Ciara Breathnach

Registered ‘unknown’ infant fatalities in Ireland, 1916–32: gender and power

The phenomenon of ‘unknown’ infant deaths addressed in this article was first explored in the course of research on fatalities arising from political violence during the Irish revolution of 1916–1921. Our data are derived from the General Register of Death Indices (G.R.D.I.), held in the General Register Office, Dublin, which are organised alphabetically, and which form an official record of deaths registered either by relatives of the deceased or by medical personnel. When infant ‘unknown’ fatalities were extracted to form a discrete database they showed a curious gender disparity. There were 100 male infant fatalities recorded for every seventy-eight females in the thirty-two counties over the five-year period. On extending the study to 1932, the same ratio was prevalent in the overall dataset of 895 ‘unknown infants’ drawn from the G.R.D.I. (a dataset which excludes the six counties of Northern Ireland for the period from1922). Initial research into the gender imbalance opened out wider questions concerning social mores regarding illegitimacy, and the extent of medical and lay knowledge of how newborn infants might be brought to death.

The Role of Women in the Economy of the West of Ireland, 1891-1923

The role of women in the rural economy in the West of Ireland altered dra matically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Joanna Bourkes important 1993 study, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland 1890-1891, argues that Victorian reform agencies? specifically, the Congested Districts Board (CDB), the Irish Agricultural Organ isation Society founded in 1894, and later, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction founded in 1899?intentionally displaced the role of women in the rural economy by removing female labor from the fields and rel egating it to employment in the home.2 However, Bourkes contention that the CDB was guilty of imposing an enforced housewifery on the women of the West fails to consider other powerful forces at work in Irish society; it would be more accurate to state that the CDBs major role in effecting a shift in womens economic roles was that it enhanced already existing mechanisms of paid female employment. Rural life in Ireland presented two distinct economic zones in the later half of the nineteenth century. The West was submerged in varying degrees of rela tive and absolute poverty, while the East enjoyed the spoils of better land, bet ter transport, and better market facilities.2 Philanthropists highlighted the plight

Scripting blame: Irish coroners' courts and unnamed infant dead, 1916–32

In the early morning of 5 January 1919 Minnie R. gave birth to a male child on Church Street in Ennis. She later recollected: ‘I became very ill and gave birth to a baby. Nobody came to my assistance and [I] stayed there about ten minutes. I walked over to the workhouse gates bringing the child rolled in a scarf. The child was alive and crying. I stopped at the workhouse gate about three hours. A man who was passing kicked the gate very loudly. I had already done my best to attract the porter’s attention. After some hours I was admitted by the porter, the baby was then dead a good time, the night was very cold.’ This highly unusual account of isolation and illness forms part of a series of depositions recorded at the coroner’s court in Ennis two days after the infant’s death in a case where the mother of an unnamed infant was permitted to give evidence (in cases classified as ‘unknown infant death’ parentage was not determined). In all of the other inquest reports concerning unnamed infant deaths identified here, family members or employers were subpoenaed to give evidence and a character reference for the mothers, while the mothers themselves were not called upon. Prior to arriving at the workhouse Minnie R. had been turned away by her landlady, Mrs MacMahon, who later claimed that she thought Minnie R. was suffering from dropsy, and that she had no knowledge of her leaving the house on 5 January 1919. Minnie R. deposed that Mrs MacMahon was aware she was ill, and ‘told me to go and knock up Reilly’s as she did not know anything’. The depositions associated with this case make no direct references to her pregnancy, the concealment of which was a criminal act, and do not capture the grief and despair one might expect in a

Even ‘Wilder Workhouse Girls’: The Problem of Institutionalisation among Irish Immigrants to New Zealand 1874

Studies of the Irish in New Zealand tend to focus predominantly on sectarian issues and respective ‘identities’. While class is explored to a lesser extent, it is mainly through the lens of occupational status. Overall, migrant poverty and criminality in that colonial setting has received the least attention from historians, because the socio-economic profile of the majority of Irish immigrants was generally of a higher status. This article traces a group of poor assisted immigrants that departed Cork at very short notice in 1874 and examines how some of them achieved notoriety in New Zealand. Using a combination of poor law records, shipping records, newspapers, government reports and criminal statistics, this article traces the fortunes of the single Irish workhouse girls. Irish Poor Law registers can be notoriously tricky to negotiate and present many problems for historians. Periodically Poor Law Guardians invested in assisted immigration schemes and to that end they surrendered groups of migrants. In so doing, the guardians bound individuals by a range of similarities—marital status, social class, fiscal means, age, abilities and gender to mention but a few—and such groups lend themselves to case-study analysis. As prophesised by those who argued against its foundation, the poor law network in Ireland both created and exacerbated many social problems. In many respects, when over-crowding occurred, it offered little by way of training and thus created a stasis for poverty. Building on recent case studies of ‘wild workhouse girls’ undertaken by Anna Clark on the South Dublin Union and Virginia Crossman on a Wexford Union, this research explores the concept of ‘modulation’ used by Patrick Fitzgerald and Brian Lambkin in the context of migration, whereby migrants were at the mercy of the host community to decide whether they can be accepted or rejected.1 This article traces and links the ‘institutionalised’ behavioural patterns of these poor, unskilled, single, young women with indefinite periods of ‘modulation’ in a negotiated space between rejection, vice, incarceration and an existence on the ‘outside’.

Handywomen and Birthing in Rural Ireland, 1851–1955

It is largely agreed among scholars of social history and history of medicine that the medicalisation of maternity was slow to evolve in Ireland as it was beleaguered by competing professional, denominational and political agendas. Such discourses have dominated Irish history of medicine and hindered the progress of the medicalisation debate. A notable feature of the birthing process in Ireland is that for centuries handywomen, or untrained midwives, played a crucial role yet they have not been subject to the attention of historians. This article traces references to them in Irish Folklore Commission (1935–71) manuscripts and places them in wider social contexts to contend that their slight representation was a result of medico-legal awareness and a desire to protect the identity of women who, after 1918, were operating outside the law.

‘Heavier the interval than the consummation’: bronchial disease in Seán Ó Ríordáin's diaries

Abstract Narratives of the experience of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) are relatively rare in the Irish context. A scourge of the early twentieth century, TB was as much a social as a physically debilitating disease that rendered sufferers silent about their experience. Thus, the personal diaries and letters of Irish poet, Seán Ó Ríordáin, (1916–1977) are rare. This article presents translations of his personal papers in a historico-medical context to chronicle Ó Ríordáin’s experience of a life marred by respiratory disease. Familiar to generations of schoolchildren are his imaginative poems, whose lively metre punctuated the Irish language curriculum from primary through to secondary schooling; for most they leave an indelible mark. Such buoyant poems however belie the reality of his existence, lived in the shadow of chronic illness, and punctuated with despair over his condition and anxiety about the periods of extended sick leave his illness necessitated. Although despair dominated his diaries and he routinely begged God, Mary, the Saints and the devil for death, they were also the locus where his creativity developed. In his diaries, caricatures of friends and sketches of everyday things nestle among the first lines of some of his most influential poems and quotes from distinguished philosophers and writers. Evocative and tragic, his diaries offer a unique prism to the experience of respiratory disease in Ireland.

An exploration of testamentary behaviour in twentieth-century Ireland

This article highlights trends in testamentary behaviour in modern Ireland derived from registers of probate cases. Primary findings show a consistently high level of intestacy in modern Ireland. It argues that such rates were more closely related to popular perceptions rather than an understanding of succession law. It also highlights that while real property was not normally divided pre-mortem transfer of non-fixed assets complicated efforts to understand how estates devolved. Testamentary behaviour also shifted significantly in favour of pious bequests in the period under review.

Introduction: Ireland church, state and society 1900–1975

1 See Cormac Ó Gráda, 2002. ‘The Greatest Blessing of All’: The The articles in this collection arise primarily from a conference held at the University of Limerick in June 2007, entitled History of European Family: continuity and change. This conference provided a forum for discussion on change in family and household structures over time; albeit unintentionally the Irish context was well-represented. Hence, a special Irish edition of this journal was the scholarly result. Akin to trends in Spanish historiography, the history of family has been slow to emerge in the Irish context (Urdáñez, 2005). While a number of scholars of Ireland notably, historical geographers, demographers, and economic historians, have been operating in this field for a few decades, few have explicitly published under the rubric of history of family, with many aligning themselves to demography, gender, or local and community studies to a lesser extent. Notable exceptions include economist, Finola Kennedy, who has written a primer on family life and social change in modern Ireland (Kennedy, 2001); the work of social historians and historians of women also consider the family as a primary unit of study in particular Caitriona Clear (2000 and 2007), Earner-Byrne (2007) and the work ofMarlyn Cohen on linen workers in Tullylish, Co. Down (1997). Early debates on household structure in Ireland by Gibbon and Curtin (1978, 1983) were later taken to task by David Fitzpatrick (1983) and vice versa in Comparative Studies in Society and History. Most demographic studies tend to focus on the impact of extraordinary circumstances such as famine or sustained emigration on household structures. For example, Guinnanes seminal work The Vanishing Irish (1997), flanked by the Great Famine and World War I, placed Irish demographic trends in a European context but was not followed by further critical analysis of household

Infant life Protection and Medico-Legal Literacy in Early Twentieth-century Dublin

ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century, the infant mortality rate in Dublin city was higher than that of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Political concerns about the health of nations coupled with the work of child protection campaigners gave rise to a sense of panic across the Anglophone world and caused an increase in the surveillance of the body of the child. While a combination of poor sanitation and inadequate feeding could account for the majority of deaths, single motherhood and the fringes of childcare were treated as flashpoints by local authorities, police and philanthropists, as well as religious, medical and legal personnel alike. Sensationalised newspaper reports played a crucial part in raising public awareness about the infant crisis, and it is for such reasons that this article focuses on the extraordinary case of Mrs Sarah T., who was accused of what was colloquially known as ‘baby-farming’ in Dublin in 1905. The case is used as a prism to examine how the infant life protection campaign contributed to the shaping of ‘medico-legal literacy’ in Ireland. The article focuses on post neonatal infants, aged over one month, to question the degree to which lower socio-economic circumstances precipitated excess mortality or if Church/State encroachment on family life and parental rights exposed already vulnerable infants to more pernicious risks associated with micro-epidemics, particularly in relation to tuberculosis.

Professional patienthood and mortality: Seán Ó Ríordáin's diaries 1974–1977

Unwieldy by nature, unsolicited diaries and their study, this article contends, have the potential to offer deeper insights into the experience of illness but only if they receive due consideration from scholars. This article uses a series of historic diaries to examine the concept of ‘professional patienthood’ or being a full-time patient, and, while it found the narrative medicine approach to be very useful, it also found it limiting. The recent methodological trends in biomedicine and social sciences towards structured mechanisms like questionnaires—surveying and evaluating performance, satisfaction and experience—can only go so far. This article makes a case for the unsolicited, the unorthodox and the unstructured.