The Carceral Network in Ireland

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction: A Decolonial Approach to Ireland’s Protean Carceral Network

   • Fiona McCann

   Pages 1-19

3. The Dublin Intermediate Prison System

   • Emilie Berthillot

   Pages 21-45

4. Shifting Carceral Formations: A Genealogy of Penal (Re)construction in the North of Ireland

   • Ruari-Santiago McBride

   Pages 47-74

5. Rehabilitating the Prison: The Evolution of Strategies for Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Carceral Heritages

   • Chris Hamill

   Pages 75-90

6. The Prisoners’ Rights Organisation and Penal Reform in the Republic of Ireland

   • Cormac Behan

   Pages 91-112

7. ‘A Virtually Self-Contained Community’: Unorthodox Containment and Prisoner Autonomy in the Maze/Long Kesh Compounds

   • Erin Hinson

   Pages 113-132

8. Gusty Spence: Agent of Conflict, Creativity, and Change

   • Connal Parr

   Pages 133-154

9. Mairéad Farrell in the Armagh Gaol

   • Katherine Side

   Pages 155-177

10. Stories from the Cells: The Role of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison in Peace Time Northern Ireland

    • Kate Keane

    Pages 179-204

11. Acts of Survival and Resistance in Industrial and Reformatory Schools in Ireland in the Twentieth Century

    • Sinead Pembroke

    Pages 205-226

12. The Room Where Nothing Makes Sense: Historiophobic Space and the Aesthetics of Child Maltreatment

    • Mathew Staunton, Deirdre Forde

    Pages 227-258

13. Incarceration, Disavowal and Ireland’s Prison Industrial Complex

    • Ronit Lentin

    Pages 259-278

14. Back Matter

    Pages 279-285

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This book examines the forms and practices of Irish confinement from the 19th century to present-day to explore the social and political failings of 20th and 21st century postcolonial Ireland. Building on an interdisciplinary conference held in the Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, the methodological approaches adopted across this book range from the historical and archival to the sociological, political, and literary. This edited collection touches on topics such as industrial schools, Magdalen laundries, struggles and resistance in prisons both North and South, Direct Provision, and the ways in which prison experiences have been represented in literature, cinema, and the arts. It sketches out an uncomfortable picture of the techniques for policing bodies deployed in Ireland for over a century. This innovative study seeks to establish a link between Ireland’s inhumane treatment of women and children, of prisoners, and of asylum seekers today, and to expose and pinpoint modes of resistance to these situations. 

• political prisoners
• irish prisons
• history of ireland
• prison reform
• prison policy
• prison architecture
• conflict in ireland
• incarceration
• protest
• human rights
• prison development
• prison photography
• memory
• gender and power
• industrial schools
• peace
• confinement
• prison narratives
• Irish literature
• British and Irish Literature
• British Politics

• CECILLE, University of Lille/Institut Universitaire de France, Lille, France

  Fiona McCann

Fiona McCann is Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the Université de Lille, France. She has published widely on contemporary Irish, South African, and Zimbabwean literature and she has a particular interest in writing by political prisoners in the English-speaking postcolonial world.

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