Explores how Ireland treats those who suffered in Magdalene Laundries, Mother & Baby Homes, County Homes, industrial & reformatory schools & adoption system

DUBLIN, IRELAND, May 10, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice explores the ways in which Ireland – North and South – treats those who suffered in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes, industrial and reformatory schools, and Ireland’s adoption system.

How will Ireland redress its legacy of institutional abuse and forced adoption? What constitutes justice? How might democracy evolve if the survivors’ experiences and expertise were allowed to lead the response to a century of gender and family separation-based abuses? These are the questions to which this collection of essays seeks answers. REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice explores the ways in which Ireland – North and South – treats those who suffered in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes, industrial and reformatory schools, and in a closed and secretive adoption system, over the last one hundred years.

The collection is particularly timely given the Irish Government’s recent, contested legislative proposals regarding adoption information provision, institutional burial site exhumation, and financial payments to certain Mother and Baby Home survivors. Additionally, the editors and many contributors to REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice were extensively involved in designing and advocating for the Sean McDermott Street ‘Site of Conscience,’ committed to by the Irish Government in March 2022. Other contributors have influenced the framework recently adopted by Northern Ireland’s Executive, to investigate the experiences of women, children and families in Mother and Baby, Magdalene, and Workhouse institutions in that jurisdiction The essays in this collection focus on the structures which perpetuated widespread and systematic abuses in the past and considers how political arrangements continue to exert power over survivors, adopted people and generations of relatives, as well as controlling the remains and memorialisation of the dead.

With diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives, the essays consider how a Transitional Justice-based, survivor-centred, approach might assist those personally affected, policymakers, the public, and academics to evaluate the complex ways in which both the Republic and Northern Ireland (and other states such as Canada, Australia, and Britain) have responded to their histories of institutionalisation and forced family separation. Importantly, the essays collected in REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice seek to offer avenues by which to redress this legacy of continuing harms. The book forensically examines the two states’ so-called ‘redress’ schemes and investigations, and the statements of apology that accompanied them.

The scholarly essays address a range of topics including social vulnerability, shame, and epistemic injustice, ‘Disremembrance’ and Protestant institutions, ‘Illegitimate Knowledge’ and Adopted People, Belligerent Ignorance and the Magdalene Laundries, Heritage as a tool of Transitional Justice, and Truth-telling and the Archive. The collection also gathers significant long-form journalism essays reprinted from international outlets such as the London Review of Books, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books and by writers Anne Enright, Dan Barry, and Clair Wills.

This much-needed publication from UCD Press highlights a public roundtable discussion among individuals with experience of Ireland’s institutional and gender-based abuses. Participants included Mary Harney, Maine resident and civil-rights activist, painter and educator; Mari Steed, Virginia resident, co-founder of Adoption Rights Alliance and executive committee member of Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR); Caitríona Palmer, Washington, DC, resident, journalist and author; Terri Harrison, Dublin resident, musician and community organiser; Rosemary Adaser, London resident, activist and founder and CEO of the Association of Mixed Race Irish (AMRI); Conrad Bryan, London resident, activist and member of the AMRI; Susan Lohan, Dublin resident and cofounder of Adoption Rights Alliance; and Connie Roberts, New York resident, poet and lecturer at Hofstra University. All the participants have previously written and spoken publicly about their experiences. At the time of the roundtable discussion, Terri, Rosemary, Conrad, Mary, and Susan were members of the Collaborative Forum for Former Residents of Mother and Baby Homes and Related Institutions established by Ireland’s Department of Children and Youth Affairs in 2018. Whilst the Irish Government published the Collaborative Forum’s summary recommendations on 16 April 2019, it declined to publish the forum’s report in full. REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice includes references to the Collaborative Forum.

The Editors are donating all royalties in the name of survivors and all those affected by Ireland's carceral institutions and family separation to the charity Empowering People in Care (EPIC).

Published by UCD Press, REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice will be available nationwide from 16 May 2022. ISBN 9781910820896

Notes to Editor
For additional information, to request an extract, request a review copy, or arrange an interview with the editors please contact, Deirdre Roberts, deirdre@deirdreroberts.com +353 87 2633011

Talking Points & Media Angles
● Participants’ stories - Mary Harney, Mari Steed, Caitríona Palmer, Terri Harrison, Rosemary Adaser, Conrad Bryan, Susan Lohan, and Connie Roberts
● How different stakeholders evaluate the complex ways that both the Republic of and Northern Ireland have responded.
● What redress means to survivors, adopted people and others affected.
● The two states’ so-called ‘redress’ schemes and investigations, and the statements of apology that accompanied them.
● Access to records, information, and archival material

Katherine O’Donnell is associate professor of the History of Ideas, UCD School of Philosophy, and has published widely on the history of sexuality and gender and the intellectual history of eighteenth-century Ireland. She has been principal investigator on several funded research projects, including gathering an archival and oral history of the Magdalene institutions funded by the Irish Research Council.

Maeve O’Rourke is assistant professor of human rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, NUI Galway, and a barrister (England & Wales) and Attorney at Law (New York). Her research and advocacy focus on state responsibility and individuals’ rights in relation to contemporary social care and ‘historical’ institutional and gender-based abuses. She is co-director of the voluntary Clann Project (www.clannproject.org).

James M. Smith is associate professor in the English department and Irish Studies Program at Boston College. His research focuses on institutional provision in post-Independence Ireland and Church/ State relations. Author of Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame UP2007)

Deirdre Roberts
Deirdre Roberts Books
+353 87 263 3011
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