§ MR. SEXTONasked the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Whether two brothers, named Edward and Daniel Flanagan, of Rathclooney, county Clare, were convicted at the last Cork Winter Assizes, of firing into a dwelling-house, and sentenced to penal servitude; whether the only witness who identified the prisoners was one Michael Molloy, a farm servant, a youth of seventeen, upon whose testimony, according to the charge of the learned judge who tried the case (Mr. Justice Fitzgerald), the case against the prisoners rested; whether the witness Molloy, after the Winter Assizes, was accommodated for some weeks in the police barrack at Ennis, and, while there, stole a watch belonging to a constable, and exchanged 1240 it for another at a pawnbroker's; whether, after the police authorities had become aware of this act of theft, they sent Molloy in charge of a constable to Gravesend, and shipped him to Australia, at the public cost; and whether Molloy, while in company with the constable in London, stole from a restaurant a gold-headed cane, which the constable, on discovering the theft, compelled him to return; whether the Government, having lately set at liberty one of the brothers condemned to penal servitude on the evidence of Molloy, will now release the other; and, why the Government, instead of sending Molloy to Australia at the public cost, did not have him committed to stand his trial for perjury and theft?
§ MR. TREVELYANSir, the earlier part of this Question was answered on a previous occasion by my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General for Ireland. The part of it which is new I would answer thus:—The constable who was with Molloy in London is in a distant part of the country, and no answer has as yet been received to the inquiry about the gold-headed cane. One of the brothers was recently released on ticket-of-leave, solely on grounds of ill-health, the doctor having reported his life to be in imminent danger from further confinement.