Remains of Harry Gleeson, wrongly executed for murder 83 years ago, laid to rest in Tipperary

Eighty-three years after he was wrongfully executed for murder, the remains of Harry Gleeson were laid to rest in his native village on Sunday, to the accompaniment of music from his own fiddle.

He was granted a posthumous pardon by the State in 2015. He had always protested his innocence.

As the coffin was taken from Holycross Abbey on Sunday, Anthony Condron – an in-law of the deceased – played Danny Boy on the German-made violin Gleeson had owned in the years before he was hanged at Mountjoy Prison in April 1941.

In the nearby St Michael and St Mary’s Cemetery, where the coffin was lowered to applause, accompanying airs included The Coolin, Carolan’s The South Wind, and Slievenamon.

Finally, after the grave was covered, Condron played two upbeat hornpipes, Boys of Blue and Harvest Home, to which mourners clapped along.

Earlier, in the church, Ann Gleeson recalled the final letter her granduncle wrote to his defence counsel Seán MacBride on the night before the execution.

“The last thing I want to say is that I will pray tomorrow that whoever did it will be discovered and that the whole thing will be like an open book. I rely on you then to clear my name,” he wrote.

“I have no confession to make, only that I didn’t do it. That is all. I will pray for you if I can, whenever you, [and the other defence lawyers] Mr Nolan-Whelan and Mr Timoney are fighting and battling for justice.”

Ms Gleeson added, to the backing of the violin: “If like the rest of us, tears swamp your eyes, replace them with a smile and rejoice with us in the music of truth, justice and peace at last. These are [Harry’s] tones – this is his very own fiddle.”

The funeral Mass included prayers for Mary “Moll” McCarthy, the victim of the murder for which Gleeson was wrongly convicted, at the request of both families. An unmarried mother of seven children, by six different fathers, she was shot dead on the night of November 20th/21st, 1940 near her home in New Inn, Co Tipperary.

Chief celebrant Fr Celsus Tierney said the story of what had happened back then was part of our “darker and bleaker history” from a time when both church and State had “failed to stand up for justice”.

But it was “always easy to judge people in the past”, he added. And perhaps a time would come when we too might be judged on such issues as our treatment of “the homeless, migrants and other vulnerable groups”.

Fr Tierney noted that Gleeson had gone down in history for winning “the first posthumous pardon” in the State’s history. “He finally got justice 74 years later.”

Along with those who campaigned for it, he thanked the public servants “who went beyond the call of duty” to ensure the remains were identified and released for reburial.

“May Harry Gleeson now rest in peace,” Fr Tierney said, to an ovation from the packed abbey.

The Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, Kieran O’Reilly, read from the Gospel according to St Matthew, including the lines: “Happy are those who hunger and thirst for what is right, for they will be satisfied.”

Those present included 90-year-old Kitty Gleeson, a niece of Harry’s. She was only six when he died and had no memory of him or the events because people did not talk much about it afterwards.

“But I thank God I was spared to see this day,” she said.

Also among the gathering in Holycross was local TD Michael Lowry, who said it was an “extraordinary and magical day”, made possible by the many who had spent years campaigning for justice. It was great, he added, that “the State had the generosity to admit that what happened was wrong and to finally correct it”.

Former Irish Times journalist Kieran Fagan, whose 2015 book The Framing of Harry Gleeson, took up from where an earlier history, Marcus Bourke’s Murder at Marlhill (1993), left off, attended too.

So did Denis Byrne, now 90, whose father was a neighbour of McCarthy and was also, as his son would only much later learn, father to two of her children. Before his death, Byrne Snr apologised to Denis for his part in the events.

Margaret Heaphy, who sang at the funeral, performed her own ballad about Gleeson – written to the tune of Kevin Barry – at the graveside. Music there also included the Galbertstown Waltz, a tribute to dead man’s native townland, played on the accordion by Tom Doran.

Condron told those around the grave that the fiddle itself had once been temporarily buried, for safekeeping, during the Garda investigation into McCarthy’s murder, when suspects’ houses were being searched and evidence seized

A “Stradivarius copy”, it would have cost “two months wages” at the time Gleeson owned it. It had not been played for many decades but was still capable of producing a beautiful sound and deserved full restoration.

“We’re lucky to have it,” Condron added.