Blake’s Castle and Kirwan’s Lane: A Prison, a tragic parting, a song for the ages.

From 1799 through 1850, the typical sentence for any crime committed in Galway was Transportation to Australia, typically 10 or 20 years hard-labour, with no hope of return. In reality it was a life sentence. One such prisoner was a young man from Athenry, who having stolen some corn to feed his starving family, was in 1847 convicted of his crime and sentenced to ‘Transportation for Life’. He spent his last night in the dockside prison, the castle now known as Blakes Castle at the end of Quay Street, only a stone’s throw from where the prison ship that brought him to Australia was berthed. His grieving, distraught wife, sick with hunger, died of grief that same night outside the prison walls, on the laneway known as Kirwan’s Lane. Her ghost, a spectre of a woman dressed in rags, her arms outstretched, begging for alms, appears at the doorway of Busker Browne’s bar, her pained face, a combination of grief and anger, at her husband’s unjust conviction. Today, the tragic lovers, the victims of power and injustice, are commemorated in a song, a second anthem to our pantheon, ‘The Fields of Athenry.