Spike Island in Cork Harbour from the air Spike Island: The Rebels, Residents and Crafty Criminals of Ireland’s Historic Island
by John Crotty (Merrion Press, €18.00 / £14.99)
Thomas McCarthy
On a bright summer’s morning there is nothing quite as magical as the watery approach to Spike Island from its old naval supply-base of Cobh.
John Crotty, Waterford-man, has been the latest keeper of that place, though the island’s Co. Waterford connections go back to the days of Celtic monasticism, of Lismore’s St. Carthage / Mochuda, who prayed and sanctified that very unholy spot more than a thousand years before its nineteenth century miseries.
More recently the good John Crotty has animated the citadel and battlements of Fort Mitchell with literary festivals and the hugely popular ‘After Dark’ tours. He and his team of volunteers and guides have created an immensely important Cork Harbour venue where art and history meet constantly.
Comprehensive
It is fitting, therefore, that he should have authored this new and very comprehensive guide. A more important guide to Spike Island is unlikely ever to be written.
The physical island that we see today, with its many battlements and enormous Fort Mitchell of twenty-four acres, owes much to just one individual, General Charles Vallancey. Vallancey came from Gibraltar to Spike in 1779 to create a battery of eighteen cannons.
But it was “the Year of the French” with its invading force of forty-four warships and fifteen thousand troops that convinced British authorities to create something much more powerful in Cork harbour.
Those who marvel at the recent idea to deport hapless refugees would do well to study the history of Spike Island”
These military fortifications would take another sixty years to construct, completing, in Crotty’s words ‘the most expensive construction project in Irish history. It is the largest military fortification in Ireland and one of the largest in the world.’
The island lay quiet after the Napoleonic Wars until the dark decade of the 1840s with its Famine, Fenians, convicts and mass deportations. Those who marvel at the recent idea to deport hapless refugees would do well to study the history of Spike Island.
In the seven years after 1849 more than six thousand convicts passed through the Spike ‘convict depot.’ In his book Life Among Convicts Revd. Charles Gibson wrote: “The prison was overcrowded. The prisoners were like sheep in a pen. And most of them were as innocent as sheep.”
Amazing
Crotty tells the whole story, creating a most amazing anthology of lost souls. One of the prison’s most compelling inmates must surely be the Manchester-born James Grey who was not only a high-society thief but a brilliant mechanic and inventor. He was regularly locked into an ingenious travel-trunk from which he unlocked himself to pilfer ship’s valuables. This is the kind of story that John Crotty loves to tell and he tells it here with skill and relish.
One of the most compelling phases in Spike’s long history began on 15 February 1921 when the island once again became a political prison. Crotty writes movingly of this era, and of the men who came through, including the legendary Seán Moylan of the Cork No.2 Brigade who fully expected to be executed.
The Truce came, then Civil War, then peace, then the hand-over of the Treaty Ports – the small number of strategic bases over the Western approaches to these islands – in 1938 – on the very eve of a new war.
Then ‘the Emergency’ and its aftermath; then coming down to recent times the great cohort of 1980s joy-riders who at least got a decent education while they served their sentences as teenage ‘offenders’.
And now, a new era, as a place of leisure, adventure and education. This is a book worth getting, then, this valuable handbook of the darker geographies of Irish life; a place redeemed only by the Jail Journal of John Mitchell and the exemplary, holy life of one-time resident, Ellen Organ (August 24, 1903 – February 2, 1908), the venerated ‘Little Nellie of Holy God’ whose childhood home still stands there as a blessing to us all.
‘Little Nellie’ was the child who yearned for Holy Communion before she died. Her story inspired Pope Pius X to issue his decree Quam singulari in July 1910 that lowered the Holy Communion age to seven.
Whenever I visit that spot on Spike Island I am always overwhelmed by the holiness emanating from that humble house. Her holy memory lights up an otherwise bleak place; and I am grateful that her presence is there still, blessing all of us, including the author John Crotty.