Executed for a crime he didn't commit — eight decades on, Harry Gleeson's remains are finally laid to rest
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More than 80 years after he was executed by the Irish State for a murder he did not commit, Henry (Harry) Gleeson’s remains were removed from an unmarked grave in Mountjoy prison and reinterred today with family in his home county.
A polished wooden coffin bearing Mr Gleeson’s remains stood before mourners at Holycross Abbey, Thurles, at the feet of a statue of Jesus.
Mr Gleeson’s great grand nephew, also called Harry, brought Mr Gleeson’s violin to be placed on his coffin. The violin lay next to a black and white photo of the innocent man who was 38 at the time of his execution.
“We must never forget Harry’s last words,” his relative, Anne Gleeson told the congregation.
“’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.’” And after decades of campaigning by his family, Mr Gleeson’s name was cleared and he was given a presidential pardon in 2015.
Mr Gleeson had been wrongly convicted for the murder of Moll McCarthy.
The mother of seven had been shot in the face and the neck and her body was found by Mr Gleeson who alerted authorities in November 1940.
Less than six months later, following a flimsy, flawed investigation, he was hung for murder in 1941.
Mr Gleeson’s family requested that Ms McCarthy and her family also be remembered at today’s funeral Mass.
“This is a unique occasion,” Fr Celsus Tierney told the congregation.
“I can confidently suggest that there has never been a funeral Mass where we bring back one of our parishioners many years after their death.
People joined the ceremony from Australia, the US, Spain, France, the UK, and Ireland, Fr Tierney said.
Mr Gleeson’s body had been held at his family home in nearby Galbertstown since Friday.
Mr Gleeson’s death in 1941 was “part of a darker and bleaker history of the State,” the priest said.
A time when Church and State failed to stand up for the innocent, as in the case of Harry Gleeson. He said:
She was also part of the history we cannot forget, he said.
But Fr Tierney warned that while it was easy to condemn people’s actions in the past, it was worth considering how future generations may judge us today for the way homeless people, migrants and others in need of our protection are treated.
Mr Gleeson received the first posthumous pardon in the history of the State, he said.
He thanked all those who had worked so hard to “bring Mr Gleeson back home.”
He was laid to rest at St. Mary’s Cemetery, Holycross, Co Tipperary.
Whoever shot Ms McCarthy dead was never brought to justice.
In the hours before his death, he told his Junior Counsel, Sean McBride, who went on to become a government minister and would help found Amnesty International, that he would “pray whoever did it will be discovered".