It is “problematic” that the body of an innocent man is buried in Mountjoy alongside those executed for murder, a leading historian has said. 

Between the end of the Civil War and the abolition of capital punishment, 28 men and one woman were sentenced to death and hanged for their crimes.

All were buried in Mountjoy and the prison has now announced their bodies will be exhumed.

Speaking to Moncrieff, Tim Carey, who wrote Hanged for Murder: Irish State Executions, said the exoneration of Harry Gleeson was an important factor behind the decision to go ahead with the exhumation.

Mary 'Moll' McCarthy was shot dead in 1940 and her neighbour, Mr Gleeson, was wrongly convicted for the crime and later hanged.

In 2016, following decades of campaigning by his friends and family, Mr Gleeson received a posthumous pardon from President Higgins.

“When you posthumously pardon someone, the idea of keeping them within the grounds of the prison becomes very problematic,” Mr Carey said.

“So, I think the Gleeson case was key to this.”

Some of the murderers lived pretty ordinary lives until they committed their crime - but some were very unusual characters indeed.

To Mr Carey, one murder who stands out is James Herbert Lehman who killed his pregnant wife and was “very much a sociopath”.

“He had at least, I think a dozen aliases,” Mr Carey said.

“He was alleged to have been born in, I think, at least seven different places.

“Subsequent to the publication of the book, which was about 10 years ago, two of his children contacted me.

“One [was] in Ireland and one from another country, neither of them really knew his full story and knew, in some ways, less about him than I did.”

The only woman to die at the end of a hangman’s noose was Annie Walsh who killed her husband with the assistance of his nephew.

“[She] promised [the nephew] she would run away with him after they had murdered her husband,” Mr Carey said.

“They murdered her husband and Annie Walsh tried to pin the murder on Michael, the nephew, and it ended up that both of them were executed in Mountjoy Prison.”

The last man to be hanged by the Irish State was Michael Manning in 1954 - although the death penalty remained on the statute book until 1990.

In 2002, the Irish people voted in favour of a constitutional ban on capital punishment.

Main image: A hangman noose at Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast. Alamy.com