Doireann Ní Ghríofa
speaker
408 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 24 May
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Welcome, Deryn Negrifa.
How are you this morning?
I'm great.
Thank you for having me, Deryn.
I find it so interesting driving around Ireland the way at the at the very edges of many of our towns and cities, there are these looming kind of Gothic buildings everywhere.
the relics of psychiatric institutions and the visible relics of our efforts in the past to care for people in mental distress.
And so there's one of these in Cork that will be familiar to an awful lot of people.
And every time I came close to it or drove past it, it always caught my eye.
And what I have attempted with this book is, I suppose it's an effort to draw a kind of history from that building.
And I'm writing as someone who's not a historian.
I'm just an ordinary person, you know.
And I'm inviting readers of this book to come along with me as I try to figure out what was this building, who were the real people who lived inside it, the doctors, the attendants, but also the women who were there.
And I suppose I'm just looking specifically at kind of the 1890s to 1920s in this hospital.
It's hard for me to pinpoint really where this interest started, but there is a similar institution which also still stands in Ennis in County Clare, right across the road from Cork.
the primary school that I went to so there really was the sense of a long shadow literally often being cast that I was aware of and as I say it's I have yet to meet anyone that I've spoken to about this subject who doesn't have a sense of similar institutions and also a sense of kind of there but for the grace of God go I and I think that then and now yeah I think it's something that many of us as Irish people share
being aware of precisely where those often institutions in ruin are and also that sense of curiosity, but also deep compassion for the people who are held there over the years.
I think they're all of those things.
And that's why they're so shocking, because it's a very dark history now.
And when we look towards the history of psychiatry, we see such moments of darkness.
And I think it's understandable when we look towards that history that we can really sense that darkness.
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