DUBLIN (IRELAND)
Irish Times
February 8, 2021
By Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell
State-run psychiatric hospitals were the single greatest contributor to coercive confinement in mid-20th century Ireland
The recently published report into mother and baby homes is the latest investigation into institutions that together constituted what we have described as a network of “coercive confinement” in Ireland.
This also included prisons, reformatory and industrial schools, psychiatric hospitals, county homes (former workhouses), and Magdalene laundries.
Yet the largest part of this landscape of confinement – institutions run by the State, particularly psychiatric hospitals – has gone unexamined.
The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, chaired by Justice Seán Ryan, estimated that 42,000 children passed through orphanages, reformatory and industrial schools between the 1930s and the 1970s. Former pupils gave evidence of the physical and sexual abuse they had experienced.
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