Pat Doran Author

During the early afternoon of Saturday the 24th of February 1900, William Symms Bird, a local Land Agent and Justice of the Peace, was shot to death in his office in the market town of Bantry in West Cork. Within twenty-four hours a farm labourer named Timothy Cadogan was arrested and charged with the murder.

Following two trials Cadogan was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged in Cork Gaol on the 11th of January 1901. The damning evidence against Cadogan came from an eyewitness who swore he had seen him coming down the stairs from Bird’s office with a revolver in his hand.

In “The Bantry Murder” Pat Doran examines the evidence given at the Magisterial Inquiry into the murder and the two trials which followed. He then asks a shocking question. Did an innocent man go to the gallows while the guilty party hid in plain sight?

“Mistakes occur in the administration of the law in the most trifling of cases and it is possible for them to occur in the most important ones like this one. Once again I request that you pause for thought before delivering a verdict that may possibly be discovered in future years to be an error which has unjustly deprived a poor creature of his life.”

Mr P.D. Lynch B.L. 20/07/1900. Closing address to the jury at Timothy Cadogan’s first trial.

In 2018 and 2021 President Michael D. Higgins issued two Presidential Posthumous Pardons to two men who were wrongly convicted and hanged for murder, Myles Joyce in 1882 and John Twiss in 1895. Should the case of Timothy Cadogan now also be viewed as a miscarriage of justice?