Along the Grand Canal: Swans and rebellion

The walk to the jail was leisurely, along the serene Grand Canal. We took the narrow paved footpath past ducks and swans, past old wooden locks, past a statue of poet Patrick Kavanaugh, sitting on a bench.

Beyond Portobello College the narrow grassy banks flattened out a bit, and on this lovely breezy day people were tossing bread crumbs to the birds, and sleeping in the grass. In the sun it was almost hot, and nobody was moving very fast.

It was a five-mile walk to Kilmainham Gaol, a place notorious in Irish history. It was here that starving people--children, too--were confined during the Famine Years, usually for stealing a loaf of bread or poaching from a landlord's estate. A brother and sister were locked up for two months for stealing a handful of gooseberries. Imagine how hungry they must have been.

But Kilmainham Gaol is now primarily thought of as the place where the heroes of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed.

It is a cold and depressing place, a hulking stone building with narrow corridors and tiny cells. Our tour guide--you cannot roam the jail independently, but must stay with a guide--was a friendly man named Donal, who had the same fervency that we encountered with other guides in other parts of Dublin: a clear desire for us to understand Irish history.

He took us past the cells where Padraig Pearse and his brother Willie and Joseph Plunkett and the others were held before they were killed. He pointed out the cell where Eamon de Valera, later the first President of Ireland, was held. (de Valera was born in America, and so escaped execution.)

And then out to the walled courtyard where the executions took place. It was a sad, stark place--high stone walls, no grass, nothing green, just two small black crosses to mark where the men had died.

Padraig Pearse, poet and scholar, was the first to be executed. He and fourteen others were shot, three or four each day, at one end of the courtyard. They were blindfolded, their hands tied.

The last to be executed was Joseph Connelly, who had been incarcerated at Dublin Castle, tended to by the Red Cross. He had been seriously injured in the fighting and could not stand. He was tied to a chair, brought into Kilmainham through the big doors you see in the picture, and shot sitting down.

That black cross marks the place of his death.


From there we filed back through the jail and out into the bright sunshine for the long walk back to the city. The lilacs were blooming, the swans were gliding; it was a grim and beautiful day.