Public Art Now Conversations 24-26 June 2021

Grangegorman histories

In the past 250 years, Grangegorman on the north side of , has been the site of a workhouse, a hospital, a prison and now it is to be integrated into the city as a health and education campus. In 1772 legislation was introduced in Ireland which radically changed the system of ‘managing’ the poor and orphans. In 1773 the Dublin House of Industry was built in the south-east quarter of the site. The House of Industry was an institution for the relief of the poor in the County of Dublin. It became the Poorhouse for the county and included sections used as asylums for the ‘aged, infirm, homeless children’ and others. The Richmond Lunatic Asylum (now the ‘TU Dublin Lower House’) was one of the first public psychiatric hospitals in Ireland. Built immediately to the west of the Poorhouse, the asylum received its first patients in 1814. It was named after the Duke of Richmond, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The asylum was intended for patients whose mental illnesses were considered to be treatable and the facility offered a humane alternative to vagrancy, or physical restraint at home which people with mental illnesses were frequently subject to. In the early years, a high quality of accommodation and environment was maintained for these patients. By the 1820s, however, changes in legislation led to overcrowding and to the reception of patients deemed by the courts of the time to be ‘criminally insane’. The asylum championed the ‘moral management’ of patients – good diet, exercise, social interaction and ‘occupation’ or work (unpaid however). The male patients’ work included tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry and weaving, while female patients were employed at needlework, spinning and of course, laundry. By 1836 the lands to the west of Grangegorman Lane were in use as recreational gardens for the benefit of the patients in the asylum (from 1851 access was by a tunnel built under the road to connect the two sites). Life in the asylum included leisure activities with visits from musical and drama groups, access to a library, and cricket and athletics on the playing fields. In the 1850s, patients in the asylum had access to the national school programme. During the First World War, the Richmond War Hospital was established at Grangegorman to serve as a shell-shock hospital. This post-traumatic disorder caused by exposure to bombardment affected 10 per cent of British soldiers during this war, and some 210,000 Irishmen fought in the First World War. Between June 1926 and December 1919, 362 soldiers were treated in a dedicated 32-bed wing on the site. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the complex expanded, and new facilities were developed including the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum (1850s), the Laundry Building (c1894), the Nurses’ Home (1938, expanded 1949) and others were added to facilitate the growing population of patients. In the 1850s the hospital catered for c.283 patients, by the 1940s, however, the Grangegorman Mental Hospital (renamed in 1923) was overcrowded with in excess of 2,000 patients. Statistics show that more patients were treated here than in any other asylum in the country. In the middle decades of the last century insulin therapy, electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomy were practiced in Grangegorman along with the ‘treatment’ of homosexuality. Lobotomy, involving the surgical separation of the frontal lobes of the brain, was performed on hundreds of patients at the hospital. It has been described by Professor Brendan Kelly as ‘possibly the biggest single mistake in the history of psychiatry.’ The Richmond Penitentiary (now the ‘Clock Tower’) was constructed in 1820, immediately to the north of the asylum. The building held both male and female offenders, the first prison in Ireland to emphasise reform and ‘moral management’ of prisoners rather than punishment. In 1832 it was taken over for an extended period for use as a cholera hospital and saw particularly heavy usage during the epidemic of that time. In 1836 the penitentiary became the Grangegorman Female Penitentiary, the first exclusively female prison in Great Britain and Ireland. This was used as the Grangegorman Transportation Depot between 1840 and the 1880s, when over 3,200 women and children were held there on their way to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). In the 1860s the penitentiary was extended and improved. It was again taken over for hospital use in 1897 during typhoid and beriberi outbreaks and was never returned to prison use. During this period, the building became part of the rapidly expanding complex of the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum. The last patients were removed in the 1930s and the buildings mostly demolished over the next few decades. From the late 1960s, the development of community-based alternatives to the treatment of mental illness resulted in a decline in the number of patients resident on the site, so that by time of closure in 2013,there were only c. 100 patients remaining. That year, the patients moved to the new Phoenix Care Centre and the rest of the site ceased to function as a hospital. In the years since then, the Dublin 7 Educate Together Temporary School opened in 2009, the first DIT (now TU Dublin) students arrived on the site in 2014, and the Grangegorman Primary Care Centre opened in 2018. In 2021, the new TU Dublin East Quad was completed, and the TU Dublin Lower House was reconstructed. Grangegorman Histories is a public history project of , Grangegorman Development Agency, HSE, Local Communities, National Archives, Royal Irish Academy and TU Dublin. Led by the Royal Irish Academy and the Grangegorman Development Agency, the project provides a series of opportunities to contribute to the important work of uncovering, cataloguing and commemorating the eventful history of this site and the surrounding area. Further details about Grangegorman Histories is available on our website www.grangegormanhistories.ie

Selected Reading Grangegorman Histories Foundation Document (see www.grangegormanhistories.ie) Ivor Browne, Music and Madness (Cork, 2008) Brendan Kelly, Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland (Dublin, 2016) and Grangegorman: Inside the Asylum (forthcoming ) Fr Alan Hilliard, ‘How Dublin Dealt with the 19 Century Cholera Epidemic’, RTE, 30 March 2020 (see https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0330/1127357-cholera-dublin-coronavirus/) Rebecca Sharon Lawlor, ‘Crime in nineteenth-century Ireland: Grangegorman female penitentiary and Richmond male penitentiary, with reference to juveniles and women, 1836–60’, March 2012, Unpublished MLitt thesis, Maynooth University Timothy P. O’Neill, ‘Fever and Public Health in Pre-Famine Ireland’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 103 (1973), 1–34 Joseph Reynolds, Grangegorman: Psychiatric Care in Dublin since 1815 (Dublin, 1992) National Archives, Penal Transportation Records (see https://www.nationalarchives.ie/article/penal- transportation-records-ireland-australia-1788-1868/) ‘Ghosts of Grangegorman’, RTE Documentary on One podcast, March 2016 Karl O’Brien, ‘Goodbye Grangegorman’, Irish Times, 23 February 2013