Enshrining Ireland's Nationalist History Inside Prison Walls: The Restoration of Kilmainham Jail

Abstract

T   of history-related tourist sites in Ireland are concerned with Ireland’s distant past. There are dolmens, stone circles, castles, ancient burial chambers, and ring forts, as well as monasteries with picturesque round towers and aweinspiring high crosses. Surprisingly in view of the place of the struggle for nationhood in the Irish popular imagination, there has been little room for Ireland’s more recent history among this impressive collection of sites. While it is certainly true that a growing number of tourist attractions appeared during the s that address eighteenthand nineteenth-century events—the  Center at Enniscorthy and the Famine Museum at Strokestown are two major examples—the War of Independence and Civil War are almost completely ignored. In fact, of the top twenty tourist sites in Ireland, only two provide any treatment of twentieth-century Irish nationalist history—the National Museum in Kildare Street, Dublin, and Kilmainham Jail1—and only the jail is devoted almost entirely to Ireland’s nineteenthand twentieth-century national struggle for independence. Further still, Kilmainham offers a vastly different