Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd

Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland by Mark FinnaneReview by: David FitzpatrickIrish Historical Studies, Vol. 23, No. 91 (May, 1983), pp. 291-292Published by: Irish Historical Studies Publications LtdStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30008128 .

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INSANITY AND THE INSANE IN POST-FAMINE IRELAND. By Mark Finnane. Pp 241. London: Croom Helm; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble. 1981. £13.95.

THE study of madness provides a fascinating (and fashionable) approach to the broader investigation of culture and social structure. The mentality of the mad is scarcely more engrossing than the mentality of those who deem them so. The fears and faptasies of the deranged are exaggerated manifestations of social norms and inhibitions otherwise difficult to pin down: as Smollett put it, 'I think for my part one half of the nation is mad - and the other not very sound'. Moreover, the attitudes and actions of the supposedly sound towards those termed insane often betray tensions within society or the family which have more to do with property or social status than with personal derangement. Modern Ireland, because of its exceptionally high incidence of admission to mental hospitals, has aroused interest among psycho-social anthropologists. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, in her 'rather grim portrait of Irish country life' jokily entitled Saints, scholars and schizophrenics (Berkeley, 1979), treated schizophrenia in west Kerry as one facet of social 'anomie and despair' fostered by sexual repression, Jansenist guilt and unavailability of nubile women. In common with other anthropologists captivated by rural Ireland's 'decline', she highlighted recent 'anomie' by sketching in an implausible historical background of flourishing, well- organised and self-perpetuating extended families presumably (though not manifestly) less subject to mental disturbance than their disintegrating modern remnants. But no concerted attempt has yet been made to relate historical evidence of insanity to changing social structures, after the fashion of Richard Stivers in his ebullient if casual romp among Irish drinkers in Ireland and America (A hair of the dog, Philadelphia, 1976).

Unlike the Americans Scheper-Hughes and Stivers, the Australian Mark Finnane chooses a sober and cautious approach to Irish social pathology, even disdaining to exploit the black-comic potentiality of his topic. He makes no attempt to draw insights into underlying social structures from evidences of derangement, or to wheedle out modern diagnoses from archaic medical reports. Instead, he investigates the institutional and (to a lesser extent) the social contexts of committal to Irish public lunatic asylums between 1817 and 1914. His title, as with most monographs, is therefore misleading. Andrew Scull having secured the title Museums of madness (London, 1979) for his study of nineteenth-century Britain, Finnane's publishers might well have resorted to Galleries of lunacy: some aspects of the incarceration of the insane in pre-war Ireland. Within these limits Finnane has made, above all, a valuable contribution to the growing study of Irish institutional history. His approach owes much to Oliver MacDonagh, whose latest monograph The inspector general (London, 1981) concerns Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, Ireland's first inspector of madhouses. But Finnane, unlike the author of A pattern of government growth (London, 1961), is sceptical of the importance of humanitarian responses in shaping administrative change. Ireland was slow to benefit from changing views of lunacy in Britain, and those institutional changes which did occur were generated by the interplay of the shared but conflicting attempts of central and local authorities to limit their spending on lunacy at the expense of the other. Both failed, so that the rate-payer and Treasury were each paying twice as much for the upkeep of the insane in 1898 as in 1876. Though doctors dominated asylum management from the start, lunatics received virtually no medical treatment apart from the sharply resented and sometimes fatal application of punitive shower-baths. Despite their enormous capital and recurrent costs, which rivalled those of the far more wide-ranging poor-law system, the Irish asylums made strikingly inefficient and archaic provision for the insane.

Finnane's study has broad implications, only cursorily explored, for Irish social history. The procedures for committal and discharge ensured that it was easy for relatives or friends to consign their loved ones to asylums and difficult for the victims to

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obtain release. The increasingly expeditious arrangements for committing someone as a 'criminal' or 'dangerous lunatic' (under legislation of 1838 and 1867 which remained in force until 1945 in eire) permitted relatives to get rid of rivals or burdens without effective judicial or medical interference. As Finnane writes, 'by making possible the expeditious confinement of an offending family member, the law played a major role in recasting relationships of violence or incompatability into an opposition of sane and insane individuals'. He provides examples which might generate worthy successors to John Broderick's novel The waking of Willie Ryan: of a labourer's son deemed a 'dangerous lunatic' because 'he Can't be kept at home - but wanders about'; of a young wife of 'clear and unclouded mind' who was committed to asylum by her husband after he had failed to cure her fever by tying up her wrists with ropes which cut the flesh; of a priest with 'delusions' about his bishop whose discharge was delayed, against medical advice, upon the intervention of the prelate. Acceptance of this bizarre method of defusing family or neighbourhood squabbles was facilitated by the relative popularity of the asylums, which carried few of the stigmata attached to workhouses. The state's acceptance of responsibility for upkeep of the lunatic poor was unqualified by the workhouse principle whereby provision within the workhouse should be at least as inadequate as that obtainable outside it. Consequently lunatics were fairly heavily fed, and in 1873 the Treasury and rate-payers treated the inmates at Richmond Lunatic Asylum to more than one hundred thousand pints of beer in addition to wine and whiskey. As one of John Millington Synge's informants said of her brother after his discharge from Richmond: 'It's a wonder he ever came back when it was a fine time he had in the asylum'. Irish asylums might provide rewards as well as restraints.

This book leaves many of its implications tantalisingly unexplored. Perhaps some analyst of Irish family structure will follow up Finnane's suggestion that committals were commonly undertaken by spouses, discharge applications by siblings. No attempt is made to relate the increasingly cavalier use of the 'dangerous lunatics' legislation to changes in family or social relationships. What social changes generated the extraordinary alteration in the profile of asylum inmates between the turn of the century and 1971 (when the Irish psychiatric hospital census was held)? In the late nineteenth century, less than one admission in twenty was of persons over sixty-five; by 1971, nearly one-third of inmates had reached this age. Over the same period the proportion of unmarried patients rose from about two-thirds to more than four-fifths. Finnane briefly discusses the spectacular increase in lunacy in the west between 1871 and 1911, but much work remains to be done on the regional, social and demographic characteristics of those whom Irish society has at various times considered insane. Yet for all its limitations, Finnane's study provides fascinating insights into the interplay of an unwieldly and inefficient state administration with an opportunistic and faction- ridden population. As usual, the state was outwitted by the people.

DAVID FITZPATRICK Trinity College, Dublin

PICKING UP THE LINEN THREADS: A STUDY IN INDUSTRIAL FOLKLORE. By Betty Messenger. Pp xxii, 265. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 1978. $17.50. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. 1980. £9.95.

ALTHOUGH a publication subtitled 'A study in industrial folklore' would appear at first sight to have little to offer historians, no one interested in social or industrial history can afford to overlook it. Picking up the linen threads is no inconsequential collection of songs, anecdotes, rhymes, narratives, riddles, nicknames and sayings, but a serious academic attempt to portray an industry by analysing its folklore. This has important implications for historians. In her introduction Betty Messenger

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