Inferno 3 Graffiti at Cork City Gaol

Cork County Gaol – a working prison between 1824 and 1923 – hosts a variety of graffiti carved and scratched onto the walls of ground floor cells. Among poems, scribbles, drawings, and prisoners’ names, there is a graffiti that reflects on the sorrow of incarceration and the inmates’ hellish living conditions by referring to the opening of Inferno 3:

Abandon all hope who enter here
out of this there is no redemption
Who ever wrote this

He wrote it well
for the same is written
on the gates of Hell

While the exact authorship of the inscription is unknown, graffiti in the cell are attributed to male and female Republican (Anti-Treaty) prisoners of the Irish Civil War who served time in the Gaol in 1922-23.

Contributed by Aistė Kiltinavičiūtė