How Ireland's only female executioner got the job

Elizabeth Sugrue saved herself from the gallows by offering to hang her fellow condemned, and thus became Ireland’s only female executioner, says Robert Hume

Michael Manning, from Limerick, was executed in Mountjoy Prison in 1954 for raping and murdering Catherine Cooper, a nurse. The hangman was Albert Pierrepoint, a Yorkshireman: executioner by day; landlord by night. His father, Henry, and uncle, Thomas, were hangmen before him.