EVIDENCE OF THE FENIAN MULLANY.

Wellington Independent, Volume XXII, Issue 2669, 18 April 1868, Page 6

EVIDENCE OF THE FENIAN MULLANY.

[From the Daily News, January 29.] ! Anotheb torch has been carried into the villianous cavern where the Clerkenwell murderers prepared at leisure their infernal plot. Patrick Mullany has turned "approver," and is now as ready to lend a hand in thrusting the necks of his countrymen into a noose as he lately was to help them to blow up an English neighborhood. Yesterday when the crowd which filled Bow street Police Court was expecting to see this man take his place at the bar, he entered the witness box, pale and fearful, like the double dyed traitor he is, and with tremulous voice professed his desiro to be examined as a witness for the Crown, and as it is the duty of the Government to get as much light as possible thrown upon this dark affair, his evidence was accepted. The line of examination taken by Mr Giffard showed that he must have previously placed his stores of information entirely at the services of the prosecution. , Mullany says that he was sworn in a Fenian last March, and was made a Centre. Since April his means of existence have been precarious, and a strike having thrown him out of work, he occupied his abundant leisure with plans for overturning British rule in Ireland, ancT setting up the Irish Eepublic. His disclosures take up the Clerkenwell plot about a week before the outrage, and begin with the incidents of the Holborn meeting. The talk at this interview was mysterious and impre3sive. An " object in view" was vaguely referred to, and so important was it deemed that all agreed that money must be raised in some way; The fellows went about the business as systematically as if they had some pious or charitable work on hand, divided the burden of the task between them, and each assuming his own share of responsibility. One volunteered to get £1 ; othors 18s, 12s or 10s. This part of the story does not favor the notion that these men were acting as agents of a Great organisation, disposing freely of the secret funds — such as must be supposed when we read of the purchases of arms which Burke and others are sworn, to have made. Mullany represents that it was difficult to raise money to buy gunpowder enough for the Clerkenwell explosion. After this meeting there was the usnal coming and going, conference, enquiry, and report, the work of conspiracy being diversified with an occassional private quarrel. At length two days before the fatal outrage, Barrett, O'Neil, English and others, with Mullany himself inet at William Desmond's house ; and on this occasion the nature of the intended crime was freely discussed. Notes were compared aud each conspirator told, like the witches in " Macbeth," what particular contribution he had brought to the work of death and destruction. The powder had been obtained, and before the meeting was over, the barrel, the truck and all else that was requisite to make the apparatus of murder complete. A meeting was then appointed at W. Desmond's for the next day. Mullany did not attend it ; but on the evening of Thursday, the day before the explosion: he saw Barrett, whom throughout his evidence he calls Jackson, aud learned from him that the attempt had been made that day but for somo reason had not succeeded, and that it was intended to repeat it on the following day. It will bo remembered that at a very early stage of the enquiry the police deposed that on this same Thursday a barrel had been taken'into Corporation row on a truck and deposited against the prison wall. On the, night of Friday, when all London was under the excitement of the outrage, Mullany met Barrett, who had changed his personal appearances by shaving off lm whiskers and wearing a different coat, and Barrett then told him that he had lighted the fuse which exploded the barrel, that he feared indentification, aud was going away. This is the substance of Mullany's disclosures !is to the Clerkenwell Crime. They may not, perhaps, add any one fact of signal importance to those elicited by the enquiries of the police, but they supply some missing links in the previous evidence, and render the whole story of the plot more coherent. Taken by themselves, the statement of an approver might have little value ; but the significance of more solid testimony is increased by the light reflected. Mullany told Sir Thomas Henry that he " knew a great deal more about the case," and the man having chosen his part, evidently wants to make a clean breast of it. He says that Barrett told him that he and another man went down to Bow street armed with revolvers, and remained there all day watching for an opportunity, which did not arrive, of shooting Croydon, the informer. Certainly, if these Fenians do us somo mischief, it must bo acknowledged that they have a knack of destroying one another. Mullany is the second of this group who turned upon his associates ; and if the prosecution should have the result which everybody expects, it will be in great part owing to the evidence of these two men. We get now a view of the type of character and intellect which have produced this great crime, and can see how well adapted they were at once to injure us and bring the conspirators to ruin. The wretches who plotted the Clerkenwell explosion were men with a certain amount of low cunning, but utterly incapable of forming a Irue estimate of the consequences of what they were doing.