What sort of person would willingly want to watch the public execution of another human being?

That question was raised lately when dotty old President Trump and his U.S administration spoke of their plans to show the death by firing squad of a mass murderer live on the internet.

There were reports this week that Trump had rowed back on this barbaric plan, and we can only hope common decency prevails. Aside from a few outliers, such as Iran, public executions have been consigned to the past, hopefully never to return.

However, we do know what sort of person would have willingly watched a public execution in Cork a few hundred years ago: The answer is an awful lot of them, and from all cohorts of society.

The curious, the gossips, the well-to-do, the down-at-heel, hawkers, young and old. All human life would turn out to watch the expiry of a fellow human being back in the day. It was like Netflix, presumably without too much chilling, although it takes all sorts I guess.

A few old ladies would even bring their knitting along to the public guillotining during the French Revolution, no doubt later telling each other that monsieur so-and-so had had ‘a good death’.

It goes without saying that public executions in long-ago Cork, like in all areas of the British empire, were gruesome affairs. And just as in the case of the murderess in the U.S a few weeks ago, they were often botched. Putting someone to death really isn’t as easy as some might think.

Take the first-ever execution to be held outside the newly-built Cork City Gaol in April, 1828.

Owen Ryan had been found guilty of the rape of a fellow domestic servant the previous month and was sentenced to hang - the wheels of justice turned remarkably quickly in........

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