For any newcomer who wants to get beneath the skin and understand what ha shaped the modern country, fro anyone with the smallest interest in Irish history and the centuries of strain and strife between Ireland and England, this tour of Ireland’s most famous jail is a must.

The guides are young, enthusiastic, and passionately interested in their subject. You will come to appreciate why Kilmainham Gaol is a national monument, a keystone in the building of an independent Ireland, once you have walked its cold, echoing corridors, stood silently in one of the tiny, chilly cells and stared around the blank-walled execution yards.

Kilmainham Gaol was not built purely to house political prisoners, but as an all-purpose prison for general malefactors. The guided tour begins in the prison museum with an introduction to street-level Dublin of Georgian and Victorian times, a place of crowded, unsanitary slums, mass unemployment, rampant disease, ignorance, alcoholism, child abuse, and early death.