On this day in 1942, Tipperary man George Plant was executed by military firing squad at Portlaoise prison after ‘one of the most controversial cases in Irish legal history.’
Although raised in a ‘strict, sober’ Protestant household outside Fethard, Plant had republican sympathies by the time he was a teenager. By 1940, Plant was on full-time IRA service and in November of 1941, he, along with IRA Southern Division commander, Joseph O’ Connor were charged in the Special Criminal Court with the murder of fellow IRA-man Michael Devereux. It was alleged that Plant and accomplices lured Devereux, who was suspected of informing to the gardai, to a meeting in the foothills of Slievenamon where Devereux was shot dead.
After Devereux’s body was found, Plant and O’ Connor were charged with murder, the guards being tipped off by a confession from IRA chief-of-staff Stephen Hayes. The state’s only substantial evidence were the statements of three of Plant’s alleged accomplices and when they refused to testify in Court, the prosecution’s case quickly collapsed.
Plant and O’Connor were immediately rearrested after being released and the state once again charged them, along with two of the accomplices (Patrick Davern and Michael Walsh) with murder.
Fianna Fail Minister for Justice, Gerald Boland, issued an order under emergency powers legislation that the four defendants should be tried before the special military court. Remarkably, another emergency powers order revoked ordinary judicial procedure regarding evidence, authorising the military court to suspend itself, whenever it saw fit, from abiding by any rule of evidence. Even though Davern and Walsh again refused to testify, their original statements were read out by Gardai and accepted as evidence by the Court.
Consequently, Plant, Davern and Walsh were convicted of murder and sentenced to death while O’ Connor was acquitted. After appeals for clemency, Davern’s and Walsh’s sentences were commuted to life imprisonment but Plant’s sentence was upheld and he was transferred to Portlaoise prison where he was executed one week later.
What exactly transpired in the ‘Plant-Devereux affair’ will forever remain shrouded in mystery given the extraordinary measures taken by the government of the day to get a prosecution in times of national emergency (bearing in mind this occurred during ‘the Emergency’) and the fact that none of the key witnesses wished to testify. Whether guilty or innocent, Plant's remains were exhumed and released to his family in 1948. He is buried in St. Johnstown cemetery near Fethard.
#onthisday #1940s #murdermystery #fethard #tipperary
Sources:
https://www.dib.ie/biography/plant-george-a7360
Michael Moroney, ‘George Plant and the rule of law – the Devereux affair 1940–1942,’ Tipperary Historical Journal, (1988)
