An exhibition of ‘secret’ images at Kilmainham Gaol – The Irish Occasions

In a dramatic {photograph} from September 1921, a prisoner lies sprawled in opposition to a wall in Kilmainham Gaol. His eyes are closed, his mouth open. Four hard-bitten British troopers crouch across the physique, one with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

The caption reads: “Shot while trying to escape.” But this isn’t a forgotten atrocity of the War of Independence. The “dead” man is alive and, just like the “soldiers”, appearing. All 4 are inmates of Kilmainham and the prostrate determine has been shot solely within the photographic sense, by a digicam they’ve smuggled in.

Such theatrical scenes, with props together with army uniforms and pretend weapons, are among the many sub-themes of a brand new exhibition – The Prisoners’ Lens: Secret Photography in Kilmainham Gaol, 1921 – now working on the jail museum.

And they remind us that though the occasions of 1916 and afterwards are often stated to have been impressed by poets, they have been a minimum of as a lot the work of playwrights and actors.

The Easter Rising was staged in additional methods than one. The Plunkett household owned a theatre. Many different protagonists of 1916 wrote or carried out performs, even James Connolly. It was no accident that footage of the GPO, earlier than and after the rise up, resemble a theatre set.

As Roy Foster wrote in Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890 to 1923: “ … when the insurrection broke out, several people mistook the manoeuvres for street theatre; Constance Markievicz was asked by passersby at Liberty Hall if she was rehearsing a play for children, and Joseph Holloway, encountering a copy of the ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’, took it at first for a playbill.”

Speaking of confusions, one other of the images within the Kilmainham exhibition options two prisoners – Tommy O’Reilly and Eddie Horn – dressed as troopers, with the caption: “The Tunnel King and his Tout.” This has puzzled even the present’s curators, who’re not sure whether or not the nicknames discuss with “characters they were playing in a skit”, or to an precise tunnel they have been digging on the time.

But many of the pictures are easy portraits, of people and teams. Some depict inmates boxing or giving and receiving haircuts. More typically the themes simply stare on the digicam, the one arms on show being those that – within the typical pose – they’ve folded resolutely throughout their chests.

Several footage additionally function canine, of which there have been a minimum of three within the jail, all the terrier selection. They included one often known as “the Fanners’ dog”, after a gaggle of prisoners arrested in June 1921 whereas attending an IRA signalling class. But these weren’t canine of conflict, most likely: they might have been in jail for his or her ratting expertise and condoned by the authorities to maintain the rodent inhabitants down.

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Secret because the digicam was, it depicts the jail as a comparatively relaxed place within the later months of 1921. Which certainly it turned after the ceasefire of July and the settlement on peace talks.

This may additionally clarify why the prisoners have been assured sufficient to leak a few of the footage to the press, together with certainly one of a Mass being held in the principle corridor, printed by the Irish Independent in September 1921. If the governor hadn’t identified in regards to the digicam earlier than that, he did then.

By December, anyway, the prisoners have been being launched. The exhibition incorporates a Pathé newsreel exhibiting them emerge from the entrance door to cheering crowds. The males are greeted by Christy Byrne, their former commanding officer, who had featured in a few of the footage however will need to have been freed earlier. Even a British officer on the door enters the temper, exchanging a heat handshake with one departing inmate, clearly a good friend.

Elsewhere, in the meantime, the identical treaty that had liberated the prisoners was inflicting tensions to rise once more. The Pathé reel follows a carriage filled with the newly freed arriving on the Mansion House, the place the Dáil was sitting and the place Lord Mayor Laurence O’Neill got here out to shake arms with the passengers.

Newspapers famous that the ex-prisoners made no try to interrupt the “serious deliberations within” (though the Treaty debates correct didn’t start till per week later, in close by Earlsfort Terrace).

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In the meantime, the dramatic footage took its place alongside drama of the Hollywood type. In Dublin’s Lyceum Picture Theatre, the Pathé newsreel was a part of a assist invoice for a Charlie Chaplin film.

The images exhibition, compiled from materials donated by mates and family members, is in line with the latter-day historical past of Kilmainham Gaol, during which former inmates took management of their very own story and its dramatisation.

This included saving the deserted jail from demolition and restoring it as a museum. Now it’s certainly one of Ireland’s hottest vacationer sights and within the course of has helped vindicate an previous joke. As the exhibition notes, inmates used to get pleasure from referring to the gaol because the “Kilmainham hotel”. Today its tens of hundreds of holiday makers embody the residents of a more moderen constructing simply reverse: the Kilmainham Hilton.