TheRanting Lunatic รีทวีตแล้ว
Today in 1954 the last execution was carried out by the Irish state. Michael Manning, a 25-year-old carter from Johnsgate in Limerick, was hanged at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin. He was the 29th and final person to be executed in the Republic of Ireland. The "hang house" still stands on the prison grounds.
The man who placed the noose was Albert Pierrepoint, an Englishman who had travelled from Britain, where he served as one of three Senior Executioners. His fee was £5 plus expenses. Pierrepoint's uncle Tom had carried out most of Ireland's executions between independence and the end of the Second World War, and Albert had first assisted him at Mountjoy in December 1932.
Being a hangman carried a stigma and was traditionally a family business. Pierrepoint is reported to have remarked afterwards that he loved hanging Irish men, because they always went quietly. They were Christian men, he said, so sincerely believed they were going to a better place.
Manning's crime was brutal. On the evening of 18 November 1953, Catherine Cooper a 65-year-old nurse at Barrington's Hospital, was walking from Castletroy towards Limerick city when she was attacked, sexually assaulted, and murdered on the Dublin Road. Her body was found in a quarry nearby. She had choked on tufts of grass stuffed into her mouth to stop her from screaming.
Manning never denied what he had done. He had spent that day drinking through several Limerick pubs, having been refused service at the Munster Fair Tavern, and eventually finding his way to The Black Swan in Annacotty. Making his way home on foot, he came upon the unfortunate woman walking alone. In his own words, suddenly lost his head and jumped on her, remembering nothing more until the lights of a car shone on him.
His trial opened on 15 February 1954 and lasted three days. The defence argued insanity, and pointed to a family history of mental illness and a low IQ that one later researcher felt bordered on intellectual disability. The judge directed the jury to set that aside. Manning had, after all, stuffed the grass into Cooper's mouth with deliberate purpose. The jury took three hours.
He admitted the attack but had pleaded not guilty to murder. The distinction mattered little. Murder carried a mandatory death sentence, and no amount of petitioning was going to change that. Members of Catherine Cooper's own family signed a clemency petition on his behalf.
Manning wrote to the Minister for Justice himself, in terms that are hard to read. He said he was not afraid to die, that he was fully prepared to go before his God, but that he was asking for mercy on behalf of his wife, who was young and close to giving birth to their child. His wife was 22. His child was born a few weeks after he was hanged.
On the Sunday before his execution, friends came from Limerick to visit. They went to Mass and received Holy Communion. Then they played a game of handball. On the Tuesday after Easter, he was taken from his cell and hanged at 8 o'clock in the morning. His body was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison yard.
His widow wrote to the Governor of Mountjoy afterwards to thank him for the kindness shown to her husband. She applied for a death certificate so that she could receive a widow's pension.
Later that same year, Brendan Behan's first play, The Quare Fellow, premiered at the Pike Theatre in Dublin. Set on the eve of an execution in Mountjoy, and while Behan never names Manning directly, the play helped shift public opinion on capital punishment.
The Criminal Justice Act of 1964 restricted the death penalty to those convicted of murdering Gardaí, prison officers, or diplomats. No further executions took place. It was abolished in 1990 and removed from the constitution by referendum in 2001. I wonder were there another referendum today on its reintroduction for certain crimes how the results would go?
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Dublin City, Ireland 🇮🇪 English
