Galway In Days Gone By
1921
Sentenced to death
It is officially announced that the death sentences on William Conway and Edward Potter have been confirmed, and that both sentences have been commuted to penal servitude for life, in the first case by the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Ireland, and in the latter case by the Lord Lieutenant.
It is also officially announced that the death sentence passed on Thomas Whelan, 14, Barrow-st., Dublin has been confirmed.
Whelan was charged in connection with the death of Captain Baggally, in Lower Baggot-st., on November 21. He is twenty-two years of age, a native of Clifden, and had been employed at the Broadstone railway station.
At his trial his landlady swore that on the morning of the tragedy he left for nine o’clock Mass, and returned at ten a.m. a young lady swore she saw him at Holy Communion in Ringsend Church at nine o’clock Mass.
Two other witnesses said they saw him leaving the church. A Ringsend priest said that Whelan had been a weekly communicant for three years.
Whelan himself said he could solemnly swear that he never entered 119, Lower Baggot-street in his life, and was not in the street on the morning of the tragedy; that on the morning he partook of the Body and Blood of his Redeemer, and that he would consider it a greater crime than murder to do that if he were guilty and to bring Our Lord to shield him.
An officer in 119, Lower Baggot-street swore that Whelan and a man named Boyce (Boyce was acquitted) ordered him to put up his hands. A private solder said he saw Whelan trying to start his motor bicycle in the street.
His parting words to his mother on Saturday were: “You are not to be worried over me, mother. If I die, I die innocent.”
Whelan has seven brothers, two of whom are in America, and three sisters.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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