Burke, Martin (1787/8–1863), hotelier, was a son of Michael Burke of Springfield House, Co. Tipperary, and his wife Honora (née Hogan); in 1832, on the death of his brother Michael, an attorney, Martin inherited Springfield and lands. In 1824 Burke purchased for £3,000 a 150-year lease on a property (formerly owned by Lord Shelbourne) consisting of three newly-built houses at the corner of St Stephen's Green and Kildare Street, Dublin. He turned the premises into a flourishing hotel, the Shelbourne Hotel, thanks in part to its proximity to the then premises of the Royal Dublin Society. The novelist William Thackeray, on a visit to Dublin in 1842, was much impressed at finding the Shelbourne ‘majestically conducted by clerks and other officers’ and the landlord himself living ‘in a private mansion hard by, where his name may be read inserted on a brass plate like that of any other private gentleman’.
Although Burke took no part in political agitation, as a juror (the sole catholic) in the trial of Charles Gavan Duffy (qv) in 1846 for publishing a seditious article in The Nation he showed undoubted bias towards the defendant, who consequently was acquitted. When he was criticised for this by the lord chancellor in the house of lords four years later he defended himself in a letter to The Times. He was briefly (1850) a Dublin city councillor. Burke died 16 January 1863, aged seventy-five. The hotel passed to his wife Anne (daughter of Edmund Burke of Roscrea, Co. Tipperary), and their eldest son, James Milo (1814–1908), a barrister, who then sold it to a group headed by William Jury (qv), who rebuilt it. Martin and Anne Burke had another son, John Hogan, also a lawyer, and a daughter (name unknown).