Irish Capital Punishment

I arrived in Dublin international airport at 7:00 am, found our program director at the airport breakfast place, and did the first thing I always do when entering a foreign country- pick up the fattest newspaper I could find. Leafing through it, I quickly found that news in the Emerald Isle would not afford a respite from American news. One of the lead stories was about the recent capture of Osama Bin Laden’s son in law and former Al-Queda spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. I remarked to our Irish program director, Tony, that I was unsure what crime he could actually be charged with, to which Tony remarked, “Just execute him.” After a quizzical look, he clarified: “I am of course opposed to capital punishment, but sometimes I wish we could make an exception.”

           

 Ireland’s attitude towards capital punishment is a curious one. Before you meet them, you would suspect that hardened nationalists, veterans of the troubles, Sinn Fein representatives and former Irish Republican Army operatives, some of whom have been associated with actual executions, would have at least reconciled themselves to the concept. As it turns out, the opposite is true. Ireland abolished capital punishment in ­­1990, and the vast majority of its inhabitants remain steadfastly opposed to the idea.

             

In the north, this trend might be attributed to an institutional distrust of the state, and thus the legitimacy of state-conducted executions. But similar attitudes persist in the Irish Republic. It could also be part of the general European conception that the practice is outdated and barbaric. Talking to former members of the IRA as well as unionist paramilitary organizations about execution, you would think you were conversing with a representative from amnesty international. As it turns out, years of violence doesn’t seem to have hardened them to the idea of death. It has done the exact opposite. Witnessing unarmed friends or family being ‘executed’ unlawfully by IRA on one side, or by unionist groups and even British soldiers on the other, has evidently bred a deep contempt of the practice among those most closely associated with it. Perhaps men who know what it is to take a life are the least likely to want to do so arbitrarily.