FIFTY-FIVE years ago this month the hanging took place of the last person in the State to be sentenced to execution for murder.
Limerickman Michael Manning was an unlikely figure to be in such a situation. Aged 25 and a carter by trade, he would later state in a plea for clemency that he had never been in trouble with the law before he committed murder on a November evening in 1953. Manning’s 22-year-old wife was seven months pregnant when he was hanged by the famous English executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, at Mountjoy Prison on April 20th, 1954.
It was an accidental set of circumstances that put his victim, 64-year-old nurse Catherine (Katie) Cooper, on the same stretch of quiet road as him at around 9.30pm. Sister Cooper, a senior nurse at Barrington’s Hospital, had been returning from a visit to a retired hospital matron in Castletroy, deciding to take the two-mile journey on foot back to her lodgings rather than travelling by bus.
It was unfortunate for all concerned that Manning should have spent much of the day drinking after finishing his delivery of coal from the quays to Sutton’s Yard in the docks area by 12.30pm. It was the only excuse he had for putting him in mind to violently attack and sexually assault his victim, and choking her by stuffing grass into her mouth. “It was all drink,” he said to the gardaí when apprehended, saying the same thing to his disgusted father who told him he had never been “up in my life for anything except for having no light”.
The trial judge later told the jury it could not reduce the charge to manslaughter due to drink. It was no defence in a case of that kind, he said.
In Manning’s Garda statement, he simply said that he had suddenly lost control of himself when walking home behind his victim, suddenly grabbing her and pulling her into a grassy area from where she never emerged.
For the gardaí, the case was straightforward from the outset.
Manning had been so inept he had lost his distinctive hat close to the crime scene. In the close-knit community of the time, it was immediately recognised as probably belonging to the well-known carter and was found with the yellow beret his victim had been wearing.
Manning's headpiece was, Dermot Walsh describes in his new book on the case, Beneath Cannock's Clock, a "Mountie hat". It had a high conical shape, pinched into panes at the tip, and was otherwise known as a Baden Powell hat after the founder of the scouting movement.
When visited by the gardaí at his home at 2.30am, Manning confessed almost immediately to the crime.
He was the 33rd person to be hanged since the Free State was formed in 1922, with Thomas Pierrepoint, Albert’s uncle, carrying out most of the executions. But even though it had been six years since the previous hanging at Mountjoy – of William Gambon for the murder of his friend John Long after a card game – there was little indication that State executions were to cease.
Manning’s grounds for an appeal were turned down and a petition organised by his wife seeking clemency fell on deaf ears despite the signatories including members of the victim’s family. At a Cabinet meeting on March 3rd, the government decided not to recommend a decision for clemency to the president. A direct appeal from the condemned man to the then minister for justice, Gerry Boland, followed in which Manning invoked the spirit of Easter. A second government meeting, on April 13th, reached the same conclusion as previously, and the taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, informed the president by phone.
On April 21st, short notices in the daily papers recorded news of the hanging.
Manning also has the distinction of being the only person ever executed by the State since it became a Republic in 1949. Subsequent death sentences were commuted and the infamous “hang house” in Mountjoy is now a visitor attraction. Part of its grisly legacy is that Albert Pierrepoint, who is believed to have carried out 435 executions in his career, witnessed his first hanging there when he was assistant executioner to his uncle, Thomas, in 1932.
The last man to be hanged in the North was agricultural worker Robert McGladdery in 1961 and the last British hangings were in 1964. In the same year the beginning of the end of the Irish statutory provisions for the death sentence began when capital punishment was abolished for all crimes except treason and murders of representatives of the State or other states and of officials such as Garda and prison officers. The death penalty was finally abolished in 1990.
According to Amnesty International, which has campaigned for a worldwide ban of the death penalty since 1977, Argentina and Uzbekistan are the latest countries to remove the penalty from their statutes but 59 countries worldwide retain it. In Europe, Belarus remains the only state carrying out executions.
Beneath Cannock's Clock, by Dermot Walsh, is published by Mercier Press