased, and rarely honoured properly.'
At least Honour's son and her late granddaughter, Patricia Hughes, tried very hard to find out more about her death. In her book, Hughes developed an elaborate though speculative theory that her grandmother's murder was a conspiracy to cover up her connection to the poet WB Yeats.
If you take the time to read through the reports of the trial, a question emerges about the taxi-driver who gave Lizzie O'Neill a lift on the night of her murder. One witness said she saw him with a revolver in the summer of 1925, but there is no more than that.
On June 9, all we can do is think of Lizzie or Lily O'Neill as a person, snuffed out in the prime of her life. Perhaps we might mark her anniversary by calling for greater recognition of victims in court. Victim Impact Statements were introduced in 1993. Maybe it is time to introduce something like a Victim Profile Statement in murder trials so that victims are no longer lost in the evidence that follows.
We might think of it as a small honour in memory of Honour, and the very many others who have been overshadowed in the legal process.