Alcatraz, Devil's Island, Saint Helena (Napoleon), and more recently Robben Island (Mandela), are four of the world's best known island prisons. They are also huge tourist attractions. If local tourism officials have their way, they are about to be joined by a fifth, Spike Island, in Cork Harbour, Ireland.

Spike Island. The very name has a ring to it. It conjures up a foul place, dingy, damp, malodorous, fit for only the most hardened criminals. One country's criminals are another country's patriots, and in Ireland Spike Island was where some of the 1848 Rebellion leaders were incarcerated before being transported overseas to convict settlements in Australia and New Zealand. Among the best known of them was William Smith O'Brien, the Protestant parliamentarian driven to take up arms against England because of the plight of his Catholic countrymen.

Even after securing independence for 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, the island continued its prison history, culminating in a riot by inmates in 1985 that eventually led to the abandonment of Fort Mitchell, the building which housed them.

As outlined by Michael Martin, chairman of Cork Tourism, the campaign to turn the island into a tourist attraction is based on the proven popularity of other such places. Cork, he said, had had its very own "Devil's Island" on its doorstep. He added: "Alcatraz was only a prison for 25 years but it gets 1.2 million visitors a year."

In 1850 Spike Island housed 2,500 Irish "convicts", and for many of them it was their last memory of their homeland.

This e-zine has its own connection with Spike Island. In fact its publisher was once threatened with incarceration there. The story of a naval court martial held on the island nigh on fifty years ago is told in The Irish Dáil and Seanad, from which the following extract is reproduced:

Have you ever seen the movie "The Winslow Boy" starring Robert Donat? The Spike Island saga was of the same genre. A young rating was charged with misappropriating a very small sum of money, less than thirty shillings. For this he was court-martialed, for this all the panoply of naval law and justice was assembled, for this the Clerk of the Dáil had offered the services of two Dáil reporters, and for this Ned Power and John Ward were threatened with incarceration on Spike Island. Alexandre Dumas could well have turned the episode into a modern-day "Count of Monte Cristo". Myles na gCopaleen could have had a field day.

The rating was found guilty and sentenced to four weeks in the jig, brigg, lock-up, or service equivalent, and under naval regulations the sentence had to be reviewed before his release. Accordingly, we were ordered to produce the transcript well in time….

I often wonder about the young rating's fate. Is there a skeleton shackled to a dungeon wall on Spike Island? Has anyone checked?

The full story may be found by clicking this link: http://www.vindicator.ca/memoirs/reporter.asp

Regrettably, as this issue was about to appear, news was received that the Irish government has truly spiked the effort to turn the island into a tourist attraction. It will, instead, use it as the site on which to build a new super-prison with the capacity to hold 600 inmates.

It is hoped that security at the new facility will eliminate any possibility of smuggling drugs into it, a common problem encountered in other jails throughout the country. To this end a new road is to be built which will be controlled by the Irish Prison Service.

Building a road to an island prison in the hope that it will prevent the smuggling of drugs seems akin to "chasing moon beams, or trying to light a penny candle from a star." A daydream, or a nightmare? Only time will tell.

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