| Grief tourism kilmanhaim gaol |
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| Written by i j |
| Thursday, 02 December 2010 18:17 |
Two days ago I published Gothic Dublin article, and I said that I was going to make a full article for both Glassnevin cemetery and Kilmainham Gaol (for being my favorite places) well, here is the first of those articles, today we talk about…
Kilmainham Gaol is an old jail that nowadays is used as a museum, it’s located in Inchicore (outsides of Dublin, Ireland). This Jail has played an important role in the history of Ireland, in deed it’s the largest out of bushiness jail of the world, it has been used as a civil jail, a political jail and even a military one and it has kept inside from the worst of the criminals to most of the people responsible of the Irish revolts against England empire. It also imprisoned men or women alike and even old people and child at same time. This jail was designed under the philosophy of that every society must have a dose of pleasure and pain, it says something like that every society that only haves pleasure tends to decay and every society that only endures pain inevitability tends to a civil revolt. It also sustains that every sin must have it’s penitence to maintain the control over the population, you can read more about this philosophy in the museum and you can see art pieces like this…
The jail has 2 wings, the east one is the most modern area and also the most famous because there has been filmed titles like “In the name of the father” and “Italian job”.
As you can see in that image, that wing is formed by a very big room with a window in the ceiling and it has a lot of doors surrounding the room that provide access to the small individual cells.
The design of this rooms favors the acoustic of this place, that was an advantage for the guards because talking was completely forbidden for the prisoners, the room allowed them to listen even the more tenuous sounds.
You can also see that there were 2 stairs one was straight while the other was a spiral one, the reason for that is that you needed a key for reaching the straight one of course only guards had a key so that allowed the guards to move quickly reaching any floor way before the prisoners could form big groups or help each other effectively.
Those rooms were used only by men, while his life weren’t specially great the situation of women and child were quite worse, women had to keep the prison clean and they had to make food for all the prison and clean all the clothes of everyone, while it was not a nice job, at least they had something to entertain themselves…
The problem is that that job was done in the basement and there weren’t any kind of artificial light down there, there were some holes in the ceiling that allowed some short of sun light to get there… not many because the holes weren’t bigger than a sewer hole.
One of those holes was used to communicate the kitchen with the men jails (using a rope and a pole) and was used both for food and for moving clean or dirty clothes around.
All this area is a really cold place and although during this times the prisoners had some privileges… like closed windows… it’s not exactly the perfect location for having a weekend… talking a bit about everything… ¿would you like to expend a weekend in a jail? I know of a hotel in which when you enter you leave all your possession in a locket and then they kept you in a jail for as many days as you paid for… ill write about that some day…
Anyway, back to Kilmainham… if you liked the modern wing… wait to see what’s behind the old one…
The west wind is completely made of cold stone, the internal distribution is made with narrow corridors surrounded by doors that give access to the cells.
All cells are designed to keep only one prisoner inside and they have a really thick door with a strong padlock and a small hole that guards could use to watch the prisoners when they wanted.
When this area was made it lacked from any heating system and they didn’t added glasses to the windows… that could be much better be called hole sin the walls adorned with iron bars, in those times it was believed that cold banishes diseases and so it was believed to be a good think to keep the prisoners healthy… I bet that several prisoners disagree with that…
As if that wasn’t enough, while the jail itself was designed to contain 200 people in deed it was strange that there were so few people in there, the record of keeping people inside was reached with 9000 people…. That’s 45 people in a cell designed for a single inhabitant, we can assume that cold wasn’t a problem then…
And with that we reach the jail courtyard , it have some tall walls and a small place in which the guards shot down the prisoners condemned to death.
And they took the job quite seriously… it happened once that one of the leaders in a revolt against the English was condemned to death, the problem is that the English catched him during a fight and the poor guy received a very bad wound in the leg that got complicated and that would have killed him in days anyway.
But English wanted him to be shot down.
So they bring the revolt leader in ambulance to the jail, tied his hands to the back, blindfolded him and tried to make him standing in front of the shot crew… it was not possible for him to stay standing because he was almost death so they shitted him in a chair and shot him down with a full shot crew formed by 14 people firing real bullets… you know… for being sure…
How to get there:
You can find Kilmainham Gaol in the “not so outsides” of Dublin, for getting there the best you can do is to get 69th bus (from Dublin centre) and ask the driver which stop to get down, there are several other bus numbers that goes pretty close to the jail and you can get them too although you’ll have to walk a little more.
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 02 December 2010 18:35 |
