Harry Gleeson - a reading

It is November 1940 – a year into 'The Emergency'. At New Inn, in the Golden Vale, life on the surface hasn’t changed much for two people who meet each other in the fields most days – Harry Gleeson, a hard-working, fortyish farm manager, a hurler, a man who plays the fiddle well; and his neighbour, Mary (‘Moll’) McCarthy, a good mother to her seven children, all by different fathers, who has to exist on scraps of welfare, occasional prostitution and the odd sack of potatoes from Harry.

Moll is not popular in New Inn. Her vivid auburn hair, her ability to make the husbands and sons of local women stray, how she seems to revel in her alternative lifestyle – these make her a public enemy of the prevailing morality.

Then on November 21, 1940; a terrible shock. Harry is out checking the cattle on his uncle’s farm and finds Moll’s lifeless body – killed by a first shot to the neck her face disfigured by a second.

Tonight we read a new play by Bernard Adams, based on 'The Framing of Harry Gleeson', by Kieran Fagan. It shows how the local guards fabricated a flimsy case against Harry; how he was charged with the murder and tried in Dublin; and how a biased judge, an inadequate defence and a hard-hearted refusal to grant the clemency recommended by the jury, led to his execution at Mountjoy prison in April, 1941.

More than seventy years later he was pardoned. Last year Gleeson's body was located in the grounds of Mountjoy prison, and his family gave him a full funeral at Holycross, Co Tipperary.

Writer: Bernard Adams

Director: Martin Maguire

Patrons Note: This is a reading of a play, with actors working from script in hand, not a full staged production