Drawing upon Lectures 8 (Professor Kearns) and Lecture 9 (Professor Till), and the reading from Catherine Cox (2018), discuss an historical institution of incarceration in Ireland as a form of structural and systemic injustice. This may include Workhouses, Asylums for Penitent Women/Magdalen Laundries, Foundling Hospitals/Mother and Baby Homes. Be sure to discuss how the state, church, and society justified placing people in these institutions, their levels, and forms of discipline and social order. Please also note what human rights abuses have been documented in the institution, and if possible what the experience of being in such an institution was like.
SJ Learning Journal 6
As Crowe (2021) write, records of the past are incomplete, contradictory, biased, missing and in Ireland, restricted by religious orders. Discuss the importance of testimony, or personal stories of the survivors (of Industrial Schools, Magdalen Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes), in calling attention to the histories of state- and church-supported gender oppression in Irish society. Provide at least one or more examples of a personal testimony (available in Crowe (2021), lecture, the Abbey Theatre’s Home: Part 1 (2021) production, the CLANN Project, Hogan (2019/20), or the Government of Ireland’s (2021) ‘Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes: Dramatisation of Individual Stories’.
