Ireland’s asylum scandal: out of sight, but not out of their minds

They lost the best years of their lives.

Locked away, all they could do was look out the window at the world passing them by. Often they remained incarcerated just miles from their own homes, the attendants on the ward people they knew in a previous life.

They were the unclaimed; another part of this country’s shameful past which has yet to be fully acknowledged.

Left to languish in State-run asylums in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s and even further on, many of these men and women were not even in need of psychiatric care. When initially signed in, it was often under the pretext of a rest from the stress of life or in some cases there was no reason even offered. Many did not have mental difficulties at all. Left too long, they often became institutionalised, never able to regain a normal life even when the asylum walls eventually came down.

It is a part of our history we don’t like to talk about, but the truth is in Ireland of the last century many were checked into asylums for a lot of reasons other than mental health issues. And they were kept there for the very same reasons. These men and women were the problems that had to be solved; their so-called shameful mistakes hidden by their families and society behind the stone walls of the asylum.

It was these sad stories I drew on to write The Judge’s Wife. Similar to my bestselling debut novel, The Ballroom Café, which was published last year, there is one main issue running through The Judge’s Wife.

A story spanning three decades, this saga sweeps from 1950s Dublin to the coffee estates of southern India. The Judge’s Wife is the story of Grace, a Dublin girl married off to an older judge. She falls in love with an Indian doctor, Vikram Fernandes, but ends up in an asylum. The novel moves between the streets of 1950s Dublin and Bangalore of the 1980s as decades later the secrets of the past begin to unfold. It is up to Grace’s daughter on the death of her father, the Dublin judge, to unearth the secrets and unravel the mystery of her mother’s life. What she finds shocks her profoundly and life can never be the same again.

As in The Ballroom Cafe, the issue at the heart of The Judge’s Wife is exceptionally serious, but here it is wrapped in fiction, allowing an examination from all sides without pronouncing judgement.

Grace Moran was a beautiful young woman who lived the good life in Dublin, wanting for nothing expect love. She wore the most beautiful clothes by designer Sybil Connolly, but even she was not immune from the fear of public shame, which drove others to have her committed to an asylum, after her love affair with Vikram Fernandes was found out and she gave birth. In The Judge’s Wife we can see clearly how the past very much determines the future and how the next generation is affected by the mistakes and misguided actions of those who have gone before.

But this is not a sad story; it is the story of resilience, forbidden and hidden love and the enduring love between a mother and daughter. It moves from the coffee estates in the hills of India to Dublin city following the story of Vikram and Grace as well as the brutal monotony of life inside the asylum walls. One of the more telling comments is when an inmate talking about another woman on the ward says she is one of the lucky ones “ because she really is mad”.

It is a love story expressed too in Vikram’s wish that he could whisk Grace away to India to sit in the shadow of the monument to love the Taj Mahal, “to hold your hand and just be”.

But it is the shadow of the past that Grace’s daughter must clear away before she can find answers.

The Judge’s Wife is a work of fiction, but the sad truth is there are many families with similar secrets in the past, where one of their loved ones was placed for a time or forever in an asylum.

Indeed, one of the more interesting statistics that kept coming up during my research was the Irish town which in the early 1950s had a population of 5,600 with 2,000 patients in the local mental hospital.

Experts have contended that the level of mental hospital usage in Ireland in the 1950s was the highest in the world with a rate of 710 beds per 100,000 of population, even ahead of Russia and the US.

Maybe now is the time when the State can acknowledge the sad stories of the past and give a voice finally to those who remained unclaimed or those who were released, but lived out their days regretting the lost years behind the asylum walls.

[ Ann O’Loughlin ]

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