Kilmainham Gaol

Between 3 and 12 May 1916 fourteen leaders of the Easter Rising, among them Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, were shot in its Stonebreakers' Yard, and Joseph Plunkett married Grace Gifford in the prison chapel hours before his execution. The gaol closed in 1924 and stood derelict until volunteers began restoring it, unpaid, in 1960; the museum opened in April 1966 and passed to the Office of Public Works in 1986. Its ghost stories, such as the chapel lights said to have switched themselves back on during the restoration, are in print in ghost books such as Richard Jones's Haunted Britain and Ireland (2001). The one first-hand account of something unexplained is Grace Plunkett's own, and she called it telepathy.

Kilmainham Gaol was built to hold the enemies of the state. Fourteen days in May 1916 turned it into the reason that state lost Ireland. The Grand Jury of County Dublin decided in 1786 to replace the old prison near Mount Brown, and the architect John Trail (c. 1725-1801) set the new building on Gallows Hill, chosen for its drainage and its air. It cost £22,000 and opened in 1796 as the New Gaol. In 1857 John McCurdy won an open competition to rebuild the collapsing east wing; it opened in 1861 as a panopticon in stone and iron, ninety-six cells all visible from a single platform, and that vaulted hall is the photograph everyone knows. Political prisoners passed through from the start: after Robert Emmet's rising of 1803 the servant Anne Devlin was held there and tortured for information she never gave, and Alfred Webb's 1878 Compendium of Irish Biography says she "suffered more than two years' imprisonment". But it is 1916 that fixed the building's meaning. After the Easter Rising surrender, prisoners were tried by Field General Court Martial at Richmond Barracks, behind closed doors and without defence counsel, then moved to Kilmainham to be shot. Between 3 and 12 May 1916, fourteen men were executed by firing squad in the Stonebreakers' Yard, a yard named for the hard labour once done in it. On 3 May: Patrick Pearse, Thomas Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh. On 4 May: Joseph Plunkett, Edward Daly, Michael O'Hanrahan and Willie Pearse. On 5 May: John MacBride. On 8 May: Éamonn Ceannt, Michael Mallin, Con Colbert and Seán Heuston. On 12 May: Seán Mac Diarmada and James Connolly. Seven had signed the Proclamation. Company Sergeant Major Samuel Henry Lomas commanded a firing party on 3 May and kept a diary, published a century later by Mick O'Farrell. MacDonagh, he wrote, "was marched in blindfolded... Death was instantaneous"; Pearse "whistled as he came out of the cell"; Clarke, "an old man, was not quite so fortunate, requiring a bullet from the officer to complete the ghastly business". On the night of 3 May, in the prison chapel, Joseph Plunkett married Grace Gifford hours before his execution. Her own account, given to the Bureau of Military History in 1949, has none of the romance later attached to it. She bought the ring from a man named Stoker who lived opposite the Gaiety. "I was brought in and was put in front of the altar; and he was brought down the steps; and the cuffs were taken off him; and the chaplain went on with the ceremony; then the cuffs were put on him again." She was never left alone with him: "not for a minute. I had no private conversation with him at all." Returning that night to say goodbye, "a man stood there, with his watch in his hand, and said: 'Ten minutes'." James Connolly had been shot through the ankle at the GPO and was held in Dublin Castle. On 12 May he was brought to Kilmainham by ambulance and carried into the yard because he could not stand. The manner of it reached Westminster: on 30 May 1916 Laurence Ginnell asked the Commons whether Connolly had been carried on a stretcher, propped in a chair and executed in that condition, and what precedent existed for executing a dying man. Harold Tennant, Under-Secretary for War, refused the ground: doctors had certified him "in a fit state to undergo his trial", he "was wounded just above the instep", and there was "no reason why in the interests of humanity the execution should have been delayed". By then the political damage was done. On 11 May, with Connolly and Mac Diarmada still alive, John Dillon told the Commons: "You are letting loose a river of blood, and, make no mistake about it, between two races who, after three hundred years of hatred and of strife, we had nearly succeeded in bringing together." The executions stopped the next day. Seven years later the gaol filled again, and mostly with women. Sinéad McCoole's survey of prison records and autograph books identified 554 women imprisoned in 1923. Kilmainham's 'A' compound was meant for about a hundred; official records list 185 there on 8 March 1923, while Annie MacSwiney counted nearly 300 in February, aged from fourteen to close on seventy. Grace Gifford Plunkett, the bride of 1916, was one of them. In late April 1923 some 270 women resisted removal to the North Dublin Union by linking arms in rows of four. The last republican prisoners left in 1924 and the building simply stopped. Rory O'Dwyer's account of the "wilderness years" records no maintenance whatsoever, a structure judged dangerous by the early 1950s, and rumours that the Board of Works was inviting tenders for its demolition. A Dublin engineer, Lorcan Leonard, assembled a committee; the government approved its plan on 26 February 1960 and handed over the keys instead of a budget. Up to 200 tradesmen worked unpaid in the evenings and at weekends, funded by donations from visitors queuing in the rain, clearing trees twenty and thirty feet high out of the yards. The museum opened in the east wing in April 1966, inaugurated by President Éamon de Valera, who had been under sentence of death in the same building in 1916 and was among the last prisoners to leave it. The society handed the gaol to the Office of Public Works in 1986.

Kilmainham Gaol Museum, on Inchicore Road in Kilmainham, Dublin 8, is run by the Office of Public Works. The site lies 3.4 km west of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street in a straight line. Entry is by guided tour, and the museum requires tickets to be pre-booked online. Tickets are released 28 days ahead at midnight Irish time. Cancellations and any additional places appear on the site from 09:15 on the morning of the visit itself. Tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable, though a booking made for the wrong day or time can be refunded if the museum is emailed within an hour of it being made. Groups of ten or more must book in advance through [email protected]. Prices read from the museum's own visitor page on 22 September 2026: adult €8, senior €6, student €4, and family €20 for two adults with two or three children under 18. Children under 12 enter free and still need a ticket. The Courthouse visitor centre opens from 09:30 to 17:15 and the museum from 10:30 to 17:15; on 23 December they close at 16:15 and 16:45, and the site closes altogether from 24 to 27 December inclusive. The guided tour of the building takes one hour, and the museum asks visitors to allow roughly 90 minutes for the whole visit. Tours are given in English and in Irish, with information leaflets in Spanish, Italian, German and French. Dublin Bus route 60 runs from Wellington Quay and from Heuston Station; routes G1 and G2 run from Spencer Dock and Wellington Quay. The nearest Luas stop is Suir Road, on the red line. The gaol has no car parking of its own; the Irish Museum of Modern Art car park is five minutes' walk away, and limited coach parking is available on Inchicore Road. Buggies, wheelie bags and large items of luggage are not permitted on the tour, and the museum does not recommend the visit for children under six. The tour ends in the Stonebreakers' Yard, where fourteen of the leaders of the 1916 Rising were shot between 3 and 12 May 1916. Patrick Pearse was the first of them and James Connolly the last. The prison chapel on the same route is where Joseph Plunkett married Grace Gifford on the night of 3 May 1916, hours before he was executed; her account of that night is Witness Statement 257 in the Bureau of Military History, and it can be read in full online.