Capital punishment in Ireland was abolished in statute law in 1990, having been abolished in 1964 for most offences including ordinary murder. The last person to be executed by the State in Ireland was Michael Manning, hanged for murder in 1954. All subsequent death sentences in Ireland, the last handed down in 1985, were commuted by the President of Ireland, on the advice of the Government, to terms of imprisonment of up to 1,000,000 years. The Twenty-first Amendment to the constitution of the Republic, passed by referendum in 2001, prohibits the reintroduction of the death penalty, even during a state of emergency or war. Capital punishment is also forbidden by several human rights treaties to which the state is a party.
Early history
Early Irish law discouraged capital punishment. Murder was usually punished with two types of fine: a fixed éraic and a variable Log nEnech; a murderer was only killed if he and his relatives could not pay the fine. The Senchas Már'''s description of the execution of the murderer of Saint Patrick's charioteer Odran has been interpreted as a failed attempt to replace restorative justice with retributive justice.
After the Norman conquest of Ireland, English law provided the model for Irish law. This originally mandated a death sentence for any felony, a class of crimes established by common law but, in Ireland as in England, was extended by various Acts of Parliament; a situation later dubbed the "Bloody Code". After the Irish Reformation, the Protestant Ascendancy to impede Roman Catholic practices passed Penal Laws, some of which created capital crimes which produced Irish Catholic Martyrs. The gallows speech was a popular genre of broadside from the Williamite revolution through the eighteenth century, feeding into popular ballads of the nineteenth century. In 1789 Elizabeth Sugrue ("Lady Betty") was among 26 led to the County Roscommon gallows; when the hangman failed to appear, she agreed to hang the other 25 if the sheriff would stay her own execution. She remained county executioner until 1802, when her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Most Penal Laws were repealed or disused by the late 18th century. As late as 1834 the officiant at an unlicensed Catholic–Protestant marriage had a sentence of death recorded, albeit commuted to 18 months' imprisonment.The crime was under the Marriage Act 1725 (12 Geo. 1. c. 3 (I)) s.1; The Criminal Law Act 1827 allowed judges to sentence to transportation for many hitherto capital crimes. For more, Peel's Acts in 1828 replaced the death penalty with penal servitude. The Capital Punishment (Ireland) Act 1842 brought the law in Ireland closer to that of England by reducing the penalties for numerous offences, and abolishing the capital crime of serving in the army or navy of France. The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 reduced the number of capital crimes from over two hundred to just three: murder, treason and piracy with violence. Death was a mandatory sentence for murder, though it was often commuted.LRC Report 108 §2.59 The last public hanging in Ireland was of John Logue in Downpatrick in 1866; after the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 executions were carried out behind prison walls. Irish doctor Samuel Haughton developed the humane "Standard Drop" method of hanging that came into use in 1866.
The Children Act 1908 (8 Edw. 7. c. 67) abolished the death penalty for a child or "young person" aged under 16.Children Act 1908, §§103, 131; O'Donnell 2017 p.27 fn.36
Execution of Irish republicans created political martyrs, such as the "Manchester Martyrs" of 1867. The Prevention of Crime (Ireland) Act, 1882, was enacted during the Land War and introduced on the day of the funeral of Lord Frederick Cavendish, one of the Phoenix Park murder victims. This empowered non-jury trials to impose death sentences, prompting Francis Alexander FitzGerald to resign in protest as baron of the exchequer. In fact no death sentence was passed under the provisions of that Act.
Revolutionary period
In 1916, the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising turned public sympathy in favour of the rebels. 24 rebels were executed during the 1919–21 War of Independence, starting with Kevin Barry. In Munster, which was under martial law, 13 were shot in Cork and one in Limerick. "The Forgotten Ten" were hanged in Mountjoy Prison, which helped turn opinion in Dublin against the Dublin Castle administration. The last execution under British authority was of William Mitchell, a Black and Tan convicted of the murder of a justice of the peace.;
The forces of the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916, which fought the 1919–21 War against the British authorities, established its own republican courts. In summer 1920, when a County Meath republican court sentenced a man to death for murder, the sentence was referred to the Dáil ministry, which decided to uphold it, although Constance Markievicz was reluctant. The Irish Republican Army was empowered by the First Dáil to court-martial and execute pro-unionist civilians for such crimes as "spying" and collaboration. The procedures at such trials depended on the local IRA leadership; many were kangaroo courts imposing summary justice. Besides executions, IRA members also carried out combat operations, assassinations, extrajudicial killings, and personally motivated murders, with varying levels of sanction from the republican leadership; historians have commented that the dividing lines between these categories can be blurred and contentious; an example being the 1922 Dunmanway killings.
The 1922 committee drafting the Constitution of the Irish Free State submitted three drafts, of which Draft B explicitly prohibited the death penalty; the Provisional Government's final draft was based on Draft B but deleted this prohibition. British laws prescribing the death penalty thus continued in force. The death penalty was retained because of the outbreak of the 1922–3 Civil War. As well as the existing British laws, the Army (Emergency Powers) Resolution was passed by the provisional parliament on 28 September 1922 endorsing the National Army (pro-treaty IRA) decision to codify emergency provisions including the establishment of military courts and tribunals with the power to impose death sentences.;Regan 1999, pp.108–109 The National Army made such regulations on 2 October 1922, revised 8–17 January 1923. In the course of the Civil War there were 81 executions by firing squad under these military tribunals. All summary executions 'official' (81) and 'unofficial' (130–50) were extrajudicial having no legal basis. All summary and arbitrary executions were carried out under martial-law introduced by the pro-treaty IRA on 11 July 1922. Unofficial executions were carried out with varying levels of government complicity. In the first decades of the new state's existence, many petitions asking cabinet ministers to commute death sentences adverted to the fact that many ministers had themselves been under sentence of death by either the British or the Irish Free State during the revolutionary period.
Later executions Between November 1923 and April 1954, there were a total of 35 executions in Ireland.Written Answers. — Capital Punishment Dáil Éireann - Volume 552 - 23 April 2002 55 men and women were also sentenced to death in that time period but ultimately received a reprieve. Thirteen were sentenced for murdering their newborns, and 42 for other types of murder. In the 1920s, execution was relatively common for murderers. The only woman executed after independence was Annie Walsh in 1925. She and her nephew blamed each other for the murder of her elderly husband. The press expected only the nephew to be found guilty, but both were. She was hanged aged 31 in spite of the jury recommending clemency.
In the absence of a local executioner, the Irish government retained the pre-independence custom of having a British hangman come to Mountjoy Prison to perform executions. A resident Irishman, alias "Thomas Johnston", applied to Mountjoy in 1941, and in 1945, after two days' training from Albert Pierrepoint at Strangeways, assisted Pierrepoint hanging James Lehman.O'Donnell and Doyle 2014 p.19 Hired as sole hangman for Joseph McManus in 1947, Johnston nervously ceded to Pierrepoint and never served again.
Increased IRA activity during the state of emergency in World War II led to six executions.Remembering the Past: Executed IRA men reinterred An Phoblacht Five were shot by firing squad after sentence by military tribunals under the Emergency Powers Act 1939. Of these, Maurice O'Neill (Irish republican) and Richard Goss had shot but not killed Gardaí: the only people executed by the state for a non-murder crime. (Two armed bank robbers were shot at Tuam at the end of May 1922 by the pro-treaty army) Charlie Kerins, the IRA Chief of Staff, executed for murdering a Garda, was hanged rather than shot, making the point of treating him as a common criminal rather than a political prisoner. Pierrepoint's autobiography claimed the IRA had ambitions to kidnap him while he was en route to Kerins.O'Donnell and Doyle 2014 p.20
Harry Gleeson, hanged in 1941 for the 1940 murder of Moll McCarthy, was granted a posthumous pardon in 2015. Seán MacBride was Gleeson's defence counsel and attributed his later opposition to the death penalty to his belief in Gleeson's innocence. Michael Manning was the last person executed in the Republic, while Robert McGladdery was the last person executed on the island of Ireland.The referendum on capital punishment Tony Connelly, RTÉ, 2002 Manning was hanged for murder by Albert Pierrepoint on 20 April 1954. The same year, Brendan Behan's play The Quare Fellow premiered, in which the title character was modelled on Bernard Kirwan, awaiting execution in Mountjoy while Behan was imprisoned there.LRC Report 108 §2.61
Legal developments The 1922 "Special Powers Act" was replaced after the Civil War by a series of Public Safety Acts promoted by Cumann na nGaedheal governments to counter residual republican paramilitary activity. The 1923 act, valid for six months, allowed the death penalty for "armed revolt against the Government of Saorstát Eireann [the Irish Free State]", whereas the 1924 act, valid for one year, reduced this to life imprisonment. The Treasonable Offences Act, 1925 defined such offences as treason punishable by death. The Court Officers Act 1926 phased out the office of under-sheriff and transferred responsibility for executions to the governor of the relevant prison;; always Mountjoy Prison in practice. The Public Safety Act 1927, passed in response to the assassination of Kevin O'Higgins,Regan 1999, pp.273–4 provided for a special military tribunal during a state of emergency, required the tribunal to pass death sentences for treason and murder, and permitted it to do so for unlawful possession of firearms; no appeal would be permitted.Public Safety Act, 1927 Irish Statute Book The Act was originally to last five years, but was expired at the end of 1928. In 1931, Eoin O'Duffy used the threat posed by Saor Éire to press for a new Public Safety Act, the Constitution (Amendment No. 17) Act 1931.Regan 1999, pp.287–8Constitution (Amendment No. 17) Act, 1931 Irish Statute Book This empowered the tribunal to try a variety of crimes and impose a greater sentence than usual, including death, if "in the opinion of the Tribunal such greater punishment is necessary or expedient". This provision was condemned by the Fianna Fáil opposition (which came to power following the 1932 general election) and was never invoked. The tribunal's sole death sentence was for murder, handed down in 1936 and commuted to life imprisonment.O'Donnell 2017 pp. 117–118
Fianna Fáil introduced a new Constitution in 1937, which contained several references to execution: