Mountjoy Prison graves
Apartments could be built on top of Mountjoy Prison graves
JEROME REILLY
THE remains of up to 40 executed men and women buried at Mountjoy Prison could be entombed beneath new apartment blocks to be built when the prison moves to a new location.
The Department of Justice has yet to address what to do with the remains - including those of ‘Quare Fellow’ Bernard Kirwan - buried within the walls of the Dublin prison.
Mountjoy historian Tim Carey told the Sunday Independent: “It’s a very sensitive issue. After all, if there is a decision to exhume the remains and relocate them, it may mean contacting families who would not want to revisit that particular chapter in their family history.”
Because there is no clarity about who is exactly buried where, there is even the possibility that the whole issue of DNA identification using descendents of the convicted murderers may arise.
“The response so far about issues relating to the relocation have been a little glib,” Mr Carey added.
“There could be those who will propose to have the burial plot preserved but it would seem a little strange to have a memorial to those executed by the State in the middle of a block of apartments or a shopping centre.”
Mr Carey, whose book Mountjoy: The Story of a Prison is now in its third reprint, said that some of the most sensational murder cases in Irish history ended with a hanging in the gallows house at Mountjoy.
In 2001, 10 IRA volunteers executed by the British Government in 1921 were exhumed and given State funerals. Kevin Barry, Thomas Whelan, Patrick Moran, Patrick Doyle, Bernard Ryan, Frank Flood, Thomas Bryan, Thomas Traynor, Edmond Foley and Patrick Maher had been hanged and then buried in the grounds of the ‘joy.
Kevin Barry’s mother died in 1957, and it was her dying wish that her son be exhumed from the grounds. That wish was granted when his remains and those of his compatriots were reinterred in a special new plot at Glasnevin Cemetery.
It’s unlikely that there will be a similar clamour to reclaim the remains of William Mitchell, a Black and Tan who murdered a Justice of the Peace called Robert Dixon in Dunlavin in 1921.
Another whose remains lie in Mountjoy is Annie Walsh, who murdered her husband to claim the insurance and ran off with a young nephew. She was the last woman to be executed in Ireland.
The new prison campus that will replace Mountjoy will be situated on a north Co Dublin site that has cost the Government nearly €30m.
