Book review: Capital Punishment in Independent Ireland: A Social, Political and Legal History, by David M Doyle and Liam O’Callaghan (eds.)
| Author | Lizzie Seal |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895820967446 |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
500 Criminology & Criminal Justice 22(3)
individual chapters as required readings for modules at any level. I want students to
question motivations of authorities and police, but I also want them to critically engage
with queer activism by questioning the state, policy, activists and themselves. This book
forces these questions.
David M Doyle and Liam O’Callaghan (eds.), Capital Punishment in Independent Ireland: A Social,
Political and Legal History, Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2019; 306 pp.: 978-1-78962027-6,
£80 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Lizzie Seal, University of Sussex, UK
DOI: 10.1177/1748895820967446
Doyle and O’Callaghan’s fascinating history of the death penalty in independent Ireland
highlights the significance of Irish capital punishment as both a civilian punishment for
murder and as a political measure to deter republican violence against the state. The
authors discuss how the perceived threat of political violence meant that the death pen-
alty was an important instrument of state power. Delineation between civilian and the
military executions existed, but tensions and contradictions remained between executing
criminals and the death penalty as a security measure. In this sense, the Irish death pen-
alty was symbolically complex, representing the integrity of the new state as well as the
maintenance of law and order within it.
A distinguishing feature of capital punishment is that many and, in certain places and
times, most people who receive the death sentence are not executed but instead have
their sentences commuted to imprisonment. The authors highlight how the prerogative of
mercy was a powerful symbol of justice that enabled the state to appear benevolent.
Mitigating factors were always taken into account. However, for this very reason, the
prerogative of mercy is also profoundly ambivalent. Decision-making, in Ireland and
elsewhere, did not follow strict rules and could be muddled and capricious. Even if there
had been strict rules, these would also likely have led to contradictory outcomes. As a
form of discretionary justice, the prerogative of mercy demonstrates state power but it
also, as Austin Sarat (2005) highlights, exposes cracks in the edifice of that power.
As in most places and times, far fewer women were executed in post-Independence
Ireland than men. In the early decades of independence, women – and femininity – were
a focus for concerns about sexual morality. By association, this related to concerns and
aspirations about the national character and the ways Irishness was distinct from
Englishness. The chasteness of Irish women signified superiority to England, where the
modern women of the interwar period behaved in a scandalous fashion. Doyle and
O’Callaghan note that there was no Irish equivalent to the famous English trial of Edith
Thompson in 1922, where understandings of appropriate womanhood, sexuality and
modernity played out.
Only one woman was hanged in post-independence Ireland: Annie Walsh in 1925 for
the murder of her husband. She was perceived to have inveigled her nephew, with whom
she was having an affair, into the crime and attempted to pin the blame on him during her
trial. Along with premeditation the crime evinced ‘a flagrant transgression of sexual
To continue reading
Request your trial