No guarantee old Cork Prison won't be demolished, says Micheál Martin

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said he cannot guarantee that the 220-year-old former Cork Prison will not be demolished during the six months it will take to become a protected structure.

Last week, Cork City Council voted unanimously to place the old Cork Prison on its protected structures register.

The council’s chief executive said this process would take up to six months.

The facility has, at different times, held both of Cork's martyred lord mayors, Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence MacSwiney.

The old prison has been vacant for a decade, replaced by the adjacent new prison, which has regularly struggled with overcrowding issues.

Justice minister Jim O’Callaghan has called for the old building to be demolished and two new prison facilities to be built on the site, one for 230 men and the other for 100 women.

Speaking to The Echo on Friday, Mr Martin said Ireland has a “very big problem” with a lack of prison spaces, and he could not guarantee that the old prison will not be demolished.

In August 1920, Cork lord mayor Terence MacSwiney began a hunger strike in the prison that ended 74 days later with his death in Brixton Prison, an event that brought international attention to Ireland's struggle for independence.

His predecessor as lord mayor, Tomás MacCurtain, had also been imprisoned at what was then known as Cork Detention Barracks.

Built by the British Army in 1806, the old building became a civilian prison in 1972 and closed in 2016. It was replaced by the €45m, purpose-built 296-bed prison, built across Rathmore Rd from the original.

That prison has capacity for 304 prisoners but has been routinely overcrowded in recent years.

When the old prison closed, the local community was promised various community facilities on the site, none of which came to pass.

The Irish Prison Service has said that a tender for the works on the old Cork Prison will be issued later this year, which will inform the decision on whether to proceed with demolishing the building.

On Friday, the Taoiseach said that while he respected the “pressures” on politicians, he had concerns about “politics putting something on a protected structures list because of political reasons and not because of architectural or historic reasons”.

Noting that the old Cork prison has been vacant for more than a decade, Mr Martin asked why it had not been listed as a protected structure before now, saying there had to be “due process”.

“I think there has been a mixing of the jerseys here,” he said.

Mr Martin said City Hall had taken the lead in remembering Terence MacSwiney, including at Terence MacSwiney Quay.

Asked if there could be no guarantee the building would not be demolished, Mr Martin replied: “No guarantee. I can’t. I’m not the minister of justice. I’m not the prison authorities.

“On the other hand, politically people will ask us to get more places for prisons, and it’s a challenge,” he said.

“Our prisons are very crowded, and we have to do an interim programme to create more prison spaces, and we need more medium-term plans then for more longer-term capacity in our prisons.” 

The Department of Justice and the Irish Prison Service did not respond when asked if they would respect plans to make the old prison a protected structure.