Dev and the hangman
When the serial killer of Rillington Place, John Christie, complained that his nose itched after his arms had been bound, Albert Pierrepoint assured him: "It won't bother you for long." And it didn't. Between the day he joined "the family business" in 1932 and the day he resigned in 1954 as England's Chief Executioner, Pierrepoint dispatched more than 430 people. Among his famous "clients" were Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, and Lord Haw-Haw (the wartime traitor William Joyce), and when he wasn't busy dropping such names in his official capacity, Albert Pierrepoint was polishing the glasses in the pub he ran, the wonderfully named "Help the Poor Struggler".
When Charlie Kerins was born on 23 January 1918 in Caherina, Tralee, County Kerry, his parents never imagined their son would meet such a famous personage as Albert Pierrepoint, but he did, in December 1944 in Dublin. It was a brief encounter. The story of that fateful meeting begins in 1940 when Kerins joined the IRA and it reaches a critical juncture on the morning of 9 September 1942 when Detective Dinny O'Brien died in a hail of bullets outside his Dublin home. O'Brien was a member of the Special Branch Division of the Garda Siochána, which had been successfully disrupting IRA attempts to collaborate with Nazi Germany. In June 1944, Kerins was arrested and a special military tribunal charged him with the shooting of Detective O'Brien. Kerins refused to recognize the court, but this Moussaoui-like gesture did not help him to avoid the death sentence. And so, on 1 December 1944 in Mountjoy Prison, Kerins was hanged. Eamon de Valera pointedly refused to issue a reprieve and, despite his loathing for the Crown, he arranged for Albert Pierrepoint to be brought over to Ireland to carry out the execution, proper, like.
Given the various IRA flare-ups since 1944, one might be tempted to argue that Dev should have spared the wretched Kerins, as the execution did not end nationalist terror in Ireland. But we cannot imagine what life was like some 60 years ago with world war abroad and extremists at home determined to subvert a fragile state. It was an existential struggle. Dev put down the IRA revolt of his day in his own way, and the most recent eruption, which ran from 1969 until 2005 and was marked by unparalleled IRA barbarity, is drawing to a close, defeated at enormous cost in blood and treasure. But the fanatics remain, biding their time, plotting, hearts filled with hatred. The Kerinses and the Moussaouis are plentiful.
Comments
Wasn't Dev on the IRA side during the Civil War of 1922?
Posted by: Jim Coles | May 5, 2006 4:34 PM
De Valera was one of the leaders in the 1916 Easter Rising. He was also president of Sinn Fein from 1917 to 1926. As regards the Civil War, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921 split the country into the Irish Free State in the south and a pro-Britain Northern Ireland in the north. The Dáil ratified the treaty but unwilling to accept it, the IRA plunged the south into a vicious civil war that lasted a year, and left a legacy that lasts until this day. De Valera objected to the fact that the Irish Free State was a dominion within the British Commonwealth; he wanted an independent republic and disputed the authority of the Treaty negotiators and the Dáil to conclude such a treaty that did not grant this status.
Posted by: Eamonn | May 6, 2006 9:21 AM