Arthur Balfour once remarked that a criminal offence did not become a political crime merely because a politician committed it. Indeed, Britain preferred to see itself as lacking the kind of political imprisonment utilised by regimes of which it disapproved. But, as William Murphy points out here, the label ‘political prisoner’ persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Irish political prisoners were central to the revolutionary movement, he argues, bringing the British prison system in Ireland to the verge of collapse in 1921. Yet although the experience of internees in Frongoch after the 1916 rebellion is well known, epic prison battles like those in Lewes gaol in 1917 or Belfast in 1918 are much less so. The only systematic study so far made of Irish political prisoners, by Sean McConville, focused on their political impact in Britain itself. Murphy takes a more dualistic approach, examining the experience of people on the two sides of the prison system in Ireland itself, both prisoners and staff.

Beginning with the suffragettes, who were the first to make deliberate use of imprisonment as a kind of political pulpit, he ends with the transfer of control of prisons from the U.K. to the Provisional Government after the Anglo–Irish Treaty. This, as he notes, has some disadvantages, notably omitting imprisonment in the Civil War, but it makes for a coherent study of British treatment of Irish political prisoners. For this he finds a wonderfully rich source in the records of the General Prisons Board (G.P.B.) of Ireland. His perspective brings into the foreground figures who are perhaps unfamiliar in the standard narrative of the revolution, such as Max Green, the G.P.B. chairman, and Art O’Brien, leader of the Irish Self-Determination League, whose extensive papers have been under-used.

The result is a closely detailed, subtly nuanced study of a penal system placed under severe, almost intolerable, strain by increasingly organised protests by prisoners demanding political status. A British ideology, which saw the alien notion of ‘political prisoner’ status as undermining the integrity of the prison system, permeated the civil prison administration. (The army, which was reluctantly forced to establish internment camps as the conflict progressed, had less difficulty in accepting something akin to prisoner-of-war status.) The G.P.B. itself, as Murphy shows, was attuned to Irish public opinion and flexible in its response to prisoners’ demands. But the Irish prison system had two masters, the British government and the Irish public, and as conflict intensified it became impossible to serve both. Governors were shocked and disoriented by the actions of their prisoners, and saw their disciplined institutions descend into chaos – some broke down, others were dismissed as sacrifices to public opinion.

The contests within and around Irish prisons, Murphy suggests, ‘were the very marrow of revolution’. Some republican leaders, like Éamon de Valera and Austin Stack, dramatically enhanced their reputations by commanding prison protest campaigns. The significance of prisoner support organisations and activity in the revolutionary movement has been generally neglected, maybe because it has been seen as ‘women’s work’. His decision to end his account with the Treaty may carry some disadvantages, but it permits him to focus on the relatively neglected Truce period, which was a kind of ‘phoney war’. The situation in Irish prisons actually worsened after the Truce, and the G.P.B.’s capacity to act effectively collapsed. A significant internal republican division emerged as ‘political’ prisoners who had expected release grew increasingly fractious. While the revolutionary elite were released, those left inside were suddenly required to abandon their confrontational posture, and ‘embrace patience and accept that some demands would be deferred in the cause of an agreement’. Murphy sensibly holds back from suggesting any direct link between this sharpening tension between leadership and followers and the subsequent split, but his account does much to illuminate the gradual poisoning of the political atmosphere.