83 years after he was put to death by the Irish State for a murder which same State now accepts he did not commit - Harry Gleeson will today finally be laid to rest in his native Co Tipperary.
Prime Time Security Correspondent Barry Cummins reflects on the enormity of a man so wronged for so long, by his own country, a country now making amends as best it can.
In circumstances still mired in controversy, rather than being thanked for alerting authorities to the discovery of Moll’s body, Harry Gleeson soon found himself charged with her murder. It was a Wednesday morning in April 1941 that Harry Gleeson had walked to his death in a room inside Mountjoy Jail, where an executioner pushed forward a lever, releasing a trap door beneath Harry’s feet.
They studied the original trial transcripts and noted that back in 1941 the judge had asked for a gun register to be shown during the trial. Applying modern medical expertise to the post-mortem report from 1940 indicated that Moll had been murdered at a time when Harry Gleeson actually had an alibi. Ms. Walsh told Prime Time"I was on duty in the middle of the night. Mary got very upset and she came out with the words ‘I saw my own mother shot on the kitchen floor and an innocent man died’. Those were her exact words. I think she was sending a message back to Tipperary."
It was a moving moment for all the Gleeson family. They graciously accepted the pardon, but of course the sentence couldn’t be undone. An innocent man’s life had been taken. Nothing could bring Harry back. The Gleeson family began engaging extensively with the Department of Justice, which pledged to do all it could to find Harry’s body and return it to the family.
The hearse slowly turned left onto North Circular Road, and quietly entered Dublin traffic, en route to Tipperary. It had taken less than six months form the breaking of ground at Mountjoy Jail on 8 January to the identification of Harry Gleeson’s remains through DNA on 21 June. The other 16 bodies, all believed to be people convicted of murder, had lain, like Harry, in unmarked graves. Those sixteen bodies remain at the temporary mortuary facility which has been set up inside the prison, adjacent to the excavation site.
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