LAW41050 Coercive Confinement

Academic Year 2022/2023

This module provides an overview of the incarceration of tens of thousands of men, women and children during the first fifty years of Irish independence. Psychiatric hospitals, mother and baby homes, Magdalen homes, reformatory and industrial schools, prisons and Borstal formed a network of sites of coercive confinement that was integral to the emerging state. The module examines a wealth of contemporaneous accounts of what life was like within these austere and forbidding places as well as offering an explanation for the longevity of the system and the reasons for its ultimate decline. While accounts exist of individual institutions and the factors associated with their operation, this is an attempt to provide a holistic view of the interlocking range of institutions that dominated the Irish landscape and, in many ways, underpinned the rural economy. The module highlights the overlapping roles of church, state and family in the maintenance of these forms of social control. These arguments remain relevant as Irish society continues to grapple with the legacy of its extensive use of institutionalization.