Tag Archives: Murder

February 11th 2026

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Title: Who Killed Honor Bright?
Speaker: Gerry Lovett
Time: @ 7:45 PM
Location: Iona Pastoral Centre

Gerry Lovett
Gerry Lovett

Gerard Lovett retired in 2004 as a detective inspector of An Garda Síochána Special Branch. Since then, he has been general secretary of An Garda Síochána Retired Members’ Association for seven years, and was editor of their quarterly magazine Síocháin. He has written numerous articles on police history and has regularly given lectures to historical societies on both Gardá and RIC history, as well as famous historical murder cases. One of those cases is tonight’s talk on the 1925 unsolved murder of Lily O’Neill (Honor Bright).

Gallery: click on images to enlarge

Who was Honor Bright?

  • “Honor Bright” was the nickname of Lizzie (Elizabeth/Lily) O’Neill, a young woman whose body was found near Ticknock, south Dublin, in June 1925, prompting intense press and public interest.​​
  • Contemporary coverage portrayed her as a glamorous but “scandalous” figure, and the case became a touchstone for debates on morality, sexuality, and urban life in the new Free State.​

The book “Who Killed Honor Bright?”

  • The book Who Killed Honor Bright? was written by Patricia Hughes, who identifies herself as the granddaughter of Lily O’Neill/Honor Bright.
  • Hughes advances a controversial thesis that her grandmother was murdered on orders linked to senior Free State figures, and that William Butler Yeats was Honor Bright’s lover and the father of her child.

What remains uncertain

  • Officially, Honor Bright’s killer was never definitively established; Hughes has campaigned for a modern re‑investigation and states that the Garda case remains formally unresolved.​
  • Later historical work (such as Nursing Clio’s article on the case) treats the murder as emblematic of the tensions of 1920s Dublin, but does not endorse Hughes’s claims about Yeats and state‑ordered assassination as established fact.

Sources via perplexity Ai.

“Honor Bright” song written and performed by By Peter Yeates (audio only)

Source: HappyStPats via YouTube
Peter Yeates “Honor Bright” – (AKA) “Honour Bright” from his CD “Back in the Middle” 1996