We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

St Mary Magdalene’s Asylum was (and is – the main building still exists) five minutes’ walk from the principle thoroughfare of the nation’s capital, O’Connell Street. It is not hidden away. It fronts right onto the street, a long, imposing three-storey brick façade suggestive of solidity, permanence, normality. It was there – but its residents were not there. They had disappeared into an abyss of memory, dignity, belonging, citizenship, human rights, personhood. They were beyond the reach of the law. Many of the inmates were children unlawfully transferred from industrial schools, a vast network of institutions, also under the control of religious orders, in which children whose parents were deemed incapable of caring for them, were incarcerated – trafficked is probably the right word. Labour laws governing wages and conditions were entirely flouted – slavery is certainly the right word. In Dublin, as in Cork and Galway, these black holes were not at the edge of the ordinary cosmos. They existed side by side with the shops and the offices and the cafés and the pubs, just as the culture of hypervigilance that created them existed side by side with a profound instinct for when to look the other way.