The death penalty was controversially retained after the Irish State gained independence, in an attempt to deter people from committing crimes after the civil war. It was used widely in the decades after freedom was won and, unsurprisingly, in a rural country dominated by agriculture, farmers were frequently amongst those sentenced to death.

Feuding Family

The O’Leary family from Kilkerran, Co Cork were at war with each other. Patrick O’Leary, the eldest brother, had inherited the farm after the death of his father in the early 1920s. He worked the land while sharing the farmhouse with his sisters Hannah and Mary-Anne and his brother Con.

Patrick was considered awkward and argumentative, and Con refused point-blank to work with him, labouring for a neighbouring farmer instead. The family also believed that Patrick kept all the money for himself in an attempt to get the rest of them to desert the farm.

In March 1924 a sack strewn with various body parts was discovered in a field adjoining the O’Leary farm by a traumatised neighbour.

Gardaí quickly realised that Patrick had been absent from the family home for ten days, although he had not been reported missing. His family showed little interest in the mutilated corpse or the whereabouts of their brother, claiming that they believed he had gone looking for work.

All three were arrested, Mary-Anne dying of natural causes while awaiting trial.

The prosecution’s theory was that Patrick had been killed by a member of his family with a hatchet in the shed where he slept before being crudely dismembered.

The jury evidently believed it and Hannah and Con were found guilty of murder, despite there only being circumstantial evidence.

Both were sentenced to death, Con being hanged on 28 July 1925, still strongly proclaiming his innocence. Hannah was reprieved shortly before the sentence was due to be carried out. She spent 18 years in Mountjoy Prison and was released into a convent in 1942.

Brothers At War

Patrick McDermott was another farmer who found himself in an unenviable situation, but one all too common in 1930s Ireland. McDermott’s father had died, leaving his Rosmoylan farm to Patrick’s older brother John. John may have been older but he was sickly and a poor farmer, leaving his frustrated younger brother to work the land for little reward.

Relations in the house were strained, and became poisonous when John also set his sights on a woman that Patrick had been courting. On 3 September 1932 Patrick borrowed a shotgun from his cousin and that night he awaited John’s return from the house of his betrothed. Patrick shot his older brother twice as he arrived to the house, killing him instantly. He then ran to his cousin’s to return the gun.

It was little surprise when Patrick was arrested and charged with the crime. He pleaded his innocence but he was convicted on circumstantial evidence and hanged by Albert Pierrepoint in December 1932.

Different Outcomes In Wexford

Two rural Wexford farms would also bear witness to inexplicable murders in the 1930s. In 1932 Jane O’Brien shot her nephew John Cousins dead as he walked up the driveway to his farmhouse on the way home from a dance in Killinick.

Cousins had attempted to eject his elderly aunt from the family home to make way for his wife-to-be. O’Brien admitted her guilt quickly, insisting that she had been driven to it. Her death sentence was ultimately commuted to penal servitude for life and she would go on to spend nine years in jail.

Killurin farmer John Hornick was not so lucky. He had inherited a farm in the late 1920s but found it difficult to make ends meet. Within a few years the farmer found himself in debt to the local bank.

Hornick was casually acquainted with a returned emigrant, James Redmond, who lived in a caravan in nearby Taghmon.

Redmond was rumoured to have made a large amount of money in his time working abroad and at some point Hornick decided to kill and rob him, using his ill-gotten gains to pay off his outstanding debts.

Redmond was found beaten to death outside his caravan in January 1937.

Hornick had been seen in the area and was among the first suspects, despite his unblemished character.

Searches quickly located Redmond’s bicycle on Hornick’s farm and discovered that the farmer had also paid off a number of debts in the days following Redmond’s killing.

The jury needed 40 minutes to find the defendant guilty and he was hanged on 17 June 1937.

Cold Comfort For Harry Gleeson

Two of the best known capital punishment cases in Irish history also revolve around farmers, but are notorious for different reasons.

Harry Gleeson was an agricultural labourer and greyhound enthusiast who lived on a farm belonging to his uncle John Caesar in New Inn, Co Tipperary.

On the morning of 21 November 1940 Gleeson discovered the body of his neighbour, Moll McCarthy, lying in a field just a couple of hundred yards from his house. She had been shot dead.

Moll had been the unmarried mother of several children. This was an unacceptable sin in the Ireland of 1940 and presumably meant that she had a number of enemies. Despite this, Gleeson was quickly arrested for the murder.

Several witnesses gave unreliable testimony and the prosecution had difficulty even ascertaining the day on which the murder occurred. Evidence against the defendant was far from convincing, yet the judge seemed determined that he should be held accountable. The young farmer was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Despite a clamour for a reprieve, Harry Gleeson was inexplicably put to death in April 1941.

It appears that a local conspiracy of sorts led to Harry Gleeson being implicated. He was finally pardoned by the State in 2015, cold comfort indeed.

Blazing Rows

The death sentence handed out to Bernard Kirwan is among the best remembered cases of capital punishment, although for a different reason. Kirwan was released from prison in the summer of 1941 after serving time for armed robbery.

He soon made his way back to the family farm in Rahan, Co Offaly which his brother Laurence had run in his absence.

Laurence was less than pleased to see his criminal brother back home and made it clear that he resented Bernard’s presence. The men had several blazing rows, witnessed by a farm hand, and Laurence often refused to pay or feed his brother. In November 1941 Laurence went missing, never to be seen again.

Despite a thorough search, no trace of the young farmer was discovered until six months after his disappearance. At that point, a dismembered and decomposed body was found in a sack in a nearby bog.

Bernard Kirwan, who had taken over the running of the farm in his brother’s absence, was found to be wearing Laurence’s coat and was arrested for murder.

He was found guilty and executed in June 1943.

Irish playwright Brendan Behan had been imprisoned at the time of Kirwan’s hanging.

The execution had a profound effect on Behan, whose acclaimed play “The Quare Fella,” was loosely based on the events.

In The Name Of love

One female farmer to be sentenced to the ultimate punishment was Laois native Frances Cox.

Cox was from a Protestant agricultural family with a lush farm of over 125 acres. She had been due to marry a local Catholic, however, he farmed just six acres and it was a match which her brother Richard did not approve of.

Fearing her lover was getting cold feet, Ms Cox decided to kill her brother to speed up the wedding process. She put strychnine in several drinks she prepared for Richard, eventually causing him a slow and agonising death.

Suspicion was quick to fall on her and she was found guilty of murder after a six-day trial in December 1949. Frances Cox would also have a narrow escape, being reprieved two weeks before her date with the hangman Albert Pierrepoint.

The death penalty for murder would remain on the statute books for many years after Frances Cox, although few cases would involve land or farming after that point.

Capital punishment was finally abolished for in 1964. Bitter acrimony would still occasionally lead to murder on Irish farms, but the perpetrator would never again face the hangman’s noose. CL

About the author

Colm Wallace is a native of Renvyle, Co Galway. He studied Education and Irish in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick and currently works as a national school teacher in his native county. His first book, “Sentenced to Death,” was released in 2016 and tells the true stories of thirty men and women who had the death penalty imposed on them by the Irish State. His interest in the topic stems from a life-long love of Irish history.

He is also from an agricultural background and the stories mentioned in this article were of particular interest to him. “Sentenced To Death” is available in Eason, Dubray’s, O’Mahony’s and all good book shops. It can also be ordered from Amazon.com. For more see www.facebook.com/colmwallaceauthor or www.somervillepress.com/sentence.html

His second book “The Fallen: Gardaí Killed in Service 1922-49” was released in May.