Out of Sight, Out of Mind

On patterns of behaviour in a post-colonial state

I think we all have moments in life that are etched in our memory because we behaved badly; acted in a way that was not aligned with our values, did something to be legitimately (a)shamed about it.

One of mine is rushing for the last Tube along a dark side-street near Trafalgar Square (nearly 10 years ago now) on a miserable Winter’s night in London and stepping over several people, silent, unmoving, wrapped in sleeping bags and cardboard on the footpath. Fellow humans, with nothing but a few strips of poorly insulated nylon between them and minus temperatures and I Stepped Over Them. I’m not sure what the correct adjective is to describe such behaviour? Ignorant? Inhuman? Uncompassionate? Shameful? I’ll let you decide.

The world is so full of pain and suffering these days that a certain amount of cognitive dissonance becomes necessary to get yourself out the door, and I am ‘hands-up’, ‘guilty-as-charged’ in that respect to a large number of ‘social issues’ (avoiding the sheer daily horror of it is why I rarely watch, listen to or read any news or media). But among that litany there are two which always punch me in the guts: animal welfare/cruelty and homelessness. It is the same for my husband —our values are almost identical— and neither of us can cope with any account of harm done to an animal or the ever worsening, devastating statistics on and realities of homelessness. The former because we both love animals more than life itself and the latter because we are acutely aware that, if it wasn’t for the privileged safety-net of family and friends, we are but one lost job and a couple of months unpaid rent away from no roof to call our own. It can happen to anyone and my husband has had points in his life where he came very close (and the fear of it will probably always be in him).

This is why, among all the other crappy things I have done in my life, my behaviour that night in London, when I allowed my personal desire to get off a poorly lit, late-night-city street as quickly as possible override my deep values of compassion and decency, remains a scar on my consciousness.

The news this week of Dublin City Council’s proposed bye-laws to regulate soup-runs at a time when homelessness is at a record high in Ireland and food insecurity so prevalent was thus a news story I couldn’t and didn’t avoid but followed closely.

The common thread I noticed across various articles was the repeated emphasis of various Dublin City councillors and spokespeople for DCC that the proposed regulations would ‘protect the public realm’ and the ‘dignity of people using the service’ (of soup-runs) by designating set-times and locations to permitted and approved soup-runs. And from what I could glean from these various articles there is a particular emphasis on designated locations being ‘indoors.’

I read a lot of historical articles and studies as part my Women of Ireland Project research and I’m always looking for patterns in social structures across time, especially commonalities in the decisions made by the Irish State since its conception in 1922. And one very notable and consistent pattern across various Irish governments, policy-makers and servants of the state for the last 103 years has been a desire to ‘contain’ (as opposed to address) things labelled as ‘social issues’ or a threat to ‘the public realm.’

I use the term ‘contain’ deliberately and in reference to the compelling work of historian James Smith who proposed that twentieth-century state-run, funded and supported institutions like Industrial Schools, Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries formed “The Architecture of Containment” of the Irish State. At the time, such institutions were presented as places of refuge, as places where the ‘dignity’ of those ‘in need of their services’ could be protected. In reality, they were not places of refuge but places of hiding and containment — mechanisms through which the state could ‘hide’ and ‘contain’ various social realities deemed problematic or shameful and, by doing so, avoid acknowledging the reality of them or addressing the underlying issues they were but a symptom of.

Out-of-sight, Out-of-mind has been the Playbook of the Irish State since it’s foundation.

Photo by Joel Filipe on Unsplash

When the Carrigan Committee of 1930-31 reported “That there was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of cases of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years”¹ the State refused to publish the report (preferring to hide it from public knowledge) largely ignored the legislative changes proposed by the Report to address the prevalence of child sexual abuse. Instead, it chose to focus on what it deemed the cause of Ireland’s ‘moral decline’ — contraception and ‘fallen women.’

As I’ve written about elsewhere (such as this article) institutionalisation has also been Ireland’s historical approach to mental illness. At one point in the twentieth-century the 26-county Republic had more 'psychiatric beds’ per 1,000 of the population than anywhere else in the world,² a statistic which reached it’s peak in 1958 when there were 20,046 people contained in auxiliary and district mental hospitals across the country³, the majority of which had received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. As anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who sought answers to the social reasons behind Ireland’s exceptionally high apparent schizophrenia diagnoses rates by immersing herself in life in one rural Co. Kerry parish, wrote:

“Rural Ireland, I concluded, was a place where it was difficult to be ‘sane’ and where ‘normal’ villagers could appear more ‘deviant’ that those institutionalised in the County Kerry mental hospital. Madness was, I argued, a social script and there were appropriate and inappropriate ways of ‘going’ and ‘being’ mad in rural Ireland. Extreme eccentricity was allowable, even coddled, if it could pass as harmless ‘foolery’ or if it came wrapped in the mantle of Irish spirituality. ‘Mihal, bless him, hasn’t been quite right since the death of his mother, but what harm if he sits up all night in the barn singing to the cows’? Mihal would never see the walls of St. Finian’s madhouse. But there would be no excuses made for Seamus, the reluctant 44-year-old bachelor who expressed his frustration at a parish dance by leaping on the stage and drunkenly exposing himself to a crowd of village girls. He, of course, was quite mad.”⁴

Avoiding and denying the reality of anything deemed problematic, dangerous, undesirable, inappropriate, upsetting, or shameful, by hiding and removing them from the sight of the ‘public realm’ through regulation and the creation of designated spaces of containment (i.e. ‘Architectures of Containment’), is a consistent pattern of behaviour by the Irish State (and I’m sure you can think of many more examples beyond the two I mention above). So, when, this week, I read of proposals to regulate where and when some of the most exceptional citizens in our society (the volunteers and charities organising Dublin’s much-needed soup-runs) can support some of the capital’s most vulnerable because of concerns over ‘dignity’ and a desire to ‘protect the public realm,’ a shiver ran down my spine. The sentiment, the rationale and the proposed action, with its emphasis on ‘indoors’ versus ‘out-in-the-visible-open,’ were all too familiar.

Behind every pattern of behaviour there is a cause, a reason. And I do not highlight this pattern in the history of the State to direct blame or point fingers. Rather to shed light. To open a space wherein we can discuss, theorise and consider the underlying causes of actions which repeatedly appear as avoidant, aimed at reducing the visible reality of something rather than tackling the root (e.g. a housing crisis). Why all the hiding? Why the lack of accountability?

My personal ruminating on this these last view days brought to mind the work of psychologist Geraldine Moane on “Postcolonial legacies and the Irish Psyche.” It is widely recognised and accepted that Ireland is a post-colonial state, yet, how that continues to impact the behaviours of state actors is rarely considered (and, indeed, all of us raised or living in Ireland). In reflecting on her various research over the years, Moane writes:

“I argued that our history of colonisation rendered us culturally more vulnerable to new forces of globalisation, and psychologically more vulnerable to exploitation. I identified five patterns that I called ‘cultural pathologies.’….. I labelled them: alcohol and drug abuse; denial and doublethink (Irish solution to an Irish problem); distortions of sexuality; horizontal hostility (begrudgery); and social irresponsibility. Adopting a liberation psychology perspective that also highlights strengths from oppression, I identified three strengths that I suggested were resources for resistance and transformation, namely community, creativity and spirituality. These patterns can be seen as psychosocial patterns, operating at both the sociological and psychological levels.”⁵

In the context of a people more vulnerable to globalisation, and a state with a pattern of behaviour littered with denial, double-think and social irresponsibility, it is perhaps ever more pertinent that we support and champion those very ‘resources for resistance and transformation’ that so many soup-runs and exceptional Irish charities represent: ‘community, creativity and spirituality’. For as Moane explains, this (not regulation or containment) is the good stuff that truly enables decolonisation:

Decolonisation:

“A creative process in which the psyche and society mutually construct a context where the human potential for co-operation, creativity, love and imagination can flourish”

Geraldine Moan: Postcolonial legacies and the Irish Psyche

1. Pg. 355 in Kennedy, F. (2000). The Suppression of the Carrigan Report: A Historical Perspective on Child Abuse. Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 89(356), 354–363.

2. Walsh, D., Daly, A., & Moran, R. (2016). The institutional response to mental disorder in Ireland: Censuses of Irish asylums, psychiatric hospitals and units 1844–2014. Irish Journal of Medical Science (1971 -), 185(3), 761–768. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11845-015-1368-4

3. Walsh, D. (2017). Mental Health Services in Ireland, 1959-2010. In P. M. Prior (Ed.), Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish: 1800-2010. Irish Academic Press.

4. Pg. 122 in Scheper-Hughes, N. (2000). Ire in Ireland. Ethnography’s Kitchen, 1(1), 117–140.

5. Pg. 127 in Moane, G. (2015). Postcolonial legacies and the Irish psyche. In Are the Irish different? (pp. 121–132). Manchester University Press. https://www.manchesterhive.com/display/9781847799579/9781847799579.00018.xml

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