Career
Curran was Attorney General for Northern Ireland (6 June 1947 – 4 November 1949), the youngest in the history of that parliament. Curran had three children, Michael, Patricia and Desmond, a barrister and latterly a Roman Catholic convert and missionary. On 12 November 1952, Patricia was murdered.
Her body was found in the driveway of the Curran home, Glen House, Whiteabbey, County Antrim.
She had been stabbed thirty-seven times. She was nineteen and a student at the Queen"s University, Belfast.
In 2000, Iain Hay Gordon, the man convicted of her murder, had his sentence overturned after the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal found it to be unsafe. Scapegoat, a British Broadcasting Corporation Northern Ireland drama about the conviction of Iain Hay Gordon, was broadcast in 2009.
Curran presided over the trial of Robert McGladdery for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble, near Newry, in 1961.
McGladdery protested his innocence but was found guilty and hanged at Crumlin Road jail in Belfast on 20 December 1961. lieutenant was the last hanging in Ireland. Another McNamee novel, Blue Is The Night (published in 2014), deals with Curran"s involvement in a murder trial in the Northern Ireland of the late 1940s.
Curran"s first wife, Doris, died on 29 May 1975.
He died in Sussex in 1984.
