“Cork’s Kilmainham” is how teacher, history podcaster and former Sinn Féin councillor in Cork city, Eolan Ryng describes Cork’s Military Detention Barracks (also known as the old Cork prison).
Ryng is campaigning against Department of Justice plans to demolish the Rathmore Road building. There are plans to construct an expanded prison facility opposite the current Cork Prison, on the site of the barracks which opened in 1806 and became a civilian prison in 1972.
But Ryng believes that the Cork Military Detention Barracks should be preserved and developed as an historical resource like Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. “It’s a 1916 site because Thomas Kent was executed there,” he says.
Kent was one of just two Rising participants to be executed outside of Dublin - Roger Casement was executed in London. Kent’s remains were exhumed in June 2015 and reburied in his family plot in Castlelyons, Co Cork. He was given a state funeral at which Enda Kenny delivered the graveside oration. There were 13 other executions in the exercise yard of the barracks during the War of Independence. They are commemorated in a mass grave on the University College Cork campus.
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What Ryng believes is not in the public domain is the link between the Cork Military Detention Barracks and the Catalpa escape from Fremantle Prison in Australia. At least three Fenian prisoners were held in the Australian prison in the 19th century. One of them was Thomas Darragh. He had been sentenced to execution in the Cork Military Detention Barracks in 1866 for his involvement in the Fenian Brotherhood. Ryng believes he was the first person to be sentenced to execution there. But his death sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life and in 1867, he was transported aboard the Hougoumont, the last convict ship sent from Britain and Ireland to Australia. He was imprisoned at Fremantle with other prisoners, convicted of Fenian activity.
Irish-American supporters raised money, purchased the whaling ship, Catalpa, and sent it to Western Australia on an audacious rescue mission.
In 1876, Darragh and five other prisoners escaped from Fremantle Prison, travelled by carriage to the coast and were brought to the waiting ship. Pursued by colonial forces, they reached the Catalpa. Eventually, they arrived in the US where they were met with a triumphant reception. Darragh’s journey to freedom started with his incarceration in the Cork barracks.
[ Camera Obscura: An exhibition of ‘secret’ photography at Kilmainham GaolOpens in new window ]
Ryng visited Fremantle Prison in 2010 where he saw a presentation on the Catalpa escape. It is, he says, a massive selling point for tourists interested in history. Crucially, the escaped Fenians were sailing in a ship that had the American flag hoisted. The minute they reached the Catalpa, from a rowing boat, they were saved because it was an American ship.
Another historical link to the Cork Military Detention Barracks is Cork’s Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney’s martyrdom. Arrested at City Hall on August 12th, 1920, he began his hunger strike at the barracks. And when he died 74 days later in Brixton Prison, he was still wearing the Cork chain of office. MacSwiney had refused to divest himself of the chain, despite being ordered to by sergeant major Bailey at the Cork Barracks.
The Cork Military Detention Barracks was to become a site of mass execution when Maria Lindsay of Leemount House, having learned of the plan to ambush a British military convoy at Dripsey on January 28th, 1921, carried a warning to the British military at Ballincollig. Troops surrounded the IRA position before the ambush could begin, leaving several Volunteers wounded and captured. They were tried by military court inside the Cork Military Detention Barracks. Five men were condemned to death. In an attempt to save them, the IRA seized Lindsay and her driver. She was forced to write to general Peter Strickland at Victoria Barracks stating that she and the driver would be killed if the condemned men were executed. The British authorities refused to grant reprieves. Lindsay and her driver, James Clarke were subsequently killed by the IRA.
In July, Cork City Council passed a motion to oppose the development of the Cork Military Detention Barracks. It received cross party support. Ryng says preserving the site is not about party politics. It’s about valuing a historical resource.
“Generations of pupils in Dublin and surrounding areas engage with real life history at Kilmainham every year. And it ranks at number one every year with foreign visitors.”
Some of the film Maze, which dramatised the 1983 escape of IRA prisoners from the Maze prison in Northern Ireland, was shot at the Cork Military Detention Barracks. It had been decommissioned shortly before filming in 2016. And the Enda Walsh play, a psychodrama called The Same was staged at the barracks by Corcadorca, Cork’s former theatre company that specialised in site-specific productions. I remember that production as being something of a head wreck. The prison setting was appropriate for the main character in the play who, stripped of self, suggested a feeling of entrapment. Sometimes, former prisons can have a very interesting second life.
