Dublin - Life must be pretty hellish when just about your only chance of survival is being thrown into your country’s most notorious prison.
Of course, life was pretty grim in Ireland between 1845 and 1852 when successive blights destroyed potato harvests – Ireland’s chief food crop – leading to about one million people dying of starvation and disease. A million more emigrated, with the result the Irish population was reduced by a quarter.
As is the case with agronomic catastrophe, the rural poor bore the brunt and fled in their thousands to the cities, most notably Dublin. With few marketable urban skills, many resorted to petty theft – mainly stealing food – to survive.
It wasn’t long before Kilmainham Gaol, built to house a thousand, was crammed with more than 9 000. While some inmates awaited death by hanging or deportation – about 4 000 were sent to penal colonies in Australia over the years – the vast majority were debtors and petty criminals. Many petty criminals became repeat offenders: prison fare might have been lousy, but it was regular and it beat dying of starvation.
Many inmates were women and children.
Kilmainham (www.heritageireland.ie/en/kilmainhamgaol), built at the end of the 18th century outside Dublin proper at a place called Gallows Hill, features prominently in Irish republican history. Almost all the leading figures who have sought independence from England were incarcerated there, from the uprising in 1798 until after the civil war of 1919-1924.
Its notoriety and place in republican lore, however, stem mainly from the deaths of 14 men who were executed by firing squad in the stonebreakers’ yard following the Easter Uprising of 1916. I have a vested interest in this story – one of the men shot dead was reputedly a member of my family.
Seven of the men – Padraig Pearse, who was the commander in chief of the rebel army, Sean MacDermott, Tom MacDonagh, Eamon Kent, Joe Plunkett, Tom Clarke and my purported ancestor, James Connolly – were the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
The proclamation was read by Pearse on April 24, 1916, Easter Monday, after groups of the Irish Volunteers – the armed wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, later the Irish Republican Army or IRA – and the Irish Citizen Army seized the General Post Office and other buildings in Dublin.
Apart from being seriously disorganised and overoptimistic about their popular support, the rebels badly miscalculated the British reaction. The General Post Office is in what is now O’Connell Street, a densely populated residential area. Pearse’s men naively believed the British army would be measured in its response to limit civilian casualties.
They were wrong. The British peppered the centre of the city with artillery fire. The rebels were driven out of the post office building by a fire that was burning out of control rather than being defeated by overwhelming force.
According to author and former Provisional IRA member Sean O’Callaghan: “At least 450 people were killed and 2 500 injured during the rising… 116 of the dead were soldiers, 22 of them Irish, plus 16 armed and unarmed policemen, all Irish.
“Sixty-four Volunteers, out of a total of just over 1 500 who played some role in the rising, were killed. The results are clear: 205 combatants died, alongside 245 wholly innocent civilians. The dead were mostly Irish, mostly civilians, mostly Dublin’s poor, killed for a cause they hardly understood or supported.”
Still, the Volunteers held out for almost a week before surrendering.
Kilmainham Gaol was reopened to house the hundreds of men and women arrested for their part in the uprising.
All but one of the “ringleaders” were held in the pokey gas-lit cells that make up the oldest part of the prison. Not for them the open, airy and well-lit east wing of 96 cells, opened in 1862 and designed in line with the Victorian belief that prison architecture was crucial to the reform of inmates. The leaders of the insurrection were isolated from the rest of the prison population.
One of those leaders was Joseph Mary Plunkett (how’s that name for an arch-Catholic family hedging its bets in the days before ultrasound?), a 29-year-old poet and one of the original members of the Brotherhood’s military council, who left a hospital bed to take his place at the General Post Office.
After being sentenced to death by court martial – they all were – Plunkett was given the traditional condemned man’s last wish. He said he wanted to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Gifford.
The two were married in the prison chapel on the night of May 3. Their married life comprised a 15-minute meeting, supervised by a prison warden, in Plunkett’s cell. Gifford, who did not remarry before her death in 1955, later said they had everything to say to one another, but did not utter a word.
As she walked away from the prison, she heard the volley of shots that killed her husband.
The last rebel to die was Connolly. He was the only one not held at Kilmainham, simply because he had been severely wounded at the post office and his wounds had turned gangrenous. He was taken under guard in a military ambulance to Kilmainham and admitted on a stretcher to the stonebreakers’ yard through an outside gate on a stretcher. Connolly was tied to a chair on the opposite side of the yard to which Pearse and the other dozen were shot, and faced the firing squad.
A popular ballad that bears his name says Connolly “fell into a ready-made grave”. This is outrageous poetic licence: the seven proclamation signatories and Pearse’s brother William, Michael O’Hanrahan, Michael Mallin, John MacBride, Sean Heuston, Edward Daly and Con Colbert lie in a communal grave at Arbour Hill a few kilometres from Kilmainham.
At the time, Arbour Hill cemetery lay within the walls of the Dublin military barracks and it was into an unmarked hole, away from the gaze of Irishmen and women – that the corpses were thrown so as not to create a shrine for those who shared their seditious views of independence.
l Numerous events are being organised in Dublin to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Ireland’s national tourism development authority tells more at www.failteireland.ie. For those intending to visit the Irish capital, go to www.visitdublin.com
Jim Freeman, Saturday Star