What would criminology look like if it had not emerged from the nineteenth-century scientific modernism, industrialisation and urbanisation? What would consume the discipline if it had not been moulded and remoulded by the rise and fall of social democracy and neoliberalism in the twentieth century? A counterfactual is hard to imagine against this origin story. This chapter suggests that the Republic of Ireland can provide one case study that may throw light on an alternative history and criminological present. Criminology in Ireland is not just another branch of English-language criminology but presents an instructive case study of an English-speaking jurisdiction situated some way down the epistemic hierarchy. Ireland has been frequently absent from Anglophone and European criminology, and its position as a persistent outlier speaks to bigger critical concerns about the politics of criminological knowledge production. This chapter aims to de-centre the English-speaking metropole and challenge the historical dominance of England and the USA in the field, examining Irish penal history to challenge knowledge inequalities embedded within the discipline, and help develop a new pedagogy of penality.