Day Seventy-Three - 22/11/2012 - Cork

     Alex's friend Saachi, had come to visit Ireland for a few days.  Alex, always the gentleman, invited us along to a night tour of the Cork City Gaol, in fact the last one of the year.  So, we met at the Gaol, Meng and I having crossed the Shakey Bridge after our computer science class.  We arrived in the dark courtyard in rain, seemingly appropriate for the occasion.  The tour began with a overview of the Gaol's history, and its place in Cork's development.  It served as a Victorian jail in the 1800s, around the same time the Queen became known as the "Famine Queen".  In 1849, many Young Irelanders, members of the middle class cultural rebellion against the British, were imprisoned in Cork city Gaol.
     The tour started in the governor's room, the administrative head of the prison.  This was run by Barry Murphy, of Murphy family fame, after the famine.  This was significant in that Murphy was a Catholic, in a time when Catholics were not given respectable jobs or positions of power.  His service as governor is a reflection of the status that the Murphy family enjoyed in Cork.
     As we walked through the halls of the Gaol, the tour guide mentioned stories of inmates as young as 7 years old.  One Mary McDonald, aged 23 with 7 children, was imprisoned for prostitution which she took up to feed her children.  Many prisoners at the time came from the workhouses, the public relief programs funded by the government, that often offered worse conditions and less food than the prisons, leading to much intentional crime with the goal of being imprisoned.  It got to be such a popular option that the goal, like others across Ireland, had 7 to 8 people crammed into tiny cells.
     We came to the main elliptical room of the prison, with a metal staircase in the centre providing access to three tiers of cells.  The acoustics in this chamber are particularly good, with an original purpose of causing sounds, especially speech, to be heard from any part of the room.  (Today it is used to host concerts.)  Legal and psychological opinion of the time was that any amount of talking or interaction was detrimental to the reformation of the prisoner.  Guards used the acoustics to their advantage, pinpointing the source of the sound and reprimanding the prisoner's responsible.  The guards even took to tying pieces of felt to the bottoms of their shoes to mute their footsteps, allowing them to sneak up on prisoners.
     We walked up the central staircase to the second level, our footsteps clanging and echoing through the halls.  There was a long narrow hallway that had fallen pitch-black from the night.  At the end of the hallway a ghostly figured presented itself.  The guide had just finished telling the story of the spectre, ruined to be a nameless prisoner.  Helen Barrett, a ghost-hunter from Cobh, apparently came to investigate the phenomenon.  Although she was unable to contact the ghost, she could not deny its presence.  The current iteration of the phantom is admittedly a fraud, set up by a system of mirrors and smoke, but as recently as last year, some night guards reported hearing footsteps in the abandoned hallways.
     The tour continued to a large circular room outside of the main gaol complex, which served as a chapel in times gone by.  The tour now puts on a multimedia presentation in the room, with multiple projectors and a movie playing.  The movie tells the story of some of the notable prisoners, and their crimes.  Much of the history is related by a judge, who explains one of the oddities of British trials.  If a judge appears before a hearing with a piece of black silk in his wig, that means the judge has decided to institute the death penalty for the defendant, usually leading to some shock when the judge appears from his chambers.  The presentation also explained how the goal used to be a county jail located on what is now UCC campus.  In fact, the old UCC gates, the ones I walked through three times a week to go to class, were the original county jail gates.  This put something of a perspective on my morning walk.
     All in all the tour was very interesting, walking through the history of Cork City and its inhabitants.  It brought to life much of what we had learned in class.