Born on January 1st, a Troubled Ringsend Child

 

Mary Anne Molloy grew up in Ringsend. Her father, up to 1829, owned the salt works that once operated where Ringsend Park is today. She was once described a ‘smart looking lassie’ but behind this evocative description lay a case of sadness. Born on January 1^st 1821 in what was then known as the Kings County, now County Offaly, her family moved to Ringsend when she was just three years old. The family however seemed to fall on hard times. Living in a tenement building on Thomas Street in Ringsend, Mary was to have a chequered career and would spend much of her life in and out of prison.

 

She was only 13 years old when in December 1834, she found herself in court charged, along with her brother Robert with stealing and umbrella and boots. She was sentenced to three months in Mountjoy Barracks, which housed many female inmates. The jail that we know today was not built until 1850. She was jailed again in November the following year for one month for stealing a handkerchief and in July 1836 she received a six-month sentence for yet again stealing a handkerchief, serving both terms in Mountjoy Prison. Stealing a silk handkerchief was a popular crime as they were easily fenced or sold on. The perpetrator would be charged with ‘felony handkerchief’ which for many the punishment was transportation to Australia. On June 2^nd, 1837, she was sentenced to three weeks in prison for ‘disturbing the peace’, this crime often associated with someone who was drunk on the streets of the city or being a lady of the night. This time, rather than Mountjoy, she served her sentence in Grangegorman’s women’s prison.  According to TU Dublin’s history of Grangegorman,

‘The year 1836 saw the building change uses again – this time pressed into service as a Women’s Prison, the only one of its kind in the British Isles. It even used female guards to maintain an exclusively female presence. The fate for many of its prisoners was transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) where they generally became servants. In fact, the Grangegorman Women’s Prison became a hub for female prisoners from all over Ireland who were first sent there to learn useful skills, such as needlework, before beginning the long journey to the southern hemisphere. In all, over 3,000 female prisoners and more than 500 of their children made the journey from Grangegorman to Van Diemen’s Land. Typically, the journey lasted more than 100 days and many perished on the way.’

 

Over the next seventeen years Mary would serve varying length for sentence seventeen times. In 1841 alone she was sentenced eight times for ‘Disturbing the Peace’ with sentences varying from five days to fourteen days. In 1845 as famine began to grip Ireland, she was sentenced ten times. On February 6^th, 1845, she was sentenced to ten months in Grangegorman for a breach of the peace. But as early as July she was before the courts again sentenced to seven days for a breach of the peace. On May 21^st she was sentenced to another ten months, this time having been convicted of assault. But whatever way the prison was working at the time, Mary was back in Ringsend within weeks only to be found guilty of assault once again in July and this time sentenced to 20 months but would be sentenced five more times that year. Many people at the time committed petty crimes in order to be sent to prison to get a dry roof over their heads and something to eat. Remarkably in 1845 she was sentenced to a total of over 1,300 days in prison, serving only a small percentage of those prison terms.

In 1845, February 19^th, Breach of the Peace (14 Days0 ; March 5^th, Breach of the Peace (14 Days); March 24^th, Breach of the Peace (14 Days); May 21^st Assault (10 Months); July 15^th, Assault (20 Months); October 2^nd, Breach of the Peace (14 Days); October 20^th, Breach of the Peace (14 Days); November 12^th, Assault (10 Months); December 10^th, Breach of the Peace (14 days); December 24^th, Breach of the Peace (1 Month) all served in Grangegorman.

 

In 1850 she briefly entered the North Dublin workhouse but lasted little over a week in there. One of the last recorded sentencings of Mary Molloy was in July 1851 when got a 14-day term for pawning a stolen vest and that despite earlier that year receiving a two-year sentence for being in possession of stolen goods. But in December 1854 she appeared in the newspaper having been charged with two other women of ‘bad character’ with robbing a James Prendergast in Flood Street. When they were convicted in February the following year it emerged that they had robbed him in their brothel, Mary now operating as a prostitute. In December 1860 along with Catherine Keogh they were accused of robbing John Ryan of fifteen schillings once again in the brothel on Flood Street. Mary was discharged while Keogh was sent forward for trial that never took place. Mary died suddenly in Flood Street in 1864 from what the coroner concluded was a burst blood vessel in the brain.