No serious history of crime and punishment in Ireland in the coming decades will exclude Richard J. Butler's Building the Irish courthouse and prison: a political history, 1750–1850 from its bibliography. Once we excavate beyond the remarkable production values, illustration, mapping and visualisation of the Irish courthouse and prison network, we encounter a comprehensive analysis that opens many new avenues for potential further research.

At its core, this book documents the parallel process that was the development of the Irish courthouse and prison. Butler deftly navigates a labyrinth of ‘lock-ups, dungeons or simply black-holes’ to unpack the prison system that began to emerge from the second half of the eighteenth century. The book is divided into two sections. Part one traces the appearance of the assize courthouse from the late 1740s when a building designed by a little-known architect named Michael Priestly appeared at Lifford in County Donegal. Lifford courthouse, illustrated in the book, while arguably unremarkable looking to the untrained eye when compared with subsequent versions across Ireland, becomes a monument of great significance as it is revealed as the earliest surviving assize courthouse. Its significance was in ‘establishing the Irish roots for this new type of building’.

Before trying to understand anything about the creation of the various imposing physical representations of justice in the towns and cities of Ireland, it is important to appreciate the function and in many ways the self-importance of the grand jury system. As Butler points out, many of their activities may be deemed corrupt by modern standards. The Dublin grand jury constructed the Green Street courthouse at the end of the 1700s. It was close to Newgate gaol for the ease of transfer of prisoners. Butler argues that a particular element of the structure suggests a separate entrance for the grand jury, indicating that by now they were beginning to place themselves toward the centre of building designs.

Understanding the presence and role of the grand jury is essential to appreciating the reasons behind the emerging grandiosity of courthouse buildings. From John Howard in the 1780s to the Freeman's Journal in the 1820s, much criticism was levelled at the grand juries for their lofty and expensive public building projects, including courthouses and prisons. Drawing from an impressive array of manuscript sources, architectural plans, paintings and photographs, Butler navigates the intricacies of the bureaucracies that created these structures. In one curious incident, a set of drawings dated October 1817 was prepared for a new courthouse at Kilmainham but came to nothing. Butler describes the ill-fated plan as ‘remarkably ambitious and indeed revolutionary for its time’. He speculates the reason for its abandonment was likely a fire at the nearby Kilmainham Gaol in December 1817 which caused a severe financial challenge to the grand jury's plan.

Part two of the book deals with the emergence of the modern prison. In the absence of prison-building programmes of the scale that occurred between 1750 and 1850, one wonders what the condition of Ireland would have been during the Famine, given the warped but necessary reliance on imprisonment as a means of social rescue. The complexity around the location of prisons is exemplified by the decision to divide County Tipperary into two ridings in 1836. It was only after several years of legal wrangling that Nenagh, in the north of the county, was established as an assize town. This allowed for the construction of a courthouse, followed quickly and inevitably by a prison. Butler draws the contours of similar local and national debates across Ireland for the different waves of prison-building.

Particular credit must be paid to the author for the ambitious set of appendices to this volume. With county-by-county, and often town-by-town lists of primary and secondary sources, short building histories, grand jury investments, much of the material contained in the appendices would be worthy of a stand-alone volume.

Historians of crime and punishment will be well aware of the difficulties of researching and interpreting the many sources upon which this book is based. Prison and judicial reports are famously dense, heavy on statistics and not always generous with commentary. Butler navigates the choppy waters of the history of national and local politics, design, architecture, and administration to produce a work that will prove immensely valuable to future scholars of Irish penal and judicial history. The book provides a valuable contribution to an ever-evolving field and marks a landmark moment in the historiography of urban, architectural, penal and judicial history in Ireland.