Catherine Coffey O’Brien (54) will “never know what lives” her six uncles and mother might have led had they been spared what she describes as “incarceration” in St Finan’s psychiatric hospital in Co Kerry.
All of the siblings had been placed in industrial schools in the 1950s after their removal from their Traveller parents. They had “brutal, tough lives at the hands of the State”, says Coffey O’Brien.
“They were on a conveyor belt from industrial schools to the psychiatric hospitals – their lives were robbed.”
Four of her uncles, none of whom married or had children, died in St Finan’s between 1996 and 2009.
On a visit to the vast St Finan’s campus in recent weeks, she has both fond and distressing memories of visiting family there as a child.
Closed since 2012, the vast gothic revival building is now locked up. The grounds remain open, however, and visitors can stop and peer in at paint peeling from walls, plaster falling from the ceilings, and notices still affixed to doors.
The facility opened in 1852 as the Killarney District Lunatic Asylum to accommodate 250 patients. It was renamed St Finan’s Mental Hospital in 1927. At its peak, in the mid-1950s, it housed about 1,100 patients and had its own farm. With the Legion of Mary, it co-hosted monthly céilí dances for patients and locals.
Coffey O’Brien’s mother Christina was “in there dozens of times”. She suffered with depression for which she was repeatedly committed and subjected to scores of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) sessions, a psychiatric treatment.
“I remember once coming to visit and she was after a dose of ECT. She was sitting in the chair, her hair was hanging over her face, she had dribble coming from her mouth and she had been sick … she asked me: ‘Don’t let them do that to me again,‘” Coffey O’Brien recalls.
The Irish Times has spoken to families of former patients in psychiatric hospitals, to former patients who describe themselves as “survivors” and former staff – all witnesses to and participants in the largest mass-confinements outside the penal justice system in Irish history.
[ Bessborough campaign group calls for hearing into proposed development at siteOpens in new window ]
An estimated 30,000 women ended up in Magdalene laundries during the 200 years they were in operation. A total of 56,000 unmarried mothers and 57,000 children were in mother and baby homes, and, about 50,000 children were held in industrial schools between the 1930s and 1970s.
On any one night in the 1950s more than 20,000 people were residents in psychiatric hospitals. Among them were Catherine Coffey O’Brien’s relatives.
The Coffey family’s story
Her uncles Michael, Danny, Patsy and Thomas lived most of their adult lives in St Finan’s. Michael died there in 1996 aged 64. He had been committed aged about 18 after he struck a priest whom he said had struck him first.
“He was considered dangerous and was kept locked in a room with a leg-shackle until the 1980s,” she says. “But I never felt in danger around him. I’d sit and eat sweets with him.”
Danny died in the hospital in 1997 aged 56, having been committed in his 40s, after three decades working on a farm.
Patsy died there in 2009 aged 62. He had arrived at Christina’s home after working on a farm. Unable to cope, she called a social worker who placed him in the hospital.
Her uncle Thomas, who had cerebral palsy from birth, was committed to St Finan’s aged 14, after being in an institution in Dublin. He died in the hospital in 2003, aged 64. Her uncles John and Jim each spent time in St Finan’s. John died in a nursing home and Jim in hospital in Tralee.
None married or had children. Catherine does not believe they were mentally ill, though they became fully institutionalised.
“Their basic human rights were taken from them. They had no lives, no families – a family, wiped,” she says.
Many others patients endured similar treatment.
“The asylums were the largest form of institutional confinement we did,” says Prof Damien Brennan, head of the school of nursing and midwifery in Trinity College Dublin and author of the 2013 book Irish Insanity 1800-2000.
“Their use was spectacular in both duration and scale.”
And yet, unlike other places of mass institutional confinement, the psychiatric hospitals have never been subjected to any statutory investigation or inquiry into the treatment of their patients.
Mary-Margaret’s story
Mary Donovan (57) is adamant “the psychiatrics” must be investigated. Her mother, Mary-Margaret Finn, was first admitted to St Finan’s in 1956 “for observation” aged 16, due to her “unsocial conduct”. Before Kerry, she had been in a Limerick reformatory school, having been sentenced for being “wayward”.
She appears to have become pregnant in St Finan’s. She was moved to a Magdelene laundry in Cork before having a baby boy in the city’s Bessborough mother and baby home in February 1957.
She would spend her entire adult life in and out of psychiatric hospitals in Killarney, Cork, Limerick and Dublin, including her final 25 years as a full-time in-patient.
She had a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but again and again the files show Mary-Margaret was deeply distressed in her marriage. They mention “very distressed state … situation precipitated by marital strife” (1986); “long history of marital disharmony” (1988) and “lacerations on forearms” (1976).
[ ‘Every little bone’: How 796 babies at Tuam’s mother-and-baby home will be exhumedOpens in new window ]
A note dated August 3rd, 1971, in St Brendan’s Hospital in Grangegorman, Dublin reads: “She says she went to Dublin … to get away from a miserable home life”.
Records show she was frequently picked up by gardaí wandering in traffic and begging. She had hundreds of sessions of electroconvulsive therapy.
“Everything they did just made her worse,” says Donovan. She believes her mother’s underlying needs were never addressed.
Mary-Margaret was admitted to St Finan’s for a final time in the mid-1980s. She was transferred to a high-dependency mental health unit in Tralee in 1995 and in 2009 moved to a nursing home where she died in 2014.
“My mother was trafficked – and that’s what I call it – from institution to institution as a child; then in and out of institutions,” says Donovan.
“They destroyed her brain’s capacity to parent. How many other women like her were locked away and still nobody knows about them?”
The Irish mental-asylum network dates back to 1817 and was groundbreaking by international standards of the time, predating asylum construction programmes in France, Scotland and England.
The 1821 Lunatic Act provided for construction of nine asylums: in Armagh, Ballinasloe, Belfast, Carlow, Clonmel, Derry, Limerick, Maryborough (Portlaoise) and Waterford, adding to those already in Dublin and Cork. Before independence, they were managed by asylum boards appointed from Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland, by the Lord Lieutenant.
A second building phase from 1845 saw more being established: in Cork, Kilkenny, Killarney, Mullingar, Omagh and Sligo. After 1860, further asylums were built in Castlebar, Downpatrick, Ennis and Enniscorthy. Letterkenny and Monaghan brought the total number to 23. After independence in 1922, the Free State government built another, in Ardee, Co Louth.
From inception and through their history they were State-provided, funded and managed and their “use” expanded seven-fold in the late 19th century, even as the population halved.
The Irish were not unusually disposed to insanity, says Brennan. Rather, the asylums were “used to manage a host of social problems”.
By the 1950s Ireland had the “dubious honour” of having the world’s highest rate of asylum residence, with one in every 140 people living in a mental hospital – more than in the USSR or the United States at the time, he notes. At their high-point, in 1956, there were 21,720 people in psychiatric hospitals.
Conditions in them were described in a 1966 Commission of Inquiry on Mental Illness report: “Considerable overcrowding … lack of furnishings … sanitary and bathing facilities were … of poor standard … catering was poor – kitchens very bad … medical staffing was inadequate.”
There were few protections, says Brennan, if someone wanted a family member admitted under the Dangerous Lunatics Acts of 1838 and 1867, and had the support of a doctor and magistrate. The “vast majority” of committals were initiated by family.
Among diagnostic criteria for committing people to asylums were melancholia (depression), mania and epilepsy, but also “disappointment in love”, “grief”, “unsocial activity” and “wandering”.
“These criteria were in constant flux and were so all-encompassing that any Irish person could be charged with having some sort of mental affliction,” says Brennan.
As their patient populations grew, the asylums grew in economic and social importance, providing huge employment and business – with thousands of patients and staff to feed daily – for local farmers and producers.
The 1945 Mental Treatment Act put doctors in charge of admissions and provided some protections against lengthy, involuntary detention, but in practice people could have their admissions extended repeatedly and indefinitely.
The 2001 Mental Health Act established the Mental Health Commission with its oversight of both conditions and patients’ rights.
John’s story
Former senator John Gilroy worked as a psychiatric nurse in Our Lady’s hospital, Cork, from 1984 to 1987, in England until 1992 and in St Stephen’s psychiatric hospital, Cork, from 1992 to 2011.
Our Lady’s, which closed in 1993, was “dull, cheerless” and despite “very decent, kind staff, abuse was built into the system,” he says.
“Patients were stripped of any autonomy, humanity. Once they came in they were stripped of their clothes and issued asylum clothes, which were shared. They had no bedside lockers but they had no possession to put in them anyway; no screens around their beds, no privacy and no access to privacy,” says Gilroy.
It’s when you step outside … you begin to see things very differently. People say these were different times but I am not sure this justifies what happened
— John Gilroy
“Three days a week the male patients would be lined up to be shaved. They were bathed twice a week, communally in a room with three baths and no screens between the baths. Staff would be standing there washing patients.”
Meal and bedtimes were “rigid” he says. Bedtime was the same year-round.
“You had fit, healthy men lying in bed by 7pm even on a beautiful summer evening,” he says.
He “was part of the system from 1984 to 2011″ and “unthinkingly went along with everything”, he says.
“It’s when you step outside … you begin to see things very differently. People say these were different times but I am not sure this justifies what happened,” says Gilroy.
Christy’s story
Mary Smith is no doubt that what happened to her late brother Christy was unjustified. When she found him “in a basement” in Our Lady’s hospital in 1990, he had been there for more than 20 years.
He had been brought in by gardaí in 1965 when he was aged 19 and homeless. He does not appear to have been diagnosed with any mental illness.
When Smith found him, he had never had a visitor.
He was never given a chance at having his own life. The people who did that to my mother and brother have to be held accountable
— Mary Smith
She and Christy had been in separate industrial schools as children. She found out about him by chance when a colleague from the same Co Cork town where her mother Eileen and Christy had once lived told her about them.
Following a search of records she found his birth certificate. A chance encounter with the late RTÉ broadcaster Gerry Ryan led to her appealing on national radio for help in locating Christy. This led her to the hospital on Cork’s Lee Road.
“I asked him if he was happy,” she recalls. “He said: ‘I don’t know.‘”
His psychiatric notes dated October 1965 say he was being “readmitted” having been “brought to hospital by … guards who stated patient was of NFA [no fixed abode] and was wandering the streets, a danger to himself and others”. He was 19 at the time.
Their mother had died in the same hospital the previous year, having been committed in 1958 from Peacock Lane, a Magdalene laundry.
A note by the Health Service Executive, compiled in 2006, as part of an internal review stated: “Christy was admitted … as a temporary patient (escorted by gardaí and an assistant officer) on January 25th, 1965 and discharged on September 9th, 1965.
“He was readmitted, again as a temporary patient on October 15th, 1965 and seems to have remained here until his transfer to St Stephen’s hospital on August 21st [1990].”
Smith tried for 17 years to have him discharged to her care, without success. She has deep concerns about the care he received, saying he was over-medicated and underfed. He is buried in Curraghkippane Cemetery, on the outskirts of Cork city.
“He was never given a chance at having his own life,” says Smith. “The people who did that to my mother and brother have to be held accountable.”
Bridget’s story
The psychiatric notes for Bridget Towey, a pregnant mother of nine, paint an equally tragic life. She was admitted to the Connaught District Lunatic Asylum, later renamed St Brigid’s psychiatric hospital, in Ballinasloe, Co Galway, with “melancholia” in October 1914. Her great grandson Martin Towey obtained her records which chart her steady deterioration.
Her 10th child, Evelyn, was born in November 1914.
“Patient very quiet and very cheerful,” state her notes at that time. Evelyn returned to the family home in Castlerea, but Bridget never did.
We cannot blame the Church for what happened here. People like us did this, participated in this, benefited from this
— Prof Damien Brennan
In May 1915 she described a “great flushing in her head” with “persecutory delusions about husband”, her notes state. In 1920 she is said to be “very destructive … says someone has stolen her children”.
In March 1923, it is said that Bridget has “hallucinations, laughs and talks to herself. Says her children are here too and calls them by their names”.
In 1927, her records state: “Kneels in the yard and rocks and says she is working for her children. Has obsession. Has to kick things.”
In 1928, the records state that she “tears her clothes … keeps spitting all day long. Kicks the walls.”
Towey’s grandfather, Bridget’s oldest son, who was 13 when she left home, visited her in her later years. Towey says he “would never talk about it and got upset if he ever did speak about her”.
“I think about her,” says Towey of his great-grandmother. “It must have been horrendous. It must have been so hard for thousands of people in the asylums. They are Ireland’s disappeared.”
Asylum admissions fell from the 1960s on. The decline was for a myriad of reasons including the effectiveness of new drugs, improved attitudes towards human rights, the declining power of the family to socially control and, crucially, says Brennan, the improving economy, which reduced a local community’s dependence on asylums.
By 2006 the population of psychiatric hospital in-patients numbered just 3,192. The vast institutions were almost vacant, “providing the political context for their unopposed closure,” says Brennan.
Will there be an investigation into the asylums? The TCD academic is not optimistic.
“The scale is so vast, but more than that, these institutions were not run by the Church. We cannot blame the Church for what happened here,” he says.
“People like us did this, participated in this, benefited from this. It is far less comfortable to confront our own institutional wrongs.”
I think of all the stolen destinies. My uncles were so special to me. They were so wronged, so wronged by the State. They all were
— Catherine Coffey O’Brien
Those who have spoken to The Irish Times believe an independent investigation is long overdue. They say the story of the State’s relationship with mass institutional confinement remains incomplete without it.
Among issues they want investigated are why so many Irish people were confined in them and for so long; conditions within them; the level of consent given for treatments including electroconvulsive therapy, insulin-coma therapy (where patients were injected with insulin) and psychotropic drugs.
They want to know if there were financial, physical, emotional or sexual abuses and what happened to patients’ bodies who remained unclaimed after their deaths.
Coffey O’Brien, who has spoken out about her own experiences in industrial schools and mother and baby homes, says she must now speak out about her family’s experiences of psychiatric institutions.
“My mother always said to me, about my uncles: ‘Don’t forget them.’ It has been easier to talk about myself, my own experiences.
“I wanted to protect my uncles. But there is no protecting them now; they are dead,” she says.
“I think of all the stolen destinies. My uncles were so special to me. They were so wronged, so wronged by the State. They all were.”
Survivors’ stories
Louise’s story
Louise, (not her real name), is in her late 40s and considers herself a “survivor” of institutional psychiatric care. She was admitted to St Brigid’s psychiatric hospital, Ballinasloe, in 1998 from Portiuncula hospital, following a suicide attempt.
The hospital, which opened in 1833 as Connaught District Lunatic Asylum, closed in 2013. The HSE plans to put most of the vast campus on the market this year.
“I was 19 and was in and out in 1998, in a mixed-gender, locked ward,” says Louise.
“There were very kind staff but as a young woman it was horrific some of the things I witnessed.
“The girls didn’t have any protection from the men and our beds were out of sight of the nurses. Some of the men were inappropriate and roamed. A lot of them were very elderly and it was obvious [they] didn’t know what they were doing.
“I witnessed everything from people in alcohol and drug withdrawals, people coming in for various offences against older people and children, people coming in complete psychosis.
“The guards were heavily present, bringing people in at night. We also had women who had been put in there years before because they had been a bit wild and were left in there for the rest of their lives.”
She became part of a drug trial for a then new antidepressant drug called Reboxetine in 1998.
“I went from being close to catatonic to being back at work within 14 days. I am still on it – it has been life-transforming for me,” she says.
“I think I would have been institutionalised if that drug had not come on the market. They kept saying if this didn’t work they only treatment left was ECT. And what I have seen of ECT, people didn’t come out well.
“There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think about or dream about that place and the people I met there.”
Ann’s story
For Ann O’Gorman (72), her time in St Joseph’s psychiatric hospital, Limerick, was a time of peace. She was admitted in 1969, aged 16, after an overdose. She had reported sexual abuse a year earlier, was removed from the family home, and placed working in a convent, and then in a clothing factory, before attempting suicide.
“The nurses were very kind to me, very nice. When I was discharged, I didn’t want to go. I did find it helpful because the nurses were very kind to me,” she says.
“I felt safe.”
