Labour Senator Joe Costello spoke in the Seanad on Tuesday in favour of the coming referendum to remove the death penalty from the Constitution. It was Charlie Haughey, he said, who as minister for justice had initiated the process and Ray Burke went a step further. He wondered if there was any moral to be derived from this, and if the present Minister, John O'Donoghue, was not worried about being the one to abolish it entirely "considering what befell his illustrious predecessors".
Costello said that, in 1990, he asked that "the tools of the hangman's trade that still existed in Mountjoy" be deposited in the National Museum.
"Eleven years later, nothing had been done about it and the paraphernalia is still in a refurbished unit where the hangman carried out his trade. Some of it is missing," he said.
As far as Quidnunc can establish, there is only one member of the Oireachtas against the removal of the death penalty, and that's Louth FG deputy, Brendan McGahon, who feels society must have deterrents.