Ballyseedy Mouument, Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry, Ireland

At midnight on March 6th 1923, nine prisoners were brought to Ballyseedy Wood near Ballyseedy cross by soldiers of the Free State army. They were Pat Buckley, John Daly, Pat Hartnett, Michael O'Connell, John O'Connor, George O'Shea, Tim Tuomey, James Walsh and Steven Fuller.  When they got there, they were tied around a log and a land  mine was detonated. Most of them survived the initial blast however, the soldiers used machine guns and grenades to finish them off.  All of them died except Steven Fuller who was blown away by the force of the blast.  He landed in the  nearby river Lee from where he crawled for about 500 yards to Currans House. They took him in and hid him in a dugout at the back of their farm for some weeks. He was the only one who survived the massacre.

Irish Famine Memorial
Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, Australia

The Orphan Emigration Scheme commenced in October 1848 and when it was wound up due to opposition from the Australian colonists in August 1850, 4,175 young girls had been sent from Irish workhouses to Australia. Many of the Irish workhouses participated in the scheme.

A large number of those workhouse inmates were children. Many were orphans, or alternatively had been abandoned by fathers and mothers no longer able to feed them. While they remained in the local workhouse they were a charge on the landowners of the area where they previously resided. No wonder then that Earl Grey, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies received much support from Irish landlords for his Orphan Emigration Scheme under which young girls from the Irish workhouses were to be sent to Australia. The scheme was designed to fulfill the two-fold purpose of helping to resolve Australia’s chronic shortage of female labour, while at the same time reducing the serious overcrowding in Irish workhouses. Not only that but the Irish landlords who financed the workhouse system also hoped to reduce their own financial burden by transferring as many orphan girls as possible out of the workhouse system.

Earl Grey Irish Female Orphans in Australia (geni.com)

Portland Prison, Dorset England

Portland's prison opened in 1848 for the holding of adult convicts. The purpose of a prison at Portland was largely to make use of convict labor in the construction of the breakwaters of Portland Harbor and its various defenses. The Admiralty Quarries were developed for convicts to work in and once established, convict labor was providing 10,000 tons of stone per week for use on the breakwaters. The conditions within both the prison and its quarries throughout the 19th-century would later help calls for penal reform in the UK, as many prisoners died while quarrying stone.

Fenian, Thomas J. Clarke described his treatment there as follows: we treason felony prisoners were known as… the ‘special men,’… kept, not in ordinary prison halls but in penal cells- kept there so that we could be more conveniently persecuted, for the authorities aimed at making life unbearable for us. The ordinary rules regulating the treatment of prisoners, which, to some extent, shield them form foul play and the caprice of petty officers, these rules as far as they did that, were in our case set aside… This was a scientific system of perpetual and persistent harassing… harassing morning, noon and night, and on through the night, harassing always and at all times, harassing with bread and water punishments, and other punishments with ‘no sleep’ torture and other tortures. This system was applied to the Irish prisoners and, to them only, and was specially designed to destroy us mentally or physically – to kill or drive insane.

Other Fenians imprisoned there included, Jerimiah O'Donovan Rossa, John Daly, Michael Davitt and John Devoy. Many other Fenian prisoners spent time there as they were rotated to others prisons on a regular basis.

Croppies Acre,  Dublin

The Rising of 1798 was marked by the severest repression and the greatest barbarity that the Irish nation had ever experienced. In the vicinity of Dublin, yeomen and military hunted mercilessly for participants, and in their lust for blood, cared little for their victims’ guilt or and less for justice.
 Information on the. atrocities committed is not confined to prejudiced or traditional accounts, for Lord Cornwallis, in his correspondence, bluntly stated that any man in a brown coat found within several miles of the field of action was butchere without discrimination.
 The mutilated remains, piled high in carts, were paraded through the city streets and laid out in the yard of Dublin Castle, while prisoners were executed without trail, frequently being hung from lamp posts in the public thoroughfare. A piece of waste ground close to the river was utilised the speedy disposal of their bodies, and into hurriedly dug trenches in this slobland were tossed the pathetic remains of the victims of the terror.
 Among those consigned to this rude plot, known to sueceding generations as the Croppies Acre, were the brother of Sir Thomas Esmonde, Dr. Esmonde, who was hanged on Carlisle Bridge; Bartholomew Teeling, who sailed with Humbert’s expedition from France and was executed at Arbour Hill; Ledwich, brother of the Parish Prieset of Rathfarnham, who was hanged on Queen Street Bridge; Wade, Fox, Raymond, Bacon, Kelly, Byrne, Adam and Carroll all of whom were publicly hanged in different parts of the city.
 Croppies’ Acre lies on the side of the river in front of Collins Barracks. It extends from a point midway between the between the barracks boundary wall, and Wolfe Tone Quay, eastwards and down to the water, for in 1798 the Liffey had yet to be embanked and the waste plot bordered the river.
 “The day will come”, wrote Dr. Madden the historian of the United Irishmen, over one hundred years ago, “when that desecrated spot will be hallowed ground … decorated by funeral trophies in honour of the dead whose bones lie there in graves that are now neglected and unhonoured.” The day has indeed been long in coming.

Grosse Ile

Grosse Ile, isolated in mid-river but still close to Quebec City, opened as a quarantine station in 1832, in response to Canadian fears of the cholera epidemic in Europe. The failures of the quarantine station are measured in the burial sites of thousands of Irish immigrants, on the island and down the length of the St. Lawrence as far west as Hamilton.

They died of cholera in 1832—and of typhus, ship fever and starvation while fleeing from the Great Hunger in the 1840s. At the western end of the island, between Cholera Bay and the Celtic cross on Telegraph Hill, is a long meadow, corrugated by a regular series of ridges, which inevitably remind the visitor of lazy beds, ridge-and-trench potato fields. On Grosse Ile, too, the ridges are man-made, for they mark the mass graves where the Irish famine victims of 1847 were buried, ‘stacked like cordwood’. -- Click here for more details.