Every Dark Hour

A History of Kilmainham Jail

Niamh O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Liberties Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781909718074
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

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.

PART I

POLITICAL PRISONERS AT 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 t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: Political Prisoners at Kilmainham Jail
• Part II: Civil Prisoners and Other Voices
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Plates
• Copyright
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