Bookshelf by David Burke

Tough tales from Kilmainham's 40 shades of grey

  EVERY DARK HOUR By Niamh O'Sullivan LIBERTIES PRESS €14.99   HAVE YOU ever been in prison? Or have you ever been in a prison? I might just qualify under both headings. I have visited three historic prisons, one active one, and spent a night in a cell. For the sake of my future travel prospects, I hasten to add that the night in a cell was courtesy of the police in Amstelveen, a suburb of Amsterdam, which was extended to two tired young Irish hitchhikers, one of whom was me, in the summer of 1970. That brief experience was a pleasant one â€â€ an unlocked cell, a convenient toilet across the corridor, and a soft foam mattress was preferable to the bus shelter which was our dormitory a few nights previously. But jails are not pleasant places. Of the three I have seen, Cork, Crumlin Road in Belfast, and Kilmainham, the latter is by far the worst. Reading Niamh O'Sullivan's book, subtitled 'A history of Kilmainham Jail', it's not hard to see why. Were it not for the connection with the 1916 leaders who were executed by firing squad in the Stonebreakers' Yard it is almost certain that the jail would have been demolished long ago, its site now the location for a children's playground. Her preface begins 'I have worked in one of the ugliest buildings in Dublin for the past twenty-four years,' and she goes on to describe the jail as having 'forty shades of grey'. She adds:â€Ë†'It is the coldest, greyest place conceivable: harsh, inhospitable and so strong that it has survived for almost two centuries.' Despite her antipathy, the jail has exerted a magnetic pull on O'Sullivan, who was the archivist there. It confined many of the major figures of Irish history from 1798 to 1923, and the names ring through the ages: Henry Joy McCracken, Napper Tandy, Robert Emmet, Anne Devlin, William Smith O'Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Charles Kickham, Charles Stewart Parnell, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, and the other 1916 leaders, Eamonn de Valera, Michael Collins ... With such a roll-call it's not hard to see how the book is a compendium of the history of the last 200 years. The jail was opened officially in 1796, and as all such buildings are, it was pronounced a great improvement on the old jail which preceded it. This was not least because it was built on a rise, in contrast with the old one, which because it was in a hollow, had continuous drainage problems. The new jail was a massive construction, with outer walls 30 to 50 feet high and more than five thick at the base. There were only three gates, and over the main gate were carved five dragons, each representing one of the five major crimes â€â€ murder, rape, theft, treason and piracy. These can still be seen, snarling in chains, and above them are two holes, now blocked up with stone, which housed the supports for the gallows. Up to 1868 executions were carried out in public, and thousands gathered at the main gates of prisons all over Ireland and the rest of the then UK to see the barbaric sentences being carried out. The jail was, despite the political connections that have ensured its preservation, first and foremost a civilian prison. From the time it was first opened in August 1796, to its first closure in 1910, it housed more than 100,000 men, women and children who were convicted of crimes that varied from stealing flowers from a garden (Rose Tyer, aged 70, four weeks) to burglary (John Motley, aged 26, hanged over the gate in 1811) to murder (Patrick Reilly, aged 55, 1893, hanged inside the jail). Even if you were not condemned to death, conditions in the jail were sufficient to cause severe damage to your health. Anne Devlin, faithful servant of Robert Emmet, suffered from the skin condition erysipalas for the rest of her life after being confined there. Which brings us back to the political prisoners. Many of them left their phyical mark on the jail, and these are detailed in a companion book, Written in Stone, by the same author, whose self-explanatory subtitled is 'The graffiti in Kilmainham Jail.' Most of the surviving graffiti dates from the War of Independence and Civil War period, but the earliest is an unfinished stone inscription from 1798. Then there is the scrawl left by one Diarmuid O'Sullivan, aged 17 in 1921, who was charged with high treason and sentenced to death for having a revolver and ammunition. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of his age: four of his comrades were hanged. Many of the graffiti are by women, imprisoned during the Civil War. Jake (Kate)â€Ë†Folan of Sea Road, Galway aged 15, was arrested instead of her sister. The shame is that many of these graffiti, written in pencil on crumbling paint and plaster, are fading. More work needs to be done to preserve them for future generations.