The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-05-24 00:00:00

SHOCKING MURDER IN TIPPERARY

Another victim has fallen by the hand of the assassin ; the
name of the murdered man was Laffan, and he met his mi-
serable fate on the very day that a meeting of the peasantry
was held at Dunkerrin, which was attended by several Ro-
man Catholic clergymen, who addressed the multitude on
the evils of ribandism, &c. But the truth is, that wherever
this formidable conspiracy has taken root, the influence
which the priests had heretofore exercised over their flocks
altogether ceases ; and there have been more instances than
one in which the Roman Catholic priest has been taught by
experience that his life depended on as frail a tenure as
though he had been the most grinding landlord or " tithe-
gathering parson " that ever rendered himself obnoxious to
the bloody code of ribandism. Government have offered a
reward of £lOO for the discovery of Laffan's murderers ; but
with the well known disposition of the lower orders of the
Irish to screen offenders against the laws, it may be long in-
deed before justice shall have her due. The following are
the particulars as they appear in the Nenagh Guardian,
which paper also gives a full report of the inquest on the
body ; and it is quite clear from the evidence of several of
the witnesses who were examined, and who deposed to the
actual commission of the murder by two men, that either
from this habitual unwillingness to detect and expose crimi-
nals, or through fear of the consequences, the guilty parties
have not much reason to apprehend speedy detection from
what has transpired at the inquest :
" The victim in the present instance was a man in the
humbler walks of life, and his alleged offence that of sum-
moning trespassers in his capacity of under caretaker on the
lands of Kilgurtin, a portion of the Bowen estate, in this
county. It seems he left his lodging-house at Toomavara on
the morning of Wednesday, between the hours of four and
five o'clock, for the purpose of visiting those lands, end th.t
in about an hour and a half after he was found lying on his
face and hands on a dungheap by the road-side, in the very
last shiver of death, with a gun shot wound in his neck, and
the back part of his head badly fractured in two places.
There is a veil of mystery thrown over the murder which is
sickening to reflect on. The body of the murdered man ex-
hibited a frightful spectacle. His face was all burned and
black from the powder, except a small streak of blood about
the mouth; one of his eyes was swollen and much bruised;
his bosom was scorched, for the wadding of the gun or pistol
having lodged, burned his waistcoat and shirt; so that he
must have suffered, along with the other agonies of death,
the torture of burning. There was only one wound in the
neck, though two pistol balls had been extracted, and the back
part of the head broken in. One of the hands was much
burned, from which one would be led to believe that even in
death the murdered man must have ' clutched' the burning
garment on his bosom. When deceased was brought into
Toomavara on a car by the police, the man with whom he
had lodged refused to admit the dead body into his house;
every door was shut against it ; and the result was, that the
bloody and blackened carcase lay on a dunghill, like some
vile and loathsome thing, until the police towards evening,
broke open for its reception a waste tenement belong-
ing to Mr. Justice. It was the fear of a similar fate that
operated on the people so as to lock up the springs of
sympathy. The vengeance of ribandism dies not with its
victim. It wars even with the dead. It follows the gory
and mangled corpse to the very brink of the grave, and gloats
with fiendish exultation as the clods rattle on the sounding
coffin—as the widow and her hungry orphans raise the wild
wail of desolation over the grave that closes for ever on their
earthly homes. Such crimes as these are ' enough to freeze
the blood.' Upon horror's head horrors accumulate ; and
the very mention of the name of Tipperary conjures up before
the mind's eye scenes of hideous barbarity ; scenes before
which the deeds of the savage Indian that prowls the prairie
with his murderous tomahawk sink into insignificance. The
inquest was held at the village of Toomavara, which is about
an English mile from the scene of murder. Major Priestley,
the Provincial Inspector, Mr. Joseph Tabiteau, R.M., and
Mr. James Willington, of Castle Willington, J.P., and Mr.
Sub-inspector Blake, were in attendance. These gentlemen
(for deceased was only worth 3d. when he was murdered)
raised a subscription to defray the expenses of burial, and
to procure subsistence for the widow and orphan, until Mr.
Willington could procure them an asylum in the Nenagh
poor-house "