Urban governance and prison building in pre-Famine Ireland, 1820-1845 (Pre published)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on urban governance, urban agency, and civil society with reference to the construction of new prisons in Irish towns in the early nineteenth century. It investigates how civil society and central government were involved in the physical transformation of these small towns. By analysing the mechanics by which new prisons were planned and built, it probes the power relationships between the national prison inspectors, the voluntary Association for the Improvement of Prisons and of Prison Discipline in Ireland, local government and urban elites. It argues that despite their relatively weak position as government employees who only occasionally visited provincial towns, the inspectors were nevertheless remarkably successful in their lobbying efforts to initiate new prison building projects. To do this, they relied on appeals to civil society, won the support of assize judges, pitted neighbouring towns against each other, and used the new information networks provided by the provincial press and their own annual reports to force local urban elites into action. This chapter shows an under-appreciated and rather early Irish ‘mixed economy of welfare’ operating within and between metropolitan and provincial urban centres in the first half of the nineteenth century.