‘The McMahon murders were not only an atrocity, they cursed Irish politics for decades’

When Rebel Heart, a controversial four-part drama depicting Irish history between the 1916 Rising to the Civil War and partition, was broadcast by the BBC in 2001, the late Lord David Trimble — then First Minister — wrote a blistering letter to the Beeb, decrying a scene that closely resembled a real-life murder case that took place in Belfast in 1922.