Abstract
Ireland's county towns witnessed the building and rebuilding of scores of courthouses and prisons from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the following one. Many of these structures have since been demolished, but a large number still survive: some as derelict buildings (such as Belfast’s Crumlin Road courthouse), while others are still in use, either performing their original function as locations for the administering of justice (as in the case of many county courthouses, such as those in Tralee, Ennis, Sligo and Armagh) or being repurposed as tourist attractions (as in the case of Crumlin Road Gaol, Wicklow Gaol and Kilmainham Gaol). The former Dundalk Gaol now houses Dundalk Garda station in what was formerly the governor's residence; the men's wing of the prison is now the location of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann's Northeastern Resource Centre, while the women's wing houses the Louth County Archive. Although the uses to which many of these buildings are put today might seem utterly beyond the wildest imaginings of their sponsors and creators, frequent change and variety over time are central to the story of Ireland's courthouses and prisons, as Richard Butler’s valuable study shows. In seven main chapters, Butler surveys in a masterly fashion the origins and development of Ireland's infrastructure of county courthouses and prisons in the late Georgian and early Victorian era, explaining the rationale behind their commissioning and construction and illustrating how and why physical changes to these buildings were considered necessary at various times. The result is the most thorough overview to date of the genesis and development of these key buildings in Ireland's judicial and penal systems.
Butler focuses on county courthouses – the buildings where assize judges heard cases twice a year in each of Ireland’s seven assize ‘circuits’ – in the first part of the book. He shows that grand jurors repeatedly ‘committed their counties to a profligate indulgence in architectural splendour’ (p. xxxii), with the central government (either in Dublin or in Westminster) often facilitating the building spree by providing generous public works loans. Butler argues that the decision to build new assize courthouses was rarely, if at all, prompted by significant rises in local crime rates: of far more importance was the desire of grand jurors to erect what were, in effect, architectural status symbols in their county. Intercounty rivalry and jealousy fed a competitive spirit amongst grand juries that accounted for a considerable number of the county courthouses that were erected in this period. James Gandon's courthouse in Waterford, built between 1784 and 1786, proved a particularly impressive example, with architects and grand jurors from all parts of Ireland paying what Butler calls ‘pilgrimages’ (p. 20) to Waterford over the next 60 years to learn from its design and improve upon it. Dundalk's splendid new courthouse, completed in 1819, was heavily influenced by Gandon's Waterford building: although it cost the ‘astronomical sum’ of nearly £20,000, it was superior to those in the counties neighbouring Louth and therefore those who supported its being built considered it ‘worth the enormous investment of the county's cess-payers’ (p. 44). Kerry's grand jurors, jealous of the numerous fine quarter sessions courthouses and bridewells that were being built in neighbouring Cork from 1824, responded by commissioning a new county courthouse in Tralee, which was built between 1830 and 1833 by William Vetruvius Morrison, one of Ireland's leading architects. This ‘victory’ by Kerry over Cork was regarded with envy by grand jurors in many other Irish counties, including Carlow. It was no surprise that Carlow's grand jurors turned to Morrison to design a new assize courthouse for their county, which was completed in 1834. Their sense of amour propre had been stung in the late 1820s by the repeated public criticisms of their county courthouse by the assize judge, Charles Kendal Bushe. A local landlord constructed a quarter sessions courthouse at Bagenalstown whose ‘majestic splendour’ (p. 75) made Carlow’s county courthouse seem comparatively dilapidated, which also helped spur the grand jurors into action, as did Kilkenny and Wicklow's refurbishing and extension of their existing county courthouses. Morrison's striking new building helped rescue Carlow's grand jurors from any feeling of inferiority that they may have felt when they regarded the impressive courthouses that were being raised by their fellows in other parts of the country. In the case of Carlow and other counties, Butler's exploration of why new assize courthouses were built and existing ones extensively rebuilt highlights the central importance of local considerations, including the economic benefits which accrued from hosting assizes: although Irish nationalists later decried such buildings as symbols and instruments of ‘colonialism’, Butler suggests that a much more nuanced set of factors lay behind their construction.
In the second part of the book, Butler contrasts the relatively permanent form of the county courthouse with the constantly changing form of the county gaol. Whereas most county courthouses had a ‘single definable period of construction’, the situation was very different with county gaols, which were ‘constantly subject to alteration and addition’ (p. 137). Prisons’ physical fabric was vulnerable to prison reformers’, politicians’, prison administrators’ and grand jurors’ competing and changing theories and recommendations about prisoner welfare and discipline and the ultimate purpose of penal incarceration. County gaols were frequently modified, or new county prisons were built, in an expensive effort to accommodate these shifting views. As a result, as Butler states succinctly, gaols ‘became immensely complicated palimpsests of penal-reform architecture from different generations and [reform] movements’ (p. 137). Central government played a much more active role in prescribing changes to the physical structure of Irish prisons than it did to its county courthouses, framing legislation which prescribed how Irish prisons should look and how they should be run, and appointing Inspectors-General whose task it was to inspect prison regimes and buildings and put pressure on grand juries to implement the desired reforms. Butler provides a particularly interesting discussion of the influence of the Association for the Improvement of Prisons and of Prison Discipline in Ireland on government prison policy. For decades, reformers argued over the relative merits of the radial or polygonal system of prison construction, with consequent effects on how prisons were constructed, until the idea of the ‘separate’ and ‘silent’ system began to win favour in the 1830s, again with implications for how Irish prisons were built or modified. Butler's insightful handling of the course of Irish county courthouse and county gaol construction from 1750 to 1850 is supported by over 300 illustrations, many of them copies of sumptuous paintings and architects’ plans, and numerous colour and black-and-white photographs.