A school gym and 1916

People visiting the recently opened Health Centre at St Michael’s Estate, Inchicore, may admire the fine glass panel doors in the cut limestone facade, and possibly ignore the adjacent buildings, a twin limestone edifice to the centre, and sandwiched between them, a fading brown bricked hall in very poor repair.

This trio of buildings have long since been ignored and neglected by the public at large, and yet 98 years ago, in the week after Easter Week 1916, it was here in the then Richmond Barracks that the leadership of the Easter Rebellion were assigned their fate. Following the surrender of the Irish Volunteers on April 29th and 30th, most of the men and women captured were marched from the city along Emmet Road to the Richmond Barracks, then one of the largest British army establishments in the city, and a short distance from Kilmainham Jail.

Such were the numbers of rebels held prisoner, that this barracks, with its open squares and parade grounds, was deemed the most convenient location to process, sort and try those involved. In time over 3,000 people were detained there, rounded up from all parts of Ireland.

The leaders had been identified. They were separated from the others, and placed in the barracks’ gymnasium, a large imposing hall, flanked by two officers’ quarters. There in the gym, on rough wooden floors, they bedded down awaiting justice. A photo of the time shows a dishevelled de Valera under armed guard.

Courts martial began with haste on May 2nd in a room directly opposite the gym, and continued for some days, with 90 death sentences imposed, leading to 13 executions in nearby Kilmainham, along with that of James Connolly, who had been held and tried in Dublin Castle.

I first saw the interior of this gymnasium in the mid 1950s when I attended school in St Michael’s CBS. Then, though we all knew of 1916, and venerated the famous names, we knew little or nothing of the structure’s associations with historic events.

By then, Richmond Barracks had been renamed Keogh Square, after an IRA man called Kehoe, one of Michael Collins’s “12 Apostles”. Evacuated first by the British army, and then by the Free State forces in 1924, the barracks had been given over to Dublin Corporation to house the impoverished of the city. Keogh Square was a huge grey miserable place, utterly unfit for purpose, a barracks inadequately converted into family habitations, Dickensian in age and conditions. Surrounded by high walls, it was isolated from the rest of the city, and yet within this perimeter of desolation there was an enclave of normality.

St Michael’s School was started in 1929. It occupied the two wings of the officers’ quarters, and the brown-bricked gym. We were aware of the links with the British army. War department marker stones, with their WD and broad arrow, still delineated the bounds of the barracks. The guardhouse still stood opposite Richmond Park football ground, sentinel to the tall buildings joined by high stone arches.

The gym was always dark and cold. The windows were blacked out and the only natural light came down from a huge octagonal glass-sided turret, topped by a conical roof, supported by a myriad of rafters. From this turret there hung a thick frayed rope, tied to one of the beams above us, and which fuelled the gory excesses of childish imaginings. Though nominally a gym, it was never used as intended. A lame pommel horse should have long since been put down.

We used the gym every day for morning break and filed in for the milk and sandwiches provided. Occasionally we would be treated to a black and white film in this darkened theatre, with Mr O’Connor, the projectionist, hurriedly misadjusting the focus if any cowgirl intimacy threatened. Though our history books ended at 1916 we never realised that far greater dramas had ensued in that very room.The school closed in 2007.

In the rush to erase Keogh Square from the collective memory, rename and rebuild the area again, many valuable historical memories were erased. The cycle is in train again as the renaming of St Michael’s Estate and rebuilding begins once more. The gym is dilapidated and turretless, though the building is preserved, but local heritage groups are raising consciousness to promote not just its survival but perhaps incorporation into a historical tourist trail within the Inchicore and Kilmainham area.