People, Place and Power – The Grand Jury System in Ireland

34 2.1. Destruction and Survival ‘Flame observed through the glass roof’ Cork’s magnificent neo-classical courthouse in Washington Street opened in 1828. It served as the city’s courthouse, and also as the principal repository for the records of Cork city and county. The 1891 spring assizes opened at the courthouse on Saturday on 21 March, but the real excitement would be at the ‘Tipperary Riot’ trial which commenced the following Tuesday in front of a ‘special city jury’. The trial of five men brought a packed courthouse on each of its three days, not least because anti-Parnellite MPs, William O’Brien (Cork North East) and John Dillon (Mayo East), were transported from Galway Gaol to appear as witnesses. 36 On Friday afternoon about 500 people were present to hear Justice Monroe sum up the evidence when ‘flame was observed through the glass roof’. 37 The building was promptly evacuated with no fatalities, but within hours it was in ruins. Frantic efforts were made to save some of the records housed in the building and some grand jury records were spirited out, but the scale of the losses was enormous. What survived were later transferred to the Public Record Office, where they were consumed in the 1922 conflagration. Within two months of the Cork fire, an order was issued centrally that the Crown and Peace records for eighteen counties, including Cork’s two Ridings, were to be transferred to the Public Record Office in Dublin. By the end 1891 most counties had transferred their records, but it was too late in the case of Cork, where ‘the Clerks of the Crown and Peace for the East and West Ridings of Cork state that all their records were consumed in the great fire in Cork courthouse in March 1891’. 38 As for the Riot trial, it concluded the day after the fire in a classroom in the Model School, Anglesea Street, with no convictions. 39 At the Public Record Office of Ireland, the county records from grand juries across Ireland were placed in a building known as the ‘Record Treasury’—a six-storey over basement repository within the Four Courts complex. The ‘Record Treasury’ had opened in 1867, and records were soon filling the building, although until the 1890s most of the top floor was still vacant.