Certainly they do represent differing points of Irish history, but mostly I would consider the difference in what they stand for today. This is just too big a topic to chew over in one post, so I will be splitting the two stops into different blog entries. The Gaol represents the horrors of the past, something any Irishman can regale you with in song, prose, or art. The Gaol was a horrific place, better suited for the minds who thought up the Saw franchise of films. I remarked at one point of the uncomfortableness of the place; it was the same reason I avoided touring the concentration camps going through Germany and Poland. I know what happened there, and I have no desire to trudge through that pain as a tourist. There's just something profoundly macabre about the Gaol and other historical sites like it. Granted, I did the tour of the Dunmore caves in Kilkenny where as many as 400 women and children may have been murdered by Vikings who set fire to the cave's mouth to suffocate the hidden survivors of their plundering of the local village. That was as much about the historical significance of the caves as it was about the natural beauty of the caves themselves. There will be an academic post on the significance of the caves from that viewpoint in a little while.But the Gaol was a very fearsome place, and even touring the defunct facility in the bright of day made it no less loathsome. Several of the girls noted they were chilled to the bone as the stood near the execution ground where firing squads eliminated the leaders of the 1916 Uprising. We visited the small chapel where Joseph Plunkett married the love of his life, Grace Gifford, only to be ripped away just 15 minutes after saying "I do" to be summarily shot in the prison yard. Kilmainham is a place of misery and death, and that it has become the place for foreigners like myself to visit and learn about Ireland's sordid and tragic history is an anathema. It just doesn't make sense.
But that's just my American midst trying to comprehend all this new information. As Yanks, we visit Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, as with many various points of military might and loss of life. We travel to Pearl Harbor to see the Arizona, Oklahoma City to see the bombing memorial, and even infamous prisons like Alcatraz are open to tourist inspection. But there's no continual history of tragedy with those monuments. There's a singularity in the events that made those places infamous or tragic.
Conversely, the Gaol has a long history of continual suffering and despair, as the leaders of nearly every Irish uprising against the colonialism of British rule were imprisoned in Kilmainham, suffering with women and children all crammed into the belly of this giant rocky beast. 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916. Those are the numbers whose pain is etched upon these walls. The postmodernist questions why we visit; why visit a place filled with such pain and tragedy? What can we learn from a tour here?
Cynically, I'd say that Kilmainham has never closed, despite it cease in operations in the 1920s. It's simply picked up its foundations and moved south to the Caribbean where the US government has it full of terrorists and those "suspected of terrorism" rotting away in Guantanamo. While no one is being sent to Guantanamo for breaking windows and stealing bread as 13 year-old George Keane was in a sentence of one week hard labor in Kilmainham, simply being friends with the wrong person or attending the wrong church is. In case you think otherwise, I know of a taxi driver you may want to learn about.
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