Before the days of cheap airfares and frequent travel, a generation of Irish emigrants will remember their sporadic trips home and the joy of seeing their native shore for the first time in many toil-filled months or years. In those days, many of them returned to our largest and southernmost major port – Cork. As they entered the harbour, there can be little doubt that many of them lined the decks of the famed Inisfallen, and they may well remember what they saw. To port the guns of the foreboding Fort Meagher stared down at their comparatively little craft, whilst to starboard, Fort Davis provided a similarly ominous spectacle. Dead ahead, they probably noted the third of Cork harbour’s major artillery forts, Fort Mitchel, sitting like a star-shaped crown on the head of Spike Island.

All were probably aware that these forts were once bastions of British military and naval power, and that Irish independence had seen their importance dwindle considerably. But how many were aware of the darker history of these three forts? How many of them knew that just a century earlier they had been home to the largest prison that has ever existed in the British Isles? And that this prison may even have been the largest in the world at that time? How many of us are aware of that now?

Although I was aware that the island had been home to a modern prison in the late twentieth century, and that “convicts” were also part of its past, I certainly wasn’t aware of how big that part was when I began my research in partnership with Barra O Donnabhain, more than two and half years ago. Barra was leading excavations on Spike Island on behalf of UCC and the Institute for Field Research. Luckily I already had some knowledge of convict history due to my research for a book on the Neva shipwreck, which Mercier had published in 2013. Barra and I agreed to co-ordinate our efforts in unravelling some of the island’s mysteries, and we began to do so.

The Spike Island prison was founded at the height of the Great Famine in 1847. In those days, it was known as a convict depot, which was a temporary prison, detaining those who were sentenced to be transported to one of a few far-flung corners of the British Empire, until a ship was procured for their journey. Whilst grinding poverty and outright starvation had doubtlessly driven many of these men to crime, it would be a mistake to think that they were typically convicted of isolated “petty” crimes.

Criminals convicted of one-off minor offences were usually sentenced to short sentences in various county and city gaols. Those convicted of felony (usually repeat petty offenders, or guilty of serious crime) were known as convicts and were dispatched to the convict depots. Those depots existed in various forms at places like Smithfield, Kilmainham (a county gaol which periodically doubled as a convict depot), Elizabeth Fort in Cork, and aboard hulks in Dún Laoghaire and Cork.

The depot on Spike Island was to be a temporary addition to convict capacity and the island was to be handed back to the military as soon as possible. However, the government failed to grasp the seriousness of the famine, and within seven years, the Spike Island depot was home to 2,500 convicts, 200 of whom were housed in overflow facilities at Forts Davis and Meagher (then Forts Carlisle and Camden).

We sought to use the stories of people who were there, to construct the story of the prison’s foundation, expansion and evolution as the sentence of transportation was replaced with that of penal servitude. Sentences on Spike Island involved labour, though from 1850, such labour was only performed after a period of time in separate cells, in Dublin’s newly opened Mountjoy Gaol. Many of Spike Island’s malnourished convicts were too weak to labour and death rates were very high during the prison’s early years. In later times prisoners who we would now regard as mentally ill were also unable to work but were often made to do so whilst being accused of malingering. As an example of such men, the book highlights the sad deaths (by suicide and mistreatment) of Thomas Morris and Michael Terbert.

Other stories we pieced together from archives and libraries in Dublin and London included the story of John Power, a Waterford orphan who was so brutalised by the system that he ended up murdering a prison warder. Power’s story contrasts starkly with that of William Burke Kirwan, an upper-class Dublin artist who murdered his wife. Indeed, Kirwan is used as a chronological marker throughout the text as he served almost three decades in captivity. Much of his time was served on Spike Island and he even returned there after his transportation to Bermuda.

Ribbonmen and Fenians also figure in the narrative. The former involved themselves in a number of brutal murders arising from agrarian disputes in Meath and Westmeath, whilst the latter saw the last of their political prisoners released from Spike amid a storm of controversy that was partially responsible for the prison’s closure in 1883.

Several of the island’s staff were as badly behaved as the prisoners. This included the Deputy Governor, whose dismissal after a drunken row led to his eventual bankruptcy and subsequent imprisonment! A Roman Catholic priest was the island’s longest-serving member of staff, and he too involved himself in many controversies, including the one where he attempted to replace the doctor with his own brother! The Presbyterian minister was fired for publicly criticising reform of the Irish convict system. Most of these reforms were rooted in the enormous prison on Spike Island, and many of them went on to influence modern correctional systems all over the world.

Too Beautiful for Thieves and Pickpockets is published by Cork County Library and is available nationwide. Having spent some 200 years off limits to civilians, Spike Island itself is now open to visitors. This globally significant penal heritage site is accessed via ferry from Cobh