The prisons and their execution suites were busy in Dublin and the county of Dublin throughout the nineteenth century. When it came to murders and death sentences, the hangmen had to cross the Irish Sea from England: Ireland did not have its own hangman. James Berry, the Bradford executioner, was the one hangman who recorded the nature of going to Ireland to do a hanging in the nineteenth century: he said ‘I was very nervous when I had to go to Ireland, and I asked my wife to go with me to look after me.’ Once, going to Tralee, he was met by a detective who told him that another officer had refused to do the job, saying, ‘I would rather give up my position than handle the ribbons for the hangman of England.’
So when we read about the murder cases in Dublin in these years when the trade of hangman was steadily being more professionalised, we have to recall that Englishmen were called in, and clearly, the situation, for obvious political reasons, would be fraught with tension and danger. But these hangmen were certainly busy: William Marwood from Lincolnshire introduced the long drop method which made the business rather more humane and swift, and he is perhaps most well-known because he it was who hanged the Phoenix Park murderers.
Some of the Dublin killings in these years were in the lowest, most deprived areas, such as the simple, straightforward murder of an old lady, Bridget Knight, in 1893, by teenager Edward Leigh. She was found stabbed to death at her home, and there was such revulsion at this that the jury’s feeling that there should be mercy applied on account of the prisoner’s youth was ignored. He was hanged on 9 June. In Dublin, convicts from the city were hanged at Newgate in Green Street and Dublin county killers were hanged at Kilmainham.