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- Herausgeber: Liberties Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007
Kilmainham Jail is perhaps the most important building in modern Irish history. A place of incarceration since its construction in the late eighteenth century, it housed a succession of petty criminals, including sheep rustlers and, during the Famine, people who committed crimes with the sole aim of being imprisoned there: even the meager rations offered at the jail were better than what was available in other parts of the country. It was a powerful symbol of British rule on the island of Ireland; its residents over the years included the bold Robert Emmet and, of course, it was also the place where the 1916 rebels were taken and executed. Every Dark Hour is a colourful and entertaining telling of the history of the jail and its colourful cast of residents over the years - as well as vivid accounts of the heroic men and women who gave freely of their time and energies to restore the jail to its former grandeur when it was on the verge of being reclaimed by the elements.
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EVERY DARK HOUR
A HISTORYOF KILMAINMAM JAIL
NIAMH O’SULLIVAN
The story of Kilmainham Jail Museum in Dublin, from 1796 to the twenty-first century, from a place of suffering and incarceration to one of learning and remembrance
Dedicated to the memory of
Sean Eoghan O’Suileabhain and
Margaret McLean O’Sullivan
We hebben het toch samen gedaan
And to little Bridget Gallagher who left Achill for Cleveland, Ohio, in 1882
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
For many people Kilmainham Jail is a place of deprivation, punishment and torture. For those who are interested in the past it is a place where history lives. The author of this book, Niamh O’Sullivan, was tutored within the walls of this place during three decades.
Every Dark Hour is a book that has been in production for twenty-five years; as archivist in Kilmainham Jail the author knows her source material intimately. She cleverly weaves the complex story of Ireland’s history from the 1790s to the 1920s with stories, letters and documentation from inmates and jailors. O’Sullivan has opted not to use academic referencing in her book, but it will be of use to scholars, for the sources are contained within Kilmainham Jail’s archive. The archivist as author took the deliberate decision not to break the rhythm of the read, and in doing so is re-creating the way one is guided through the jail. You trust in your guide, your storyteller, your keeper of the nation’s memory, that what you are told is the truth, with the unspoken understanding that history is ever changing, reinterpreted and reassessed. This is the oral transfer of knowledge as it has been done for generations, before we had schools of history and a formalisation of history as a discipline.
The Irish people for centuries have told their history orally, especially the illiterate poor; they told of their heroes in battle, they sang of emigration, of imprisonment and loss. They huddled around fires and told of mighty deeds and failed rebellions. They never forgot. Today in the Ireland of the new millennium, school history books are a broad sweeping look at history from the prehistoric to modern times, soundbites of information ranging from the local to the international. By linking the story to a place O’Sullivan manages to use the jail as a transporter to long ago, thus overcoming the difficulty in this modern age of touching readers, making them feel that the people of the past actually lived. Here you will read of poignant stories of love, loss, death, cruelty and neglect that happened within the walls of one building. You will read of ordinary people, of the rank and file, and of high-ranking revolutionaries.
Niamh O’Sullivan came to work in Kilmainham Jail when it was still run by voluntary workers, the Kilmainham Jail Restoration Society, who had saved the building from destruction in the 1960s. She gave her time freely, worked for nothing simply because she believed that Ireland’s ‘revolutionary’ story should be told. She worked as a guide through the 1980s when Kilmainham Jail was a place of unspoken controversy. Telling Irish history – and telling the truth without rancour – to a mixed audience of tourists, activists, history graduates and schoolchildren is an art form. It was a diplomatic tightrope that she walked, guiding people through a building that told the story of freedom fighters when war still raged in the northern section of the island, and Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned on Robben Island.
O’Sullivan demonstrates through this book that history is personal. The mix of the personal and the historical is important: to see history simply as a series of facts is to lose something in the telling. The writer is informed by her own unique background: her American father, and the fact that she spent part of her childhood and received her formative education in Holland. In this she follows in the tradition of historians such as Calton Younger, who was the first to write on the Irish Civil War. Her own life experience, rather than academic accreditation in Irish history, gives her an ability to tell this story, and gives her a reinforced sense of identity with Ireland. She understands that knowing one’s history is vital to the psyche of the nation, and that, with a multicultural background, one has a unique sense of being Irish.
This is Niamh O’Sullivan’s first commercially published book, but it is not the first time her voice has been heard: she has been filmed talking about the jail for countless television programmes and has contributed to numerous radio programmes on the jail’s history. In fact, as a guide, she has already told this story to a worldwide audience of over 100,000 people. Following one of Niamh’s radio interviews, when she recounted the 1916 Rising as if she had seen it, and not read of it in books, a caller rang the radio station and said that Niamh should be bottled and sent to every school in the country. Sadly that is not possible, so instead read in these pages her words, and gain something of the magic she sees and feels in Ireland’s history. Perhaps you’ll never hear her speak, or visit Kilmainham Jail, but contained within these pages is a virtual tour: Irish history told in the context of what was Ireland’s foremost political prison for over two centuries.
Sinéad McCoole
June 2007
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was more than a thought-process for considerable time and I am indebted to many people who may not even realise it. My thanks to all I met on my twenty-five-year journey through Kilmainham, including the staff of the National Museum of Ireland and the Military Archives, who were always involved and helpful. However, the book would be forgotten on a shelf were it not for the encouragement of two special people, Mary Kirwan and Sharon Kelly; to you, my sincere thanks.
My deepest gratitude for the sheer generosity of spirit of those whose research assisted me greatly: Phyl Mason, Gavan Woods, Paul Turnell, Sean Browne, Marie Sheahan for her family history, Sally Smyth for sharing her artist-in-residence year, Louise O’Hanrahan, who started with me in the Kilmainham Archives in 1992, and Sinéad McCoole, for so many things, including a gentle yet firm introduction to our women prisoners. Thanks also to Niall Bergin for all his assistance. The support of many friends has made a huge difference: Eileen Leonard, Ann-Marie Smith, Ciaran Barry, Elizabeth Carey, Deirdre Connolly, Tony Mahon, Nesta Nolan, Gillian Mullen, Margaret Roche, Kevin O’Byrne, Eabhan Ni Shuileabhain, Gwyn Parry, Ronan and Clare O’Sullivan, Catherine Gallagher, Catherine Nolan, Angela and Terry O’Brien, Ettie Pooler, Mary V. Johnston, and my family in Ireland and in America. Recalling collectively the many guides who told Kilmainham’s story with me for the past twenty-five years, I fear to name you in case I forget someone. To all of you who were captivated by the old jail, thank you for your friendship and the hours of arguing and laughing in our canteen cell. My near-quarter-century in jail was immensely cheered by Tommy Halton, Kathleen (Kay) Salinger and Lynn and Betty Sheerin.
Pat Cooke, former Curator of Kilmainham, for twenty years of teaching, encouragement and animated discussions, thank you. I am also grateful to Professor Kevin Whelan of the Keough-Naughton Notre Dame Centre for his generous support of me during my time in Kilmainham. Pat McBride of The Paper Conservation Studio was always at the end of the phone with welcome advice and suggestions.
To all the Kilmainham relatives, our mainstay, who visit the jail with what can only be called family treasures, my thanks cannot begin to suffice, especially today, when historical material is fetching such incredible prices at auction. The jail itself is aware of its debt to you all. Your kindness in allowing us to look after and use your precious material is most gratefully accepted and appreciated. Thanks to all of you who permitted me to tell your stories here. To everyone who ever worked with the Kilmainham Jail Restoration Society, quite simply, you gave us back Kilmainham.
And to Seán O’Keeffe, Peter O’Connell, Orlaith Delaney and everyone in Liberties Press, I am lost for words. There should be a stronger word for ‘thank you’.
Niamh O’Sullivan
May 2007
PREFACE
I have worked in one of the ugliest buildings in Dublin for the past twenty-four years. At the jail’s reopening in 1966, it was referred to by the then President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, as ‘this old dungeon fortress’. It is the coldest, greyest place conceivable: harsh, inhospitable, and so strong that it has survived for more than two centuries.
Opened officially in August 1796, it was used almost continuously for 128 years. The deprivations, sufferings, longings and human hopes witnessed in its long life, within its hard, grey walls, are unimaginable. The building itself nearly died, too. It lay waste for roughly thirty-six years, and was ultimately saved from ruin by a desperate need for remembrance – and by love. Snatched at the last moment from destruction, it still stands on Inchicore Road beside the courthouse. It seems acutely aware of its own history: on warm and humid days, its limestone stairs and hallways weep silently. Built as a prison, it is now a national monument: Kilmainham Jail.
My own path to the old jail was very slow, with an abrupt arrival. Two early childhood memories stand out vividly. My parents brought me to Roger Casement’s funeral as a little girl. I can recall huge crowds; flurries of snow; heavy black clothing. I also stood with my father in St Michan’s Churchyard in Dublin, and I remember his soft, gentle Ohio voice telling me about the grave of a great patriot, Robert Emmet. Far more important to me was the fact that it was just the two of us together. I did not really understand my father’s words, yet I recognised that they were significant. Years later, this conversation culminated in my working on the bicentenary exhibition of Robert Emmet in Kilmainham Jail Museum.
That visit to St Michan’s was followed by years of myself and my siblings telling my poor father to change the record, that we were not interested in Irish history. We moved to the Netherlands, where we grew up speaking Dutch, and were curious about the Dutch war years, 1940 to 1945. We returned to Ireland – most of us reluctantly – in the late 1970s. In 1982, some of my father’s relatives from Ohio came to visit, and we accompanied them to Kilmainham Jail, then being reclaimed by the Restoration Society. My memories of Casement and Emmet fell into place, and within months I had joined the Society and was giving tours of the jail myself. In 1986, the Kilmainham Jail Restoration Society handed the building back to the State, and I stayed on. I have always been aware that I had started working at the jail at the end of a true labour of love, with volunteers some of whom who had already dedicated more than twenty years of their lives to the reclamation of this special place. Later in my career at the jail I worked with university students from around the world on wonderful subjects like ‘Places of Memory’, and I watched as this ugly prison building claimed their wholehearted interest too. As I write, a young French student is working on a paper about Kilmainham’s transformation from prison to museum, and a student from Boston is studying how the museum presents modern Irish history to its 225,000-plus annual visitors.
The wretched prison building is dark, cold and inhospitable – and forty weary shades of grey. But if you peel back the stone skin and venture right inside, it is suddenly illuminated by the heroism, idealism and love of those men and women who were forced to spend time within its walls or, worse, to lose their very lives in one of its yards. There is also a gentle pride – that of the countless descendants who return from the four corners of the earth to remember those prisoners and the costly sacrifices they made for us all.
PART I
POLITICAL PRISONERSAT KILMAINHAM JAIL
1
LINGERING SPIRITS
‘But, sure, jail is a grand place, if one can forget that one’s in it.’ So wrote Evelyn Masterson, veteran Civil War prisoner of Kilmainham Jail, in a letter to Bridie O’Mullane, a young friend and fellow veteran. The dry, wistful sense of humour possessed by these republican women prisoners and their male counterparts sustained them in their long days and nights of incarceration.
‘“There is a tide in the affairs of men”, but we seem to have got jammed in a backwater’ was the opinion of a prisoner who signed himself ‘C, Central Hall, Kilmainham Gaol, October 1921’ in a War of Independence-era autograph book belonging to a fellow inmate. These notebooks were passed around amongst the prisoners to fill their days and help preserve their memories for the future.
The prison referred to is Kilmainham. Built on a specially selected site called Gallows Hill as the County Jail for Dublin at the behest of the presiding Grand Jury, it was officially opened in August 1796. The prison building is still in everyday use, albeit currently as a National Monument and Museum. The current building is not in fact the original Kilmainham Jail. The original was located near St James’s Hospital in the Faulkner’s Terrace/Mount Brown area of Kilmainham, a short distance from Gallow’s Hill in the direction of Dublin city centre.
OLD KILMAINHAM
This ancient prison was an appalling place of incarceration. Here, men, women and children were imprisoned together in long narrow rooms, with repeat offenders and first-time prisoners also sharing cells. Liquor flowed freely in the original Kilmainham Jail, with reports of many inmates being drunk at eleven o’clock in the morning. The old jail possessed ‘begging grilles’: three dungeon windows which fronted on to the street, enabling prisoners to stick their hands through the bars and beg passers-by for alms. Money was vitally important to the inmates of the first Kilmainham Jail, as it could purchase a slightly more bearable life for them. They could buy better-quality food from the jailers and even rent some of the better rooms. In those early days of penal history, prison warders were paid extraordinarily low wages, which they supplemented by charging for services like these. On occasion, prisoners were kept in jail after their sentences had expired, as they lacked the means to ‘pay’ the prison staff for their release.
NEW KILMAINHAM
New ideas about prison reform, however, were gradually gaining strength. One of the people speaking out strongly against such inhumane regimes as that at Kilmainham was John Howard, an English Quaker who campaigned for jailers to be paid wages rather than being dependent on fees extracted from prisoners. The decision was made to build a new County Jail in the area. The Gallow’s Hill site was specifically chosen as it was on a height: the drainage system of the first Kilmainham Jail was exceptionally poor due to its location in a hollow.
Construction of the second Kilmainham Jail commenced in 1787. This new prison was to be everything the first was not. It was to have separate cells for each inmate – and thus was born the silent, separate system of observation. Silence was considered to be an important new factor in dealing with prisoners, allowing them to reflect quietly on their past sins, and to make the decision to turn over a new leaf. All prisoners were constantly watched through special spy holes built into the doors of each cell. Those prisoners who were not sentenced to heavy labour (breaking stones for the construction of roads for men, and working in the laundry for women) spent long hours locked alone in cells. All were permitted to exercise for one hour daily. Buckets in the corner of each cell were the only toilet facilities, with ‘slopping out’ taking place each morning. There was no heating or lighting in the early days of the jail: prisoners were given candles to keep them warm and enable them to see, but these were carefully rationed. Gas was introduced to the jail in the mid-1840s, and small pipes entered each cell beside or above the doorway. The gas was lit for roughly two hours each evening.
Despite good intentions, prison-reform theories were severely tested. Overcrowding was often a serious problem, especially before the practice of transportation ceased, and during the years 1845 to 1850, when the Great Famine swept through the country. Up to five prisoners were crammed into each cell at the height of the Famine. Conditions were never kind in Kilmainham: prison food (which varied slightly over the years and included a thin prison gruel called stirabout, bread, water, milk, tea, potatoes or rice, oatmeal, Indian meal and, occasionally, meat) was carefully weighed and doled out in order to deter those in poverty from looking to prison for comfort. Food simply could not be of better quality in jail than in the slums. Nevertheless, many of Kilmainham’s prisoners deliberately committed crimes in the hope of being incarcerated, believing that they would receive some care while they were in custody – at least for a short time.
THE JAIL YARDS
Kilmainham Jail is a harsh, majestically ugly grey building constructed from limestone and granite. The boundary wall runs for one third of a mile around the prison buildings, and varies in height from thirty to fifty feet. This wall is roughly five and a half feet thick at the bottom, and three and a half feet thick at the top, and is interrupted only by three iron-and-wood gates. At one corner, still visible today, is a hollow scooped out at the top of the wall where the death bell used to hang. This bell was rung after an execution had taken place in the prison.
Inside the jail walls, those unrelenting forty shades of grey continue. The large transportation yard lies in silence today, with its two cement circles running side by side – circles that were exercise pathways for two different classes of prisoner. Here in 1842 John Sheahan, convicted of an agrarian crime, walked the inner circle with fellow transportees-in-waiting, wondering when the prison ship would arrive in either Dublin or Cork to take him to exile in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Here he may have decided what to bring with him halfway across the world in his small, black, prison-issue wooden box. This is the yard where those condemned to death in the nineteenth century shared the inner circle with those who had been sentenced to transportation, enviously eyeing the more fortunate prisoners on the outside pathway, who had their precious end-of-sentence dates carefully memorised and always at the front of their minds. Here also male prisoners from the War of Independence took clandestine photos with a smuggled box camera – photos which are now on display in the jail’s museum.
In a smaller, neighbouring yard, the female prisoners exercised down through the years. Here, it is alleged, Anne Devlin and Robert Emmet were placed together after their failed uprising in 1803, in a ploy to see whether they would recognise each other, and talk. Here too, in 1858, seventy-year-old Rose Tyer would have taken her daily hour-long exercise. Tyer, who was imprisoned for four weeks for stealing flowers from a garden, may have enjoyed the tiny splashes of light and dark pink of the flowers of the weeds that were clinging here and there to the stone walls, and alleviating the relentless lack of colour. Kilmainham’s true survivors, these little weeds still bloom in summertime today, despite the best efforts of the prison’s maintenance crews.
Deserted now, except for modern visitors, is the children’s exercise yard, as inhospitable and grey as the rest of the jail. One can only imagine what the child prisoners must have felt as they were allowed out of their cells for their daily exercise. In those times, children were regarded as little adults and were granted no exceptions. One of the youngest child prisoners entered in the Kilmainham Jail Registers was a six-year-old boy, Joseph Williams. Imprisoned for travelling without a fare on one of the new Great Southern and Western Railway trains with his parents, Joseph would have ‘played’ in this small yard in the 1850s.
Years later, the women republican prisoners of the Civil War used this little area as their rounders field. Necessity being the mother of invention, they used the wooden leg of an old chair as a bat. A humorous drawing in one of their autograph books depicts a rounders game in full swing until the ball soars over the high wall – signalling ‘game over’.
The most famous yard in Kilmainham is the Stonebreakers’ Yard, used for hard labour. There are no windows overlooking this yard. When the prison’s Rule of Silence was in effect, the men were placed in individual huts, with only their thoughts to accompany them as they broke up stones. Darker areas around the walls are now the sole remains of these huts. This yard, because it is not overlooked, was chosen in 1916 as the place of execution for the leaders of the Easter Rising. Here in the grey dawn, within the cold grey walls, these men glimpsed their dreary last view of the world.
The front of the prison is dominated by the huge entrance doorway, above which the five dragons of Kilmainham still observe anyone entering or leaving the prison. Sculpted in stone, snarling and chained, they represent the five serious felonies: murder, rape, theft, treason and piracy. From 1796 until the jail was closed in 1924, they terrorised all but the most hardened prisoners who were about to begin their sentences. In 1821, Bridget Butterly and Bridget Ennis, aged nineteen and twenty respectively, passed under their all-seeing eyes, to be hanged shortly afterwards on the gallows above them for taking part in a burglary during which a woman died. ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’ the dragons seem to say.
On the façade of the building, a little above the dragons, one can still see faint traces of the old gallows. Two blocked-up holes are now all that remain of the structure, which obscured the middle window on the second floor. The last public hanging took place in 1865. Patrick Kilkenny, who had been convicted of murder, was hanged in July of that year, despite the fact that his jury had asked for mercy to be shown to him. Approximately four thousand spectators attended the hanging, some of them climbing the trees in front of the prison to enable them to follow the proceedings more closely. The present-day railings guarding the front yard of Kilmainham were erected in the 1880s to prevent crowds from gathering too close to the front of the prison during the hangings of five members of the Invincibles (an offshoot of the Fenians), convicted of the assassinations in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1882 of the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his Under Secretary, Thomas Burke. The Invincibles were buried in quicklime in the yard below the Children’s Yard.
THE ADMINISTRATION SECTION
Inside, the jail is divided into three distinct sections. The middle part of the building is the administrative section, containing the largest and most comfortable rooms. Here also, at the top of the building, the Governor’s quarters were located. Signs of the many internal changes throughout Kilmainham’s 128-year lifespan as a working jail can still be seen in the jail in the present day in the form of mysteriously blocked-off walls and filled-in windows.
In one of the ground-floor rooms, the uneven shadow of an internal doorway is still in evidence. The door linked two of the bigger rooms which were used in daytime by the unfortunate female debtors. (At the start of its career, Kilmainham was filled mostly with debtors, some of whom owed pitifully small sums of money.) This sizeable room also briefly served to shelter Robert Emmet, when he spent the last hours of his life here in 1803. He was brought to Kilmainham on 19 September, in readiness for his execution and shortly after making his famous speech from the dock: ‘When my country takes her place among the nations of the world …’. Emmet was brought to this room in order to allow a number of officials and clergymen to try to persuade him, before death, to admit that his actions were wrong. It was here too that Emmet’s Dublin Castle defence lawyer told him that his mother had died.
This room also served as the hangman’s working area: from here, he could look through a small hole in the room’s internal window to study the height and weight of the condemned prisoner, placed momentarily in a hallway outside. The hangman would then use his morbid calculation table to choose the length of rope necessary for a quick death. Here also, informers could take their time studying prisoners and identifying them, without any danger of being seen themselves.
Directly across the hall from this room is Kilmainham’s finest apartment, complete with large fireplace and gas lighting. In the early days of the jail, it was given to the Matron, and later it was occupied by Mr Charles Stewart Parnell, MP, who was permitted to furnish it with his own fittings. It was from here that Parnell issued the No Rents Manifesto; here also, he discussed the Kilmainham Treaty, which led to his release in May 1882.
The old sign is still in place over the narrow door leading to a grey and worn stone stairway: ‘To C of E & RC Chapels’. The Catholic Chapel is located on the first floor, its walls painted a rather dark yet welcoming red. The wooden altar stands in a small alcove, with prison-issue candles atop, waiting to be lit once more. This altar was built in September 1882 by James Lalor, a Belfast man sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude for receiving stolen goods. He was a carpenter, and it is rumoured that his skills were often in demand in the prisons around Dublin. This altar was used for the eleventh-hour wedding of Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett in May 1916; the wedding took place, by the light of a few candles, hours before Plunkett’s execution. The couple were not permitted to speak during the ceremony, except to exchange their wedding vows. Although Grace’s sister Nellie was a 1916 prisoner in Kilmainham at the time, she was not allowed to attend the wedding.
The Church of England, or Protestant, chapel is situated on the top floor of the middle section of Kilmainham Jail. A light shade of blue enhancing its walls, the Protestant chapel was witness to a christening when Young Ireland leader William Smith O’Brien was granted permission, before he was sent for trial in 1848, to have his infant son baptised in the jail. Years later, descendants of the infant son visited Kilmainham and, to the delight of their guide (the author), allowed her briefly to wear the child’s signet ring.
THE WEST WING
The prison wings flanking the administration area clearly represent both the old and the newer periods of the jail. The West Wing is the oldest section, dating from 1796. Designed by Sir John Traille, the cells are laid out in a square shape in long narrow corridors, numbering approximately seventy-nine. Originally there were fewer; extra cells had been added to the West Wing in the 1840s, and twelve more again in the 1860s. The old gas piping, also installed in the 1840s, still silently hangs in a battered and rusty condition above the original cell doors. When Kilmainham first opened, there was no glazing in either the cell or the corridor windows. The prison reformists sincerely believed that the cold wind whistling down the corridors and through the cells would clean the prisoners’ souls. Glass was finally installed in the cell windows in the 1840s. (In 1989, the OPW glazed the corridor windows to keep the structure safe – and the pigeons outside.) This old wing was home to the Sheares brothers, Henry and John, for a short time after the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798. In one of the ancient cells on the ground floor of the West Wing, John Sheares wrote a movingly eloquent letter of farewell to his sister Julia the night before his trial began.
On the West Wing’s second level of cells, Patrick Pearse wrote a similar letter to his mother and sisters after the Easter Rising of 1916, and Thomas J Clarke was allowed to say goodbye to his young wife Kathleen in his darkened cell. She was unable to bring herself to tell him that she was expecting their fourth child, which was subsequently stillborn.
The female Anti-Treaty prisoners of 1923 called the West Wing ‘B Wing’. This part of Kilmainham had been condemned a few years previously, during the War of Independence, by the British military authorities. The pro-Treaty Free State authorities initially attempted to house all female prisoners in A Wing, or the newer East Wing, but so many came to be interned in Kilmainham during the Civil War that it was necessary to open B Wing to contain everyone. Close to the large top-floor window, on those occasions when the sun shines brightly on the dark-grey walls, Angela Doyle’s name can be seen on the plasterwork where she scratched it in 1923. Two years later, at the age of eighteen, young Angela Doyle was dead. Her former prison comrades had no doubts in attributing her death to the conditions they had all endured in B Wing.
From 1845 to 1850, Kilmainham Jail and the West Wing contained the poorest of Ireland’s citizens. These years of the Great Famine saw the largest number of people ever held at one time in the prison. In 1847, the Vagrancy Act came into force, making it a crime for hungry people to be caught begging in the streets. Kilmainham was grossly overcrowded, with as many as five prisoners being crammed into cells that were originally meant to hold one. For 1850, the last official year of the Great Hunger, the Kilmainham Jail Registers record 9,052 prisoners living in a jail which contained fewer than two hundred cells.
THE EAST WING
Kilmainham’s East Wing is now a familiar sight to filmgoers around the world. Many films, including The Mackintosh Man, starring Paul Newman, In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, and Michael Collins, starring Liam Neeson, had scenes filmed in this part of Kilmainham. The East Wing replaced the original wing, which had stood on this site from 1796 to the end of the 1850s, and was a mirror image of the West Wing still standing today. The new East Wing was designed by John McGurdy, an architect whose previous works included the drainage system in Trinity College and an extension to the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin city centre. Opened officially in 1861, the East Wing reflected the continuous development of prison-reform ideals, and was built in a horseshoe shape to allow for the constant observation of prisoners. Based on leading prison reformer Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptican (Inspection House), or All Seeing Eye, all ninety-six cells are instantly visible from any one position in the huge indoor compound. (Silence, observation, separation and light were the main goals in the smooth running of Kilmainham Jail and the rehabilitation of prisoners.) A thin strip of carpet ran around the horseshoe shape, just outside each cell door, to enable the prison staff to approach the spy holes in the doors in complete silence and without warning to the prisoners. The East Wing roof has an enormous skylight, allowing the rays of the sun to pour down over the prisoners’ souls in a spiritually cleansing manner. Also, cell windows are situated rather high up the grim stone walls, forcing prisoners to look upwards towards the light.
Four short years after opening, Kilmainham became Ireland’s first political prison, when Fenian captives were transferred here after the daring escape of one of their leaders, James Stephens, from the Richmond Prison in Dublin. Many more Fenian prisoners were added in 1866 and 1867, around the time of the March Uprising. A great number of these men were fresh from the American Civil War – and came from both sides. How often was the Battle of Gettysburg fought and re-fought here, or the Battle of Chickamauga – with the men’s raised voices echoing loudly around the iron staircases and floating to the glass roof?
On a night in early May 1916, three-year-old Joseph Mallin sat on the bottom steps of the huge iron staircase in the East Wing, peering through the darkness at the glimmering lights emanating from the candles that had been placed throughout the area. He was too small to understand that his family had been brought to the prison to say goodbye to their father and husband, Michael Mallin, another of the 1916 leaders being prepared for execution in the Stonebreakers’ Yard.
In 1923, female Anti-Treaty prisoners staged plays in this central compound. The Free State authorities granted permission for Patrick Pearse’s play The Singer to be performed in A Wing on the seventh anniversary of the Easter Rising. Was it whilst watching this performance that young Fanny Kelly from Abbeyleix carved her name into a cell door on the ground floor? A second play, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, was staged the following August. The prisoners were well organised: May Gibney, in her beautiful script, wrote out the programme of events, which was distributed amongst the women. Seventy-six years later, this Civil War prisoner’s daughter, artist Sally Smyth, held an exhibition in the same East Wing area in honour of her mother, and commemorating all the prisoners who had been held in Kilmainham over the years. One of Smyth’s paintings, entitled Beyond Sedition, retells the story of the women burning their cell furniture in protest at a ruling by the Free State Military Governor, William Corri. May Gibney had not approved of this particular protest, and she stood with a few other women on the sidelines, watching as flames licked the precious wooden tables and chairs.
During the Civil War, the female and male prisoners in turn went on hunger strike in this wing, some suffering greatly. It was from here that Helena Mary Hoyne was carried out on a stretcher to the Mater Hospital in Dublin. Here Terence MacSwiney’s ghost is alleged to have visited his sister Mary to promise her she would be released from both the prison and her fasting. Here Donegal man Peadar O’Donnell wrote his will, on a single sheet of paper, in the event of him dying during the strike. Ernie O’Malley, who had been severely wounded during his arrest by the Free State authorities on Dublin’s Ailesbury Road, also took part in the hunger strike, despite his injuries. Two years earlier, O’Malley had made a spectacular escape from Kilmainham Jail with the help of two Welsh soldiers during the War of Independence.
Shortly after they had celebrated the ‘Seventh Year of the Republic’, the anti-Treaty women prisoners of A Wing experienced drama and horror on little Joseph Mallin’s iron stairs when, on the night of 30 April 1923, Free State soldiers and CID men entered the wing to remove some eighty of their number to the North Dublin Union internment camp. Discouraged from screaming, the women were permitted by their Officer in Command to hold tightly to the railings around the wing in an attempt to prevent them being removed by the soldiers and CID men. They were reluctant to desert two members still on hunger strike: Mary MacSwiney and Kate O’Callaghan. These women were also the reason that no screams were permitted: the noise would tear through their senses. Many later wrote letters and articles on this move, describing how they were kicked and shoved down the stairs. Some of them needed medical treatment after the event.
Despite the harsh and at times cruel horrors of prison life, the political prisoners were for the most part acutely aware of where they were. Dorothy Macardle, who had written an article entitled ‘Kilmainham Tortures’ about the 30 April move, also wrote a letter to a Republican newspaper, published on 12 May 1923, stating:
We were not altogether unfortunate to be in this prison on April 24. It was a good place and day to take again – some of us for the first time – the oath of allegiance to the Republic: it was good to be prisoners where the men of 1916 were prisoners and to know that it was because we had been faithful to their deed and would not waste their sacrifice that we were here.
In April 1966, President Éamon de Valera, a Kilmainham prisoner both after the Easter Rising and during the Civil War, officially opened the newly restored prison as a museum and National Monument in a ceremony held in the East Wing.
THE PRISONERS
During its 128-year existence as a prison, Kilmainham had far more civil prisoners than political ones. Roughly 85 percent of the inmates through the ages were unknown and, up until now, largely unrecalled. They were incarcerated for offences ranging from cattle stealing to being in debt; from attempted suicide to body snatching; and from assault and theft to rape and murder. Around 15 percent were political prisoners who had taken part in the major uprisings of 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916, and also in the War of Independence and the Civil War. These men and women believed in their country’s right to freedom to such an extent that they would suffer imprisonment and even execution for these beliefs, and it was to honour the memory of these political prisoners that Kilmainham Jail was restored in the early 1960s. Kilmainham also consistently reflected society throughout all the periods of its existence. It can be argued too that the thousands of prisoners incarcerated during the Famine years were the most subtly political of all Kilmainham’s residents, especially as the huge majority of them had few life choices.
Across 128 years, they all walked under the savage, stony eyes of Kilmainham’s five dragons: the political and the ordinary, the evil and the unfortunate, the greedy and the starving. Each one had his or her own unique story and reason for becoming a Kilmainham resident. Most craved anonymity and eventual release, or even transportation to a new world, and some craved remembrance. In their humiliation and shame, the ordinary prisoners never sought to be remembered, only to escape back to difficult and often mean lives.
But to the political prisoners, being remembered was the entire point of their incarceration. They wrote in diaries and autograph books, smuggled letters to the newspapers, and scratched their names and messages on the very walls of the prison itself. Their ghostly voices still echo to us through the ages – perhaps joined finally in the twenty-first century through our feelings of compassion and guilt to the names of the thousands of ordinary men, women and children who spent time in this ugly yet fascinating place of great suffering and fierce pride.
After the American Civil War (1861–65), Union Major General Joshua Laurence Chamberlain wrote: ‘In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass, bodies disappear; yet spirits linger.’ His words are particularly relevant to Kilmainham. Perhaps some of the American Civil War veterans recalled them while they were in prison here.
2
THE 1798 RISING
A determined spirit of liberty swept through the final decades of the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Ignited first in 1775 during the Revolutionary War for American Independence, it was endorsed fully during the French Revolution of 1789. Ireland was not left unaffected – this same spirit burned fiercely throughout the country, especially after the founding of the Society of United Irishmen at Cave Hill in Belfast, in 1791, by Theobald Wolfe Tone, Thomas Russell and Samuel Neilson.
The aim of the society was to achieve independence for Ireland by severing the connection with England, and to establish an Irish republic enjoying the sacred principles set out in the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity for all Irish citizens, of all or no religions. Protestant, Catholic or Dissenter, in the words of Wolfe Tone, were called upon to join together in the attaining of these worthy goals, with mutual respect and concern for one another. The United Irishmen felt a growing need to change the fundamental outlook of the sectarian and greatly unequal society in which they lived. An Irish parliament of sorts did exist, but found it difficult to pass laws without approval from Britain. Initially the United Irishmen had been more concerned with reforming the political situation, but they were gradually coming to believe that the only manner in which they could achieve their goal was by using physical force. They had their own newspaper, the Northern Star, which was edited and owned by Samuel Neilson.
The British were growing increasingly worried by the activities of the United Irishmen, and the society was outlawed in 1794. To counter this move, Samuel Neilson simply reconstituted the Society of United Irishmen in 1795, retaining its name, making it secret and oath-bound, and pledging it anew to the establishment of an Irish Republic, by force if necessary.
Meanwhile, Wolfe Tone had travelled to France to discuss possible military aid. In December 1796, General Hoche sailed for Ireland, attended by Tone, in an expedition comprising forty-three ships. Severe weather and high winds were responsible for the scattering of the fleet, with only very few troops being able to land in County Cork. They did not engage in any military activity whatsoever, not least because General Hoche himself had been on board one of the ships that had been unable to secure a safe landing. Morale was high on the Irish side, however, as the French had proved themselves willing to assist.
Early in 1797, martial law was established in some parts of the country, and many people suspected of involvement with the United Irishmen were taken prisoner. Spies and informers were used to infiltrate the society, and one of these, Thomas Reynolds, proved to be of tremendous value to Dublin Castle, seat of British rule in Ireland. Following information obtained by Reynolds (himself a member of the United Irishmen) on 12 March 1798, a raid was led on the house of Oliver Bond, a Dublin wool merchant, where many leaders of the United Irishmen were present at a meeting. Among the valued leaders of the central committee taken into custody on that occasion were Oliver Bond himself; barrister Thomas Addis Emmet; Dr William J. MacNeven; and John Sweetman. They were taken to Kilmainham Jail, recently opened in August 1796. On 30 March, the country was declared to be in a state of rebellion.
A further blow was dealt to the United Irishmen with the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, on 19 May 1798, in Thomas Street, Dublin. A fierce struggle took place during his arrest, resulting in the death of one of his captors. He himself was fatally injured, and died of his wounds on 4 June in Newgate Prison, Dublin.
Lord Edward’s death was a huge loss to the United Irishmen: he was generally acknowledged to be the man with the best military knowledge and experience amongst them. A former member of the 19th Regiment of Foot, he had fought with the British against American troops in the Revolutionary War.
Cork-born brothers John and Henry Sheares, both members of the Irish Bar and sympathisers with the leaders of the French Revolution, had visited Paris in 1792. On returning to Ireland, they joined the United Irishmen. After the capture of the leaders at the March 1798 meeting and Lord Edward on 19 May 1798, John Sheares became the chief organiser of the Rising of the United Irishmen, which had already been planned for 23 May 1798.
On 21 May, forty-eight hours before the day set for the uprising, John and Henry Sheares were also arrested on foot of information given to Dublin Castle by British army officer Captain Armstrong, who had befriended and then betrayed the brothers. Their house in Baggot Street was raided, and papers, including a proclamation to the Irish people drafted by John Sheares, were found. Henry, who was ignorant of the existence of this document, was arrested at the house. John was captured later in the day and both were brought to Dublin Castle. They were charged with high treason and taken to Kilmainham Jail, where they were lodged in separate ‘apartments’.
With the added arrest of the Sheares brothers, there were virtually no leaders left to take command of the rank and file of the United Irishmen. Despite this, the planned uprising did take place, starting on 23 May. Confusion reigned supreme, with poor coordination and, in some locations, poor discipline. In possession of very few guns, the rebels were armed mostly with pikes and pitchforks. The rebellion broke up into several local risings in Carlow, Kildare, Meath, Wicklow and Dublin in the central part of the country, in Antrim and Down in the north, and in County Wexford in the south. Atrocities were committed on both sides.
The rebels did experience some minor victories, but were unable to maintain these. At one stage, most of County Wexford was in rebel hands, and the rebels gathered at Vinegar Hill, outside the town of Enniscorthy. They were attacked and defeated by General Lake with cannons and fourteen thousand trained soldiers on 21 June 1798. The rebels executed a good fighting retreat.
Henry Joy McCracken, recently released from Kilmainham Jail, where he had been imprisoned for his membership of the banned United Irishmen, led his insurgent forces in the fighting in Antrim. He too was defeated, but managed to evade arrest. However, he was captured just before an attempt to flee to America and was subsequently hanged in Belfast on 17 July 1798.
In a final engagement of the 1798 Rising, another small French force under General Humbert set sail for Ireland, in early August 1798. They landed in Killala Bay, County Mayo, on 22 August, and were joined by many local Irishmen. This combined force of French soldiers and Irish peasants defeated General Lake at Castlebar. The victory was short-lived. The British under Cornwallis (who had surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in October 1781) defeated General Humbert at Ballinamuck, County Longford, in September. The French were made prisoners of war, and large numbers of Irish rebels were killed.
James Napper Tandy, a Dublin leader of the United Irishmen, and holding the rank of general in the French army, was also part of that French expedition. He had come ashore in County Donegal, but when news of Ballinamuck reached him, he realised that there was no point in continuing, and departed. He went to the German city of Hamburg, where he was betrayed and handed over to the British, who had him returned as a prisoner. He was incarcerated in various prisons, amongst them Kilmainham Jail.
Theobald Wolfe Tone was with the third section of the French expedition, and was taken prisoner in Lough Swilly, Donegal, in September. Conveyed to Dublin, but never held in Kilmainham Jail, Tone was tried and sentenced to death in November 1798. He cut his throat while in custody to deprive the English of his execution.
As a direct result of the Rising of 1798, the Act of Union was passed in 1800, uniting Ireland with Britain, thus depriving the country of any right to nationality. No parliament was to sit again in Ireland until 1919, when Dáil Éireann was assembled in the Mansion House in Dublin.
UNITED IRISH PRISONERS IN KILMAINHAM
Even before the prisoners of the actual Rising of 1798 began to fill Kilmainham, the jail was being used to house members of the United Irishmen. The first leading historic figure to be held in the jail was Samuel Neilson, editor and printer of the Northern Star newspaper, and a founder member of the outlawed United Irishmen. He was imprisoned in September 1796, one month after Kilmainham was officially opened, and held for at least some period of his incarceration in solitary confinement. A father of five young children, Samuel Neilson’s health deteriorated badly during his time in Kilmainham. He was joined in the jail in October 1796, one month after his own arrival, by Henry Joy McCracken, a Belfast man charged with being a member of a proscribed society.
There is a certain amount of confusion regarding the conditions that were endured in Kilmainham by the United Irishmen. There is good evidence to demonstrate that, especially at the beginning of its existence, ‘New Kilmainham’ was benevolently looked upon as a ‘gentleman’s prison’, with the best rooms or ‘apartments’ given to the state, or political, prisoners. State prisoners also received a generous allowance from the authorities, and were held separately from ordinary Kilmainham felons. Tablecloths were given to them for use during their meals, and food and drink was of a high quality. The state prisoners were permitted to receive visitors almost without restriction; indeed, it is known that Lord Edward Fitzgerald, fatally wounded during his arrest in May 1798, had visited members of the United Irishmen in Kilmainham in order to consult with them. According to legend, while Fitzgerald was on a visit to the jail, the Inspector General of Prisons also arrived there, and visitors were unable to leave without being identified. Lord Edward simply took his place in one of the cells, and left when it was safe to do so!
Samuel Neilson’s wife visited him in jail, and the wife of William McCracken, brother to Henry Joy, came to live in the prison with her husband, who later joined the United Irishmen in Kilmainham.
