before a justice of the peace and committed for
trial. She was in prison from August 27th until the month of December,
when the lucky accident of a winter assize occurred, else she might be
there still. At the adjourned inquest the Coroner proceeded to read over
the depositions taken on the former day, and it was sworn by four
witnesses, whom he (the Lord Chief-Justice) entirely credited, that the
Coroner read these depositions as if they were originals, whereas an
unprecedented transaction had occurred. The Coroner had given the
original depositions out of his own custody, and given them to a
reverend gentleman who was rather careless of them, as was shown by the
evidence of a witness named Greene, who deposed that he saw a car on the
road upon which sat two clergymen, and he found on the road the original
depositions which, presumably, one of the clergymen had dropped. The
depositions were handed to a magistrate and afterwards returned to the
police at Philipstown, who had possession of them on the resumption of
the inquest. If the case stood alone there it was difficult to
understand how a Coroner could come into court and appear by counsel to
resist the quashing of an inquisition in regard to which at the very
door such gross personal misconduct was demonstrated. No doubt, he said,
he did not read them as originals but as copies, and it was strange,
that being so, that he did not inform the jury of what had become of
them, and he complained now of not being told by the police of their
recovery--not told of his own misconduct. On the 1st September, Ellen
Gaffney applied by a solicitor--Mr. Disdall, and as a set-off the
Coroner permitted a gentleman named O'Kearney Whyte to appear--for whom?
Was it for the constituted authorities or for the next-of-kin? No, but
for the Rev. Father Bergin, who was described as president of the local
branch of the National League, and the Coroner (Mr. Gowing) alleged as
the reason why he allowed him to appear and cross-examine the witnesses
and address the jury and give him the right of reply like Crown counsel
was, that Ellen Gaffney stated that she had been so much annoyed by
Father Bergin that she attributed the loss of her child to him--that it
was he who had murdered the child. It was asserted that Father Bergin
sat on the bench with the Coroner and interfered during the conduct of
the inquest, and having to give some explanation of that Mr. Gowing's
version was certainly a most amus