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
There was a time in my life where I made determined efforts to end my own life.
And so when I came to the archive in Cork and the case books that are there, and I was turning the pages and reading the stories of these women,
Oftentimes they were being brought by policemen to the institution, having just made an effort to end their own lives in the same river that I had attempted to climb into and end my own life in.
And so there was a sense of recognition there, Derval, and a real sense of, like I keep coming back to the word compassion, and a sense of almost wanting to reach through the blue pages of those case books and the ink that the doctor had left there
To see the woman on the other side of that page, the real woman who was sitting in front of the doctor who was writing about them,
And I was just so moved by that and so moved by the experience we shared and that oftentimes they had been pulled back by passers-by from clambering over the same railings that I would have clambered over and that this is a history of our city and our country that is rarely spoken about.
And also, I think it's really important to acknowledge that
We have so few documents that attend so closely to the real lives of real Irish people and the difficulties they faced in their ordinary lives.
Not people who are considered historical figures, but real people like me and you, you know, there they are.
And that was really what I felt when I was turning the pages, as well as gratitude to the archive for putting up with me and letting me...
I think it's difficult to say, and I mean, except to say that Ireland's difficult history with institutions is not over.
It's not over.
It's unfolding all around us still.
It's ongoing.
And I think that...
In Ireland, we can be proud of the fact that we make continuous efforts to care for people.
And yet we have to, I think, also be aware of the shame that those efforts often fail and that often those failures are failures of funding and institutional failures of state funding.
And overcrowding, overcrowding is an issue that was being documented in these casebooks and still being documented all over the place.
And the idea of trying to care for people in some way, but in such a kind of...
underfunded way that there's failures of the system.
Showing 181–200 of 408 · page 10 of 21
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