New Hibernia Review

The genealogy of capital punishment in twentieth-century Ireland defies easy articulation, and several aspects of the practice appear especially perplexing in the absence of an appreciation of a precise historical context. It is puzzling, for instance, that Irish politicians couched arguments favoring the retention of capital punishment in terms of its perceived efficacy as a deterrent to potential subversives when the death penalty was imposed almost exclusively for non-political civilian murder.¹ It is puzzling, too, that the taoisigh and ministers who were prepared to allow executions go ahead had not only been comrades with men executed during the revolutionary period, but in some cases, had themselves been sentenced to death.² It is puzzling that the sanction was retained after Independence when one considers the “politicization” of capital punishment and the attendant public antipathy toward what was seen as an unfortunate colonial (and civil war) legacy; in the minds of many nationalists, hanging was nothing more than a manifestation of English tyranny.³ And, finally, it is puzzling that when the need arose to execute a condemned person in Ireland an English hangman was always contracted to arrange the “drop.”⁴ This final puzzle may, however, be illuminated by a detailed examination of the men who discharged this grisly function.

A motley succession of executioners had been employed in Ireland since the 1870s, but it has been generally accepted that Thomas and Albert Pierrepoint [End Page 101] were the principal actors in the Irish state in the post-Independence period.⁵ For many years after his retirement from the official Home Office list of approved executioners, Albert Pierrepoint remained reticent about his career. But in 1974 he published his reminiscences in an autobiography titled Executioner: Pierrepoint. Its pages reveal an extraordinary double life, which involved regular time away from his usual domestic routines to execute an estimated tally of 450 people (433 men and seventeen women, including more than two hundred Nazi war criminals hanged after the Nuremberg trials). Pierrepoint’s memoir concludes with the provocative claim that none of these hangings actually “prevented a single murder.”⁶

This is not the only suspect claim in Pierrepoint’s memoir, but, although not always the most reliable source, his recollections offers an offbeat and intriguing insight into capital punishment in Ireland. In this regard, four of the claims made in Executioner: Pierrepoint with regard to Irish hangings are particularly noteworthy. First, Pierrepoint asserted that that the position of executioner in independent Ireland had been, to use his own words, “entrusted to me and my family since the Free State had been formed” (E 161). Second, he intimated that his first execution experience, which set him on course to become Britain’s most prolific executioner in the twentieth century, actually came in Dublin acting as an assistant to his uncle, Thomas, in Mountjoy Prison, in the early 1930s. Third, although Irish officialdom was unable to find a willing hangman within the jurisdiction, Pierrepoint recounted that he “was asked by the authorities in the Republic of Ireland” during the 1940s if he would “train an Irishman in the British method of execution” (E 161). And finally, he recollected that a notable feature of Irish executions was the propensity for alcohol consumption in their immediate aftermath.

Pierrepoint’s reminiscences need to be situated in the context of a larger judicial and legal history.⁷ A survey of the hangmen, along with a sample of the [End Page 102] hanged, reveals that Irish executioners were conspicuous by their absence. It also discloses that certain English executioners were allowed to officiate in Ireland, despite serious concerns about their capacity to fulfill their duties in England and Wales.

When an Irish murderer was sentenced to death, the authorities almost always called upon the services of Thomas and Albert Pierrepoint. Little is known about the rare occasions when other English hangmen were involved; the position of the “official” Irish executioner was to all purposes a family preserve.⁸ In a macabre reversal of the migratory networks of the previous century that involved more benign, and less lucrative...