Ireland's Architecture of Containment: Concealed Citizens and Sites Bereft of Bodies

Abstract

With Irish Independence being granted in1922, the Irish Catholic Hierarchy and the Irish Politicians with their new found power embarked on the complex and highly fraught project of forging a new Irish Nationalist identity. In the decades which followed, the officially named “Irish Freestate” became a nationwide network of asylums, reformatory schools, industrial schools, Magdalen Asylums and Mother and Baby homes. A mere two years after the declaration of Irish independence, it was reported that “there were more children in industrial schools in the twenty-six counties of Ireland than were in all the industrial schools in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together,” (Raftery, O'Sullivan: 1999: 69, 72). Likewise, Rafferty and O'Sullivan claim that between 1869 and 1969 approximately 105,000 children were committed to industrial schools and that at its peak, the system consisted of 71 such institutions (1999: 20). This paper will draw on the experiences of my younger brother and I as we spent a combined total of 18 years in four such institutions in the Republic of Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. In the terms of much of the current literature on what is sometimes referred to as “coercive confinement” (O'Sullivan & O'Donnell, 2008: 32) we are amongst thousands of survivors of a state-sponsored and Church-administered system that as An Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern acknowledged in his ‘apology’ speech of 1999, all too often “denied children the care and security that they needed”, and worse still, perpetrated “grave wrongs”. With the recent conclusion of our 17 year legal battle with the Irish Catholic church and State and with research I am undertaking for my PhD project, “Remembering and (Re)Presenting Lives Within Care” I will recall the event where my brother and I were taken beneath the Four Courts in Dublin, an airless subterranean trap, and asked to trade away our voices. We have learned that in the face of the most insidious forms of State violence, one doesn't breathe to speak, one needs to speak to breathe. This is the story of our combat breathing.