Mary Duffy and Elizabeth Plunkett – a timely reflection 50 years on

By Dr. Michael M. O'Connor

I WAS nine years old in spring of 1976 and had just finished third class at Belcarra National School.

Two events from that summer and the autumn that followed are etched in my memory - just two; one very broad and bright, the other very specific and dark.

The first is the weather - cloudless skies, long hot days, and evenings when the sun dared not set before we finished whatever childish pursuits we were engaged in.

The summer of 1976 was one of the hottest, driest, and sunniest on record.

It stretched from late May to late August and, significantly, it coincided with the long school summer holidays. It was a summer against which to benchmark the summers to come.

A summer that gave us confidence it could happen again when the dark, damp eighties arrived.

By then, farmers from Frenchill to Belcarra were reminiscing, as the hay rotted in the fields and the turf never dried: ‘Sure, I remember the summer of 1976.’ At least that’s how I recall it, and childhood memories can be selective, vague, and contestable.

I recently looked through newspaper archives from that summer.

While some of what I read in the national papers and much of what I examined in The Connaught Telegraph and other Mayo papers were generally familiar, I found it hard to recall or connect with any of it specifically.

As a nine-year-old, my friends and I learned about the world - the good, the bad, and the ugly - through adults’ conversations.

Yes, there were television and newspapers, but neither truly captured our attention like television and social media do today.

Adults’ conversations were usually discreet around children, until something happened so terrible, extraordinary, and unbelievable that it made them involuntarily lower their guard, forget themselves, and lose awareness of the company they were in.

The long summer ended, as summers do, and I returned to Belcarra National School in early September, tanned, lean, and with my hair cut short.

I was one of six in a class that had only one girl - Maisie Murphy was our teacher. Looking back now, it is clear that the summer of 1976 was not only the beginning of the end of childhood innocence, but it also marked a significant shift in Ireland.

In the third week of September, news broke that Mary Duffy, a young woman from Deerpark, near Belcarra, was missing.

What unfolded in the weeks that followed left adults visibly shaken and frightened, and the community traumatised.

Strange new words, words we, as children, were not familiar with, became part of adult discourse; we speculated about what some of the words meant, and in retrospect, I believe many adults did as well. This was unfamiliar territory in rural Ireland, and in the end, it was something alien to urban Ireland as well.

Mary Duffy, an innocent and beautiful 23-year-old woman, was taken by two Englishmen, John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, late on the night of September 22, 1976, as she made her way home from work in Castlebar.

She was brutally raped, tortured, and murdered by the men, and her remains were callously disposed of.

On September 29, Evans and Shaw were charged with the rape and murder of Mary Duffy and the rape of 23-year-old Elizabeth Plunkett from Ringsend in Dublin.

Elizabeth Plunkett’s remains were recovered from the sea on September 28. The search for Mary Duffy’s remains continued. I remember the massive search that lasted days between Castlebar and Deerpark, not because I was involved, but because adults talked about their experience of it - I did not ask questions, I listened and tried to make sense of it.

Mary Duffy was eventually found in Lough Inagh in Connemara on 10 October 1976, many miles from her home.

Belcarra is and was a small, tightly knit rural community.

Following Mary’s funeral, The Connaught Telegraph reported that 2,000 people were in attendance when Mary’s remains arrived at St. Ann’s Church in the village.

I remember the guard of honour and sat in the gallery with the choir for the funeral mass. My child’s mind recorded a moment in time, an image of Mary’s coffin near the altar, her grieving family and Fr. McDermott, but nothing else.

The police, prosecution, courts and juries struggled with the prosecutions, and despite the facts, convictions were not assured.

Over a decade later, I was reminded of Mary Duffy when I studied the twists and turns in the prosecutions of the men in constitutional law at Trinity College Dublin.

Ultimately, Evans and Shaw were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

The outcome, however, was far from satisfactory and especially so because no one was ever convicted of the murder of Elizabeth Plunkett.

This is a particularly sad indictment of the Irish justice system. Two decades later, the bungling system failed to secure a conviction in the case of the murder of French woman Sophie Toscan du Plantier, leaving a French court to convict the perpetrator in absentia.

Evans and Shaw travelled to Ireland specifically to rape and murder young women, and they did exactly that. They were labelled Ireland’s first serial killers, but Irish law viewed it differently.

Evans died in 2012 after being in a coma since 2008, when he had a stroke. Shaw remains in prison and is Ireland’s longest-serving prisoner. I have had occasion to reflect on the case over the years, especially when the prospect of the men’s release was discussed.

I have always believed they should not be released, and I have submitted at least one letter to the justice system explaining my reasons.

In the 50 years since Mary Duffy and Elizabeth Plunkett were brutally murdered, Ireland and Irish society have undergone a significant transformation.

The Women’s Aid Femicide Watch has documented the violent deaths of women in the Republic of Ireland since 1996 (https://www.womensaid.ie/.../campaigns.../femicide-watch/).

They do this to highlight the dangers women face and to better understand how to strengthen protections for women and children.

From 1996 to November 19, 2025, a total of 277 women have died violently in Ireland.

Eighty per cent of these cases have been resolved, and of these, eighty-seven per cent of the women were killed by someone known to them.

The perpetrators live among us; unlike Shaw and Evans, they rarely arrive by ferry from England or elsewhere.

Two of the most distressing cases in recent years include the murder of Clodagh Hawe (née Coll) and her three sons by her husband and their father in their family home in County Cavan in 2016.

Clodagh was a teacher at my children’s school, Oristown National School near Kells, County Meath.

In 2019, Valerie French was brutally murdered by her husband at Islandeady near Westport. Nationally, however, many cases remain unresolved.

In Mayo, these include the case of Sandra Collins, who went missing on 4 December 2000 in Killala. She was twenty-eight years old.

This year, 2026, marks the 50th anniversary of the murders of Mary Duffy and Elizabeth Plunkett.

The anniversary should be a time to remember these women, their lives, and the losses their loving families endured. It should not be a time to remember the monsters who took them.

Their deaths should also serve as a reminder of the importance of the work of Women’s Aid, the shortcomings of our flawed justice system, and the deep-seated reluctance to address these issues.

(Dr. Michael O'Connor, a renowned historian, is attached to the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queens University, Belfast. He resides in Murrisk, Westport).