Coercive Confinement in post-Independence Ireland by Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan Manchester University Press £53.99
A REFERENDUM on the rights of the child looms; the Minister for Children announces a new child and family support agency. Could it be that, well into the 21st century, this State is waking up to the unmet needs of our most powerless citizens? For a reminder as to how badly we got it wrong in the past, our leaders need look no further than a recent publication.
Coercive Confinement in Ireland deserves a much wider readership than its authorship by two academics might suggest. Devoid of polemic, it uses first-hand and lost or forgotten contemporaneous accounts to shed light on some of the many ways in which people, mostly young and from disadvantaged backgrounds, could be incarcerated for long periods. It makes for lively and intelligent, if rather depressing, reading.
From unmarried mothers to life sentence prisoners, by way of the poorhouse, the workhouse, the asylum, reform school, and the nightmares of Daingean and Letterfrack, the casual reader is struck by how many institutional establishments existed since the inception of the State.
Even worse, it is striking how easily one could fetch up in one and how difficult it might be to get out. It is remarkable how many people, in how many categories, became institutionalised despite not having done “wrong” in any meaningful sense.
The editors note, for example, that in the 1960s the average time in prison served by way of a life sentence, at six years, was less than the time spent by many destitute children in industrial schools, the forgotten thousands in involuntary psychiatric detention, or unmarried mothers in laundries.
Noting that the first 50 or so years after independence was a time of relatively little crime and a very low prison population, the editors describe a “large infrastructure of social control” outside the criminal justice system, confining “troubling and troublesome citizens” to alternative institutions of detention. Such mechanisms, of course, tended frequently to avoid difficulties by way of due process.
The work contains a cross section of official reports and other documents, along with first-hand accounts by detainees of their experiences. For the most part these are negative, though some learned to read and write and managed to leave their surroundings behind.
The volume closes with the story of Charlie “The Hare” Maguire, the longest-detained psychiatric patient in Ireland, a classic victim of institutionalisation, who spent 48 years in hospital as “unfit to plead” to a charge of setting fire to some hay. Maguire is not some figure from ancient history. He died in custody in 2010.