SPIKE ISLAND (INIS PIC)

Introduction by Dr. Kirstie North

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'In this court[yard] nothing is to be seen but the high walls and the blue sky. And beyond these walls I know is the beautiful bay lying in the bosom of its soft green hills. If they keep me here for many years I will forget what the fair outer world is like. Gazing on grey stones, my eyes will grow stony.'

John Mitchel (1815 – 1875).

 

Spike Island (Inis Píc) is a small Island in Cork harbour which is home to ‘Ireland’s Alcatraz’. Now a quietly foreboding tourist attraction, the prison, which was never intended to be a prison, occupies a kind of temporal and geographical limbo.  The ambiguity of this place is reflected in its Irish name, Inis Píc – Inis refers to the Island, but the meaning of Píc is uncertain. The function of Spike Island has shifted throughout time, but one thing has remained consistent. Throughout its various histories, Spike Island has always been the ultimate example of what Michel Foucault calls a ‘heterotopia’. A heterotopia is a counter-site – a place connected to, but unlike ordinary cultural spaces. Heterotopias are places of crisis and deviation such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, cemeteries and ships.

Access to Spike Island is by boat from Cobh through Cork harbour’s heavy traffic of container ships, cruise liners, sail boats and naval vessels. In the 7th century Spike Island was the site of a monastic settlement before it became the site of cutting edge military fortification in the 19th century. Due to its strategical location the fort was almost invisible to approaching vessels. This defensive prowess rendered the fort obsolete and, like its neighboring Camden Fort Meagher, it never saw battle. The function of the fort then shifted. In response to the famine Spike Island became the largest prison in Britain or Ireland with over 2,300 prisoners. It even had its own penal colony, a punishment block in which prisoners heavily chained from wrist to ankle were dressed in black frieze and wore a black hood with two eye-holes. Many of these prisoners were driven insane by the inhuman conditions and many more suffered snow blindness as a result of malnutrition. More than 1,000 convicts died and were buried in mass graves on the island by 1883, with most dying in the first decade of its operation. During the war of independence, Spike Island housed members of the IRA, before being handed back to Ireland in 1938. The fort was then renamed Fort Mitchel after John Mitchel an Irish nationalist activist, author, journalist and prisoner of the island. In the late 20th century Spike Island was a youth correctional facility. This closed in 2004.

Foucault says that as its history unfolds a society can make an existing heterotopia function in a different fashion. This is true of this monastic site that became a military fort. This prison that became a death camp. This youth correctional facility that became Spike Island the tourist attraction. If a heterotopia functions like a mirror that reflects society, what do you gaze upon during these daytime and after-dark ghost tours that lead you over mass graves haunted by the presence of snow blind men? Perhaps the spectres of the mentally ill peering out from behind their black hoods at stoney-eyed visitors on day trips passing through Spike’s grey stone walls.

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Dr. Kirstie North