§ On the Order of the Day being again moved, for the House to go into a Committee on the Corporations (Ireland) Bill. Mr. O'Connell said, that he had a motion to bring forward respecting a subject which arose out of circumstances connected with this Bill, in which was involved the character of one of the highest judicial functionaries in Ireland. He alluded to the present Master of the Rolls, and late Attorney-General. His motion had reference to the statements in a speech which was published in the newspapers, from the manuscript of the hon. and learned Member for Belfast. The speech to which he alluded was delivered on the occasion of the last debate upon the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Bill. His intention was to submit to the House a motion for a return of the proceedings against a man named M'Carron, who was three times tried at Monaghan on an alleged charge of murder. He would also move for a return of the indictments preferred against him, the names of the judges who presided at each trial, the number of jurors set aside by the Crown on each occasion, and the names of the 668 learned gentleman who at each period filled the office of Attorney-General in Ireland. He would not stop to inquire how much of the speech to which he referred was spoken in that House, but it was therein stated, that the rule introduced by the late Attorney-General (O'Loghlin) had been productive of the very worst consequences; and the case of M'Carron was instanced to show the impropriety of adopting the regulation of dispensing with the right of the Crown to set aside jurors. The hon. and learned Member for Belfast had stated that the baneful effects of this rule were visible in the case of M'Carron, as well as in that of a man named Carter, which had been referred to by the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Bandon. To the latter case he would call the attention of the House immediately after Easter. With reference to M'Carron's case, the hon. Member for Belfast said, that he spoke from authentic details, which he held in his hand. Now, he could fearlessly state, that the three trials in which M'Carron was concerned, had taken place before Mr. O'Loghlin was appointed to the office of Attorney-General for Ireland. The last of the three trials had taken place five months before Mr. O'Loghlin was appointed, and eleven months before the regulation complained of with reference to jurors had been made. The first trial took place during the Spring Assizes of 1834, the second during the summer of the same year, and the third and last in the spring of 1835. Upon all these occasions Mr. Blackburne was Attorney-General, and during the last trial Lord Haddington was Viceroy in Ireland. He wished for returns of the particulars of all these trials, in all of which (without any exception) the Roman Catholic jurors had been set aside. So much for the truth of the charge which had been preferred by the hon. and learned Gentleman, the Member for Belfast. He (Mr. O'Connell) was authorised to deny most positively that there was any truth in the allegation that Mr. O'Loghlin had made any regulation by which murderers were allowed to escape. He had made a rule that no one should be set aside as a juror, unless good cause were shown for doing so; the consequence of which was, that now no man was set aside on account of his politics or religion. He (Mr. O'Connell) was furnished with dates to prove that the last of the three trials 669 had taken place five months before Mr. O'Loghlin's appointment to office, and that they had all taken place when Mr. Blackburne was Attorney-General, and, moreover, that in each of them the Roman Catholic jurors had been set aside.
§ Mr. Emerson Tennentsaid, it was not to be supposed, in alluding to circumstances which had occurred in another county, with which he was unconnected, and of which he had no personal recognizance, that he had spoken otherwise than on information derived from others, but on the accuracy of which he had every reason to rely; and he regretted that the short notice which the hon. and learned Member for Kilkenny had given him on Saturday last, of his intention to bring this matter before the House this day, rendered it impossible for him to communicate with those parties from whom he had received his previous information. The House would remember that he had alluded to this case on a former occasion, not Merely for the purpose of exhibiting the prejudicial effects of the order against setting aside jurors, but as tending to show the abuse of the powers vested in the Irish Executive, by their indiscriminate exercise of those prerogatives of the Crown, which should always be applied sparingly and with prudence. He had likewise introduced the case of M'Carron, because it was one which had excited the utmost alarm throughout the north of Ireland, not merely from the savage deliberation of the murderer, but as exhibiting the almost impossibility which existed in Ireland, from the confederated feelings of the Roman Catholics, of apprehending or bringing to justice those criminals who had committed outrages on Protestants. The circumstances were briefly these:—A Protestant whose name he had forgotten, ventured to take a farm out of which a Roman Catholic tenant had recently been ejected for nonpayment of rent. Shortly after he was assaulted and most barbarously beaten by this M'Carron and two other confederates. Being of a peaceful disposition and hoping, as he stated, that a display of kindness and forgiveness on his part might induce a correspondent feeling on that of his neighbours, he forbore to prosecute, and pardoned his assailants. The farm which he had taken was at some distance from another which he continued to occupy, and on which he resided, coming daily a 670 distance of a mile or two to cultivate the new tenement, on which occasions his wife attended to keep him company and dress his meat at a neighbouring cottage fire. On the day of the murder, which took place in the middle of a summer-day, in July or August, the poor fellow was quietly mowing in his meadow, and his wife seated beside him, when a little child was sent to her to say she was wanted in a cottage hard by. She went, and whilst in the House she heard cries proceeding from the direction of the meadow. She jumped up, and from the door or near it she saw three men murdering her husband. She flew back to the House, and implored the inmates to return with her to his rescue, which they refused, and advised her to hide herself as she would be murdered likewise. Instead of this she again rushed out towards the field, when she saw the three murderers coming towards her down a narrow lane. With singular determination and presence of mind she performed one of those acts of which women in such awful circumstances seem occasionally capable. She threw herself behind the ditch, and applying her eyes to an opening in the fence, she lay breathless, and, as the three assassins passed close beside her, still chafed and excited with their recent slaughter, she marked deliberately the countenance and features of each with so much precision, that she was able at the trial to lay the wand on the head of each man as he stood at the bar. This scene took place within a short distance of a turf bog, in which some hundreds of persons were at the moment at work, within sight and within hearing of the cries of the murdered man—the three murderers had actually passed through this crowd of persons on their way to the meadow, and some of them were actually produced at the trial on behalf of the prisoners, to swear that they were not the criminals although, as the judge stated in his charge, they admitted that not one human being moved to the rescue of the victim. If he remembered aright, they even refused to assist the unfortunate wife in raising and removing the still breathing body of her husband. He did not die till sunset, and had still sufficient strength left to state that the men who murdered him were the same three whom he had before forgiven for assaulting him. The circumstances, as he had here stated them, were all proved upon the three trials 671 which took place. On the first of these, he believed that jurors had been set aside by the Crown, and the consequence was, that eleven of the jury were for a conviction, and one only obstinately refused to join in the verdict. A second and a third trial took place, with a similar result, and the charges which he had brought against the Government were—first, that they had not removed the case, as it was in their power to do, into a different court, where they would have been certain of a verdict, either of guilt or acquittal; and secondly, that having induced the prisoners to plead guilty to the minor offence of manslaughter, having already thrice established an alibi at a fair, they then discharged them as innocent persons, and permitted them to emigrate to America. Thus, in a country exasperated by party feeling, and amidst a community so brutified, that some hundreds of persons looked calmly on at a savage murder—a community, above all others, requiring some example to be made within it—three men, whom the popular opinion set down unhesitatingly as homicides, and whom crowds of witnesses knew to be murderers, whom three successive juries had refused to pronounce innocent, were, by the act of the Irish Government, virtually pronounced to be guiltless, and permitted to retire as settlers to the colonies. What must be the result in practice from the establishment of such a principle as this, but that if one man could be smuggled on a jury who would pertinaciously differ from his colleagues, justice must be derided, and crime set at liberty unpunished. As to the dates of the three trials, as stated by the hon. and learned Member for Kilkenny, he was not prepared, from the reasons he had before stated, either to contradict or to argue on their correctness till the return should be made for which the hon. Member had moved. But since he had last mentioned this subject in the House, two circumstances had come to his knowledge connected with the case, which he was anxious that the hon. and learned Member should embody in his motion. One was the fact, that the solicitor for the prisoners on the three trials was a gentleman of high respectability, he believed, in his profession (Mr. O'Reilly), who was employed in a confidential situation by the Government as solicitor to the Corporation inquiry; and the other, which he confessed he could scarcely credit was, 672 that M'Carron and his conspirators were not only liberated by the Lord-Lieutenant as he had stated, but had actually received a sum of money out of the public treasury to pay their passage, and establish themselves in America. He trusted the hon. Member would not, therefore, object to add, to the return for which he had moved, the names of the counsel and solicitors who had acted for the prisoners on their several trials, and the sum or sums of money which each had received on the occasion of his departure for America. As to Mr. O'Loghlin, whom it seemed to be the chief object of the hon. and learned Member for Kilkenny to defend, he had no disposition whatsoever to attack him. It was the system and not the individual which he found fault with. Whether he or Mr. Perrin were the Attorney-General on the occasion of these trials, when jurors were not set aside, the case was equally sustained, which he wished to make against the impolicy of the rule, and the improper and injudicious clemency of the Government.
Mr. O'Connellsaid, what when the hon. Member had brought forward charges he should have been prepared to sustain them. It was evident he was unable to do so, and he had not now even attempted to say he could.
§ Mr. Tennentsaid, he was prepared with all the details, but that at present he could not supply the dates.
§ Lord Morpethexpressed a wish, that the hon. and learned Gentleman, Mr. O'Connell, would withdraw his motion, for the purpose of allowing the House to go into Committee on the Bill. He could again bring it forward towards the end of the evening, or on some future occasion. He would take the opportunity of saying, that other accusations against his right hon. friend, Mr. O'Loghlin, which had found their way from the Committee on fictitious votes to the Ulster Times newspaper, were also most unfounded.
§ Motion withdrawn.
§ The House resolved itself into a Committee on the