Michael Manning, a 25-year-old carter from Limerick, who was executed in Mountjoy Prison, was the last person to suffer the ultimate penalty, writes Frank McNally
Fifty years ago this morning, the last person to be executed in the Republic of Ireland went to his death at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. Michael Manning, a 25-year-old carter from Limerick city, was hanged at 8 a.m., as was the custom.
The only public aspect of his demise was the emergence from the prison shortly afterwards of a warder to pin a notice on the gate and confirm that the sentence had been carried out.
The newspapers of the day reflected the lack of ceremony. The Irish Times of April 21st, 1954, reported the event in a tersely worded two paragraphs, noting that Manning had been found guilty in February of the murder of Catherine Cooper (65), a nurse of Barrington's Hospital, Limerick. But at least the report was devoid of the phrase "the execution went without a hitch": a grisly but unintended pun frequently attributed to prison governors in reports from the 1920s and 1930s.
The execution was performed by the British hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, his third such job for the State.
He inherited the position from his father Tom, who was responsible for most of Ireland's executions between independence and the end of the second World War.
The government always looked to England for its executioners, and the fact that Manning's death happened on a Tuesday, rather than the usual Wednesday, may have been designed to facilitate the hangman's travel arrangements. Albert Pierrepoint's fee was the standard £5 plus expenses.
John Grundy, a UCD research student who has completed an M.Litt. on "The Death Penalty and the Irish State" thinks that in a modern trial Manning might have escaped with manslaughter. A married father, he had a low I.Q. bordering on mental disability, and was extremely drunk when his assault on the elderly nurse turned into murder, by asphyxiation. But his death at least had the distinction of being historic.
Later in 1954, Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow opened at Dublin's Pike Theatre. Apparently inspired by the 1943 execution of Bernard Kirwan, a butcher who murdered and then expertly cut up the body of his brother, it nevertheless provoked popular revulsion against executions, and probably helped ensure they did not happen again.
The death penalty was abolished in 1964 for all but capital murder (gardaí, prison officers, diplomats), and was abolished even for that in 1990.
Until 1954, however, opposition to the ultimate deterrent was relatively mute. If Ireland's executioners were English, so was the most prominent anti-death penalty campaigner of the age, a Mrs Van der Elst, who regularly travelled to Irish hangings. But the Catholic Church and the otherwise vociferous Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, was silent on the issue.
"The Church never intervened," comments Grundy, "judicial execution was the only form of killing it had nothing to say about".
As for the legislators, the death penalty was sometimes a political football. The last but one man hanged in the South (there was an execution in Northern Ireland as recently as 1961) was William Gambon, executed in 1948 for the murder of his best friend in a drunken fight begun over a remark about Gambon's wife.
The prisoner's fate was an early test for the first inter-party government, in which Noel Browne and others were fiercely opposed to the death penalty. But when Seán MacBride as Minister for External Affairs made a speech outside the Dáil condemning the sentence on Gambon, it sparked a major row.
Lawyer and later president, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh was among those who criticised him, specifically disputing MacBride's claim that judicial killing was unchristian.
In the Dáil, Fianna Fáil's Seán Lemass seized on the Government's discomfort, suggesting the coalition should fly a flag over government buildings to show when ministers were speaking with cabinet approval.
As Taoiseach during the war, Eamon De Valera outraged former allies with his ruthless use of the death penalty against IRA men. Six were executed during the Emergency, but the five convicted of political offences were given the honour of death by an Irish firing squad.
The sixth, Charlie Kerins, was tried as a civilian and hanged by Tom Pierrepoint.