Reading this morning about there are plans afoot to turn Spike Island into a tourist attraction like Alcatraz. Now, leaving aside there has never been a Birdman of Spike Island this puzzles me.
Who in their right mind would want to visit it as a tourist attraction? Wouldn’t we be better off spending money on refurbishing it and using it as … I dunno … a prison again? At a time when violent crime is ever increasing locking up a load of cunts on an island seems like a good idea to me. Also, when they’re being held 8 to a cell in Mountjoy it suggests we need another prison.
Ah, you might say, but what about Thornton Hall, the planned super-prison on the Northside of Dublin. That’d be the Thornton Hall on which over €40m has been spent so far on purchasing land, making plans and then discovering we can’t afford to build it after all. And even if we can residents are going to hold up the process so long that we’ll all be long dead before it happens.
Wouldn’t it have been better spending that €40m on Spike Island? Doing up the cells, buying new stocks and manacles, purchasing state of the art racks and filling the island with dangerous animals like rabid badgers and monkeys, large cats and mangy, hungry Afghan fighting dogs so if someone did try and escape they would be killed and eaten? There could be no possible comeback to the state because all the prisoners would know such beasts were there to scoff them and if they chose to go out there it’s entirely their fault.
We’re absolutely shit at thinking about things in this country until after the fact when we all know exactly what we should have done. But turning a prison, which could be used to punish prisoners, into a flowery “hahaha, this is where Cromwell herded up the Micks before sending them away to populate Australia” style tourist attraction is one of our worst ideas yet.
Wait until prisons properly run out of space as the country, its people taxed to the point where they can’t afford to eat, descends into a era of rampant criminality. Where will we put them? You know that house you bought in Portlaoise in that estate which only has four families living in it? Yeah, they’re gonna build a wall around it and house the scummers there. You wait and see.
Still, at least tourists who aren’t having their cameras stolen the minute they get off the plane can visit Spike Island. Joy.
Snake Pliskin escapes from Port Laoise
they could get the bumboys to fish for cod and boost the economy , some sea bass , cockles and mussels ,as well
If they were really smart, they’d dig up a story from back when it was used by Cromwell and make a ‘Far and Away’ type piece of shit film the Merkins love and then make it a tourist attraction after that. It needs a story.
If they really want to make it a tourist attraction why not allow them to throw rotten fruit at inmates?
Fun for all the family and the dual-purpose nature of the establishment serves us well.
They had to close Alcatraz because they couldnt get fresh water there, and the cost of bringing out fresh water was, as the HSE might put it , Prohibitive… its a cool attraction though…
Surely all you’d need is a big long pipe. Or make them boil sea water.
Snake Pliskin escapes from Port Laoise
haha, not quite as cool as NY or LA.
Spike Island would be much better if the prisoners were actually kept on spikes instead of in cells
We’re absolutely shit at thinking about things in this country until after the fact when we all know exactly what we should have done.
You forgot ‘…and we’re in the pub pontificating on stuff we don’t understand properly’.
If we were only allowed to talk about stuff we understand properly the news programmes and papers would be fucking empty…
We could just doa China on it and harvest prisoners organs..they would pay for themselves then..
Plus the look on tourists faces as they walked through spike Island looking at lads in baths of ice with their kidneys missing??….Oh Mercy
!!
An even better idea – an RTE reality show ‘ESCAPE FROM SPIKE ISLAND’.
Sticking with your wild animals idea, you could starve and abuse celebrities until they work out an escape plan. A guaranteed winner. I mean who wouldn’t want to see Twink getting torn apart by guard hyenas or Damien Rice getting eaten by a trained shark in the bay of Cork or Senator David Norris stabbing Ryan Tubridy with a shiv in the canteen queue?
If we were only allowed to talk about stuff we understand properly the news programmes and papers would be fucking empty…
That’s ‘they’, not ‘we’, SoS. We know everything.
I’m digging the reality TV idea, plus there’d be all the shivving and rape as they plotted their escape plans.
They could get Harney, strip her down, paint her gloss black, all climb into her and then push off from the pier disguised as a humpback.
Are we not all Captain Ahab?
I guess we are not
Spike Island? Never heard of it, must have been censored in the NI media because of the phallic undertones. Surprised that name got past the hierarchy.
where the fuck would you get that much paint?
You could close down fota island zoo, put all the animals over on spike island and ship the prisoners out once a week after dipping the fuckers in bovril.
‘nice tiger, nice tiger……’
Just this very evening I thought about the ideal place in Ireland to build a KY Jelly factory – why Ringaskiddy of course.
People who don’t want to live near a prison are morons, if a prisoner ever escapes they’ll want to get as far away from the fuckin place as possible.