Qualla: Spike Island

Spike Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2017, the World Travel Awards named it Europe's Leading Tourist Attraction, beating out everything from the Acropolis to the Eiffel Tower. The island that won is barely a kilometre across, sitting in the middle of Cork Harbour, and for most of its modern history it was a place people were sent against their will. Spike Island has been a 7th-century monastery, a smuggler's hideout, a star-shaped fortress, a Famine-era convict depot, a British naval base held under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, an IRA internment camp, and a youth prison so brutal that the inmates burned down a wing in 1985. Now visitors pay to wander its cells.

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Image: Sheila1988 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Spike Island: From Monks to Marlborough

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ME, CC BY-SA 3.0. The earliest tradition places Saint Mochuda founding a monastery here in the 7th century, when the island was just a wooded hump in the harbour. By 1178 the Church of Saint Rusien on Spike was being granted to St Thomas's Abbey in Dublin, the same year Diarmid McCarthy, King of D...

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Image: ME | CC BY-SA 3.0

Spike Island: The Star Fort

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guliolopez, CC BY-SA 3.0. When France and Spain joined the American Revolution in 1778 and 1779, Cork Harbour became the assembly point for transatlantic convoys - at one point, more than 400 vessels rode at anchor here, loaded with supplies for British forces in the West Indies and North America. The har...

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Image: Guliolopez | CC BY-SA 3.0

Spike Island: Ireland's Alcatraz

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Clarke, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the Famine years, Spike's fortress had become a convict depot, the way-station for prisoners bound for transportation to Australia. The reputation as 'Ireland's Alcatraz' stuck, and it kept earning that reputation through the next century. John Mitchel, the nationalist journal...

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Image: Peter Clarke | CC BY-SA 3.0

Spike Island: Held by Britain, 1922 to 1938

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stackc, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed on 6 December 1921, it gave Ireland its Free State but kept three deepwater 'Treaty Ports' under British sovereignty. Spike Island was one of them. For sixteen years after Irish independence, the Royal Navy still flew the Union Jack above th...

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Image: Stackc | CC BY-SA 4.0

Spike Island: Riot, Ruin, Reinvention

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Cleary, CC BY-SA 4.0. The new Irish state used the island as a military base, then later as a youth correctional facility. On 1 September 1985 the young inmates rioted. A subsequent Dail committee reported that 'civilians, prison officers and the Gardai on the Island were virtual prisoners of the crim...

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Image: Brian Cleary | CC BY-SA 4.0