Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921

by William Murphy

Author	: William Murphy
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Total Pages	: 372
Release	: 2016-04-14
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0191087475

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For a revolutionary generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen - including suffragettes, labour activists, and nationalists - imprisonment became a common experience. In the years 1912-1921, thousands were arrested and held in civil prisons or in internment camps in Ireland and Britain. The state's intent was to repress dissent, but instead, the prisons and camps became a focus of radical challenge to the legitimacy and durability of the status quo. Some of these prisons and prisoners are famous: Terence MacSwiney and Thomas Ashe occupy a central position in the prison martyrology of Irish republican culture, and Kilmainham Gaol has become one of the most popular tourist sites in Dublin. In spite of this, a comprehensive history of political imprisonment focused on these years does not exist. In Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921, William Murphy attempts to provide such a history. He seeks to detail what it was like to be a political prisoner; how it smelled, tasted, and felt. More than that, the volume demonstrates that understanding political imprisonment of this period is one of the keys to understanding the Irish revolution. Murphy argues that the politics of imprisonment and the prison conflicts analysed here reflected and affected the rhythms of the revolution, and this volume not only reconstructs and assesses the various experiences and actions of the prisoners, but those of their families, communities, and political movements, as well as the attitudes and reactions of the state and those charged with managing the prisoners.

Justice, Mercy, and Caprice

by Ian O'Donnell

Author	: Ian O'Donnell
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Total Pages	: 266
Release	: 2017-11-02
Genre	: Law
ISBN	: 0192519441

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Justice, Mercy, and Caprice is a work of criminal justice history that speaks to the gradual emergence of a more humane Irish state. It is a close examination of the decision to grant clemency to men and women sentenced to death between the end of the civil war in 1923 and the abolition of capital punishment in 1990. Frequently, the decision to deflect the law from its course was an attempt to introduce a measure of justice to a system where the mandatory death sentence for murder caused predictable unfairness and undue harshness. In some instances the decision to spare a life sprang from merciful motivations. In others it was capricious, depending on factors that should have had no place in the government's decision-making calculus. The custodial careers of those whose lives were spared repay scrutiny. Women tended to serve relatively short periods in prison but were often transferred to a religious institution where their confinement continued, occasionally for life. Men, by contrast, served longer in prison but were discharged directly to the community. Political offenders were either executed hastily or, when the threat of capital punishment had passed, incarcerated for extravagant periods. This book addresses issues that are of continuing relevance for countries that employ capital punishment. It will appeal to scholars with an interest in criminal justice history, executive discretion, and death penalty studies, as well as being a useful resource for students of penology.

Cork's Revolutionary Dead

by Barry Keane

Author	: Barry Keane
Publisher	: Mercier Press Ltd
Total Pages	: 512
Release	: 2017-06-12
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1781174962

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In Part 1 Keane gives a brief introduction to the period and outlines the most important events that took place during the course of the fight against the British in Cork from 1916 to 1921 and during the Civil War of 1922–23. This includes the burning of Cork city, the ambush at Kilmichael (which is examined in great detail), Crossbarry and the story of Tom Barry's trench coat. In Part 2 Keane uses a wealth of new sources to reconstruct every death that can be ascribed to the war, including those caught in the crossfire and some accidental deaths that can be directly linked to one side or the other. Some individuals who did not die in the county, but who were central to the conduct of the war there, are also included. One such example is Terence MacSwiney, who died in Brixton prison in London in October 1920, but was both head of the IRA in Cork and lord mayor of the city, having assumed the role after his predecessor, Tomás MacCurtain, had been assassinated earlier that year.

Utter Disloyalist

by Donal Ó Drisceoil

Author	: Donal Ó Drisceoil
Publisher	: Mercier Press Ltd
Total Pages	: 255
Release	: 2021-10-29
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1781178003

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Tadhg Barry was the last high-profile victim of the crown forces during the Irish War of Independence. A veteran republican, trade unionist, journalist, poet, GAA official and alderman on Cork Corporation, he was shot dead in Ballykinlar internment camp on 15 November 1921. Barry's tragic death was a huge, but subsequently largely forgotten, event in Ireland. Dublin came to a standstill as a quarter of a million people lined the streets and the IRA had its last full mobilisation before the Treaty split. The funeral in Cork echoed those of Barry's comrades, the martyred lord mayors Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed three weeks later, all internees were released and the movement that elevated him to hero/martyr status was ripped asunder in the ensuing civil war. The name of Tadhg Barry became lost in the smoke. This is the first biography of a fascinating activist described by his British enemies as an 'Utter disloyalist' and by a comrade as 'a characteristic product of Rebel Cork – courageous, kindly, generous to a fault, bold and daring, and independent in speech and action'. It offers fascinating new perspectives on the dynamics of Ireland's long revolution, including glimpses of the roads not taken.

Republican Internment and the Prison Ship Argenta 1922

by Denise Kleinrichert

Author	: Denise Kleinrichert
Publisher	:
Total Pages	: 0
Release	: 2004-10
Genre	: Ireland
ISBN	: 9780716527305

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Argenta Legacies encapsulates the essence of internment in daily lives beginning in May 1922. Deluged under the British partition and formation of the Northern Government, nationalists were overwhelmingly affected. In an attempt to subvert the nationalist economic position, the Minister of Home Affairs, Dawson Bates, imposed martial law tactics to rend supremacy over both a rural and urban populous through violence, intimidation and economic sanctions. The saga has never been told in its entirety. Mere paragraphs and footnotes have decided the fate of the men and women as that deserving of 'Sinn Feiners'. 300 men were arrested within a 24-hour period beginning near midnight on 22 May 1922, almost all nationalist and pro-Treaty but with professional and economic status within their respective communities. Over 900 men and women in the North were eventually ordered lifted by James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act between the years 1922 and 1925. The analysis of the detention without legal recourse has spanned over three years of research of public and private archives. Interviews with former internees and countless descendants of internees provide an interesting exposÃ?Â?Ã?Â(c). The words, writings and drawings of innumerable men interned aboard the prison ship, S.S. Argenta, together with those at Larne Workhouse Camp unfold the miseries of a two-year ordeal. The lives of the internees were impacted beyond their captivity. Malnourishment, disease and death, physical abuse, public abandonment, hunger strike, prayer and escape bids served to foment the direction of their lives. This chronicle is an important historical reflection for nationalists, republicans and the politically astute in both Ireland and the United States. Scores of internees emigrated. Tragedy and human rights issues remain. Tremendous visual images relay the story.

Disorder Contained

by Catherine Cox

Author	: Catherine Cox
Publisher	: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages	: 317
Release	: 2022-03-10
Genre	: Medical
ISBN	: 1009002198

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Disorder Contained is the first historical account of the complex relationship between prison discipline and mental breakdown in England and Ireland. Between 1840 and 1900 the expansion of the modern prison system coincided with increased rates of mental disorder among prisoners, exacerbated by the introduction of regimes of isolation, deprivation and hard labour. Drawing on a range of archival and printed sources, the authors explore the links between different prison regimes and mental distress, examining the challenges faced by prison medical officers dealing with mental disorder within a system that stressed discipline and punishment and prisoners' own experiences of mental illness. The book investigates medical officers' approaches to the identification, definition, management and categorisation of mental disorder in prisons, and varied, often gendered, responses to mental breakdown among inmates. The authors also reflect on the persistence of systems of punishment that often aggravate rather than alleviate mental illness in the criminal justice system up to the current day. This title is also available as Open Access.

The Battle of Clonmult

by Tom O'Neill MA

Author	: Tom O'Neill MA
Publisher	: The History Press
Total Pages	: 240
Release	: 2019-10-28
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0752481029

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Exhaustive research by the author of newly available primary source material has unearthed new facts surrounding the battle. The new information allows this edition to more accurately document and analyse the Battle of Clonmult. The book makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of the events surrounding this battle and of the manner in which both sides conducted their military operations during the War of Independence. New insight revealed by the author's research into the details of military operations by both sides is applicable not just to East Cork, but nationally. The information and analysis provided is timely as it increases our awareness of a period in our history which we are currently preparing to recognise and commemorate over the next few years.

Great Hatred

by Ronan McGreevy

Author	: Ronan McGreevy
Publisher	: Faber & Faber
Total Pages	: 333
Release	: 2022-05-24
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 057137283X

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THE IRISH TOP 10 BESTSELLER A gripping investigation into one of Irish history's greatest mysteries, Great Hatred reveals the true story behind one of the most significant political assassinations to ever have been committed on British soil. 'Heart-stopping . . . The book is both forensic and a page-turner, and ultimately deeply tragic, for Ireland as much as for the murder victim.' MICHAEL PORTILLO 'Gripping from start to finish. McGreevy turns a forensic mind to a political assassination that changed the course of history, uncovering a trove of unseen evidence in the process.' ANITA ANAND, author of The Patient Assassin 'Invaluable.' IRISH TIMES 'Intellgient and insightful.' IRISH INDEPENDENT On 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson - the former head of the British army and one of those credited with winning the First World War - was shot and killed by two veterans of that war turned IRA members in what was the most significant political murder to have taken place on British soil for more than a century. His assassins were well-educated and pious men. One had lost a leg during the Battle of Passchendaele. Shocking British society to the core, the shooting caused consternation in the government and almost restarted the conflict between Britain and Ireland that had ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty just five months earlier. Wilson's assassination triggered the Irish Civil War, which cast the darkest of shadows over the new Irish State. Who ordered the killing? Why did two English-born Irish nationalists kill an Irish-born British imperialist? What was Wilson's role in the Northern Ireland government and the violence which matched the intensity of the Troubles fifty years later? Why would Michael Collins, who risked his life to sign a peace treaty with Great Britain, want one of its most famous soldiers dead, and how did the Wilson assassination lead to Collins' tragic death in an ambush two months later? Drawing upon newly released archival material and never-before-seen documentation, Great Hatred is a revelatory work that sheds light on a moment that changed the course of Irish and British history for ever. 'McGreevy provides more than the anatomy of a political murder; in reconstructing this era of blood, poverty and wartime trauma, he also gives full expression to the terrible forces that WB Yeats once called the "fanatic heart" and the "great hatred".' THE TIMES 'Thoughtful and well-researched . . . an important and valuable addition to the library of the Irish Revolution.' PROFESSOR DIARMAID FERRITER, University College Dublin

Truce:

by Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

Author	: Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc
Publisher	: Mercier Press Ltd
Total Pages	: 217
Release	: 2016-01-22
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1781173869

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On 8 July 1921 a Truce between the IRA and British forces in Ireland was announced, to begin three days later. However, in those three days at least sixty people from both sides of the conflict were killed. In 'Truce', Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc goes back to the facts to reveal what actually happened in those three bloody days, and why. •What sparked Belfast's 'Bloody Sunday' in 1921, the worst bout of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland's troubled history? • Why were four unarmed British soldiers kidnapped and killed by the IRA in Cork just hours before the ceasefire began? •Who murdered Margaret Keogh, a young Dublin rebel, in cold blood on her own doorstep? •Were the last spies shot by the IRA really working for British intelligence or just the victims of anti-Protestant bigotry? This book answers these questions for the first time and separates fact from fiction to find out what really happened in the final battles between the IRA and the British forces.