Sir, – I read with interest the article about Sighle Humphreys and the TG4 documentary about her (February 27th, Life & Features Culture).
One aspect of her life not mentioned in the article was her orchestration of a campaign of jury intimidation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Anonymous pamphlets were posted to those called for jury service in cases where IRA members stood trial. The pamphlets were signed “Ghosts” and went further than encouraging acquittals (which would, in itself, have constituted the common law offence of embracery). Some leaflets named members of juries which had convicted Republicans in previous cases and excoriated them for doing so. In one leaflet the condemnation took the following form: “These men are traitors to their country. (Death would be their fate in any free country in the world.)”
According to one account, 20,000 copies of such leaflets were found in Sighle Humphreys’s house on Ailesbury Road. She was convicted of embracery at a retrial in the early 1930s, the first jury having failed to agree a verdict. As quoted in Uinseann MacEoin’s 1980 book Survivors, she was unrepentant, almost nostalgic, about her intimidatory conduct: “That was the great thing then about juries. They instinctively agreed with us, or wanted nothing to do with us”. – Yours, etc,