Description
Grangegorman—Dublin’s oldest psychiatric institution—operated from 1814 to 2013, becoming a centerpiece of Ireland’s troubling legacy of mass institutionalisation. By the 1970s, the country housed more people in mental hospitals per capita than anywhere else in the world. Beyond those with mental illness, Grangegorman became home to society’s unwanted: people with intellectual disabilities, alcohol problems, and those who simply found no way to fit in. As part of the Grangegorman Histories project, this former asylum’s transformation into a university campus prompted a critical examination of its complex past.
Lianne O’Hara’s Grangegorman poems mine the National Archives of Ireland and use original interviews to illuminate silenced lives and challenge historical erasure.
The Patients All Seemed Happy is a commission of Grangegorman Histories’ public call.
Writing Ireland is an independent press devoted to the creative use of archives to explore Irish social and cultural histories.