Published by the Jesuits in Ireland since 1912, Studies examines Irish social, political, cultural and economic issues in the light of Christian values. It also explores issues in literature, history, philosophy and religion, with an emphasis on the Irish dimension.
Summer 2024
Keith Adams Challenging Prison Policy: Introduction
Shona Minson The Disruption of Women’s Imprisonment: Negative Consequences and Non-Carceral Alternatives
Anna Schliehe A Critique of ‘Trauma-Informed’ Prisons for Women
David Scottt Prison Abolition in a Time of Overcrowding: Sowing the Seeds for Change
Catherine Cox Prison Chaplains and the ‘Modern’ Prison System in Ireland, 1830s–1870s
Sheena Orr Meeting Face to Face: The Essential Role of the Prison Chaplain
Kevin Hargaden The Place of the Prison in the Bible
Kevin Rafter John Bruton: An Appreciation
James Harpur Four Poems
Peadar Kirby The Rise of the Far-Right, Part II: Towards a New Politics
John Turpin Friends of the National Collections of Ireland: A Century of Gifts
Gerald O’Collins SJ FThe Seven Pillars of Jesuit Wisdom: What Characterises Jesuit Education?
Studies
Power and Punishment: Challenging Prison Policy
Winter 2022-23
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Power and Punishment: Challenging Prison Policy
Editorial
In his acclaimed work on the shifts in behaviour, manners and social norms from the Middle Ages into modernity that made up ‘the civilising process’, German sociologist Norbert Elias noted the tendency for distasteful things to be gradually ‘removed behind the scenes of social life’.1 Public nudity, the performance of bodily functions, public displays of punishment, and the like – all of these came to offend against the growing ‘delicacy of feeling’ that marked the emerging sense of ‘civility’. Disturbing aspects of life were moved to more private or discreet places. Another feature of the civilising process that Elias detected was that the nation-states that emerged in the seventeenth century began to lay sole claim to the exercise of force. Violence, in other words, could only be legitimated through the centralised, bureaucratised world of the judicial system, the police, and the military. Contemporary prison systems show the marks of both of these processes, and not in every respect for the better. The ‘civilisation curve’, as Elias knew well, can easily be interrupted by an opposite process, a ‘decivilising’ one. The latter may even, in fact, be facilitated by the civilising process itself. In spite of good intentions, making the management of crime and punishment equitable easily leads to an over-dependence on incarceration as a singlemodel solution. Those that the system determines to punish become the distasteful elements that must be kept from public view. They are radically decoupled from their own life-worlds, even for lesser crimes, which may well lead to the unjust disregard of the needs of their communities and dependents, as well as to a loss of personal dignity and to disproportionate damage to their reputation. A more nuanced policy is needed.
As Jeremy Travis, a prominent advocate of justice reform in the US, has repeatedly insisted, a principle of parsimony is needed when it comes to criminal justice. The state must be careful not to intrude on the life and liberty of citizens any more than is necessary to achieve a legitimate social purpose.2 There are many alternatives to incarceration for many types of crimes, and these may well be more effective at reducing crime, enhancing public safety, preserving personal dignity, and minimising the upset to the world of those –themselves perfectly innocent – whose lives are bound to that of the offender.
In January of this year, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dublin, hosted a one-day workshop to discuss and challenge current prison policy in Ireland and beyond. The workshop was generously funded by the St Stephen’s Green Trust. The three papers presented on that occasion are published in this issue of Studies, and three further essays, follow-up reflections on the theme of the workshop, are also given here. My thanks are due to Keith Adams, Penal Policy Advocate at the centre, who organised the workshop and who curated the essays for this issue. In his introduction, after this editorial, he summarises the six essays.
Apart from the set of essays on prison policy, this issue of Studies also includes ‘John Bruton: An Appreciation’, Kevin Rafter’s reflection on the person and the political career of the former taoiseach, who died in February of this year. Bruton was an occasional contributor to Studies. And in ‘The Rise of the FarRight, Part II: Towards a new politics’, Peadar Kirby continues his reflection on the correct way to respond to the far-right, specifically by developing what Pope Francis has called ‘a better kind of politics’, one that is ‘primarily concerned with individuals and the common good’.
The Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, a body that supports public galleries and museums throughout the country, celebrates its centenary this year. In ‘A century of gifts to Irish galleries and museums by the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland’, the body’s current president, John Turpin, describes the work it has done since its foundation in 1924. And in ‘The Seven Pillars of Jesuit Wisdom: What Characterises Jesuit Education?’, Australian theologian Gerald O’Collins SJ identifies what he calls ‘seven sources of human and Christian wisdom’ on which Jesuit pedagogy has been built since its inception.
Two Irish poets are represented in this issue of Studies, James Harpur and Peter Sirr, both members of Aosdána, the association of artists set up by the Irish Arts Council in 1981.
The cover image of this issue, ‘West of Ireland landscape’, is a mixedmedia composition by an inmate of Castlerea Prison. I am grateful to Tom Shortt, Arts Officer with the Irish Prison Service, for arranging that we could reproduce it here.
Notes
1 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 2000; originally published in 1939), p. 103. Also see Norbert Elias, ‘Power and Civilisation’, a 1981 essay published in Journal of Power, 1:2 (August 2008), 135–142.
2 See the Square One Project, <https://squareonejustice.org>. Also Jeremy Travis and Bruce Westen (eds), Parsimony, and Other Radical Ideas About Justice (New York: The New Press, 2023).
Challenging Prison Policy: Introduction
Keith Adams
In the twelve months up to March 2025, Ireland will have had local, national and European elections with all the accompanying canvassing, media commentary, and political debate. Politicians are acutely sensitive to the reality that delivering a tough rhetoric on questions of ‘law and order’ will win votes and safeguard against any accusations of being ‘soft on crime’. The risk to political ambitions by adding nuance to the discourse is much too great. Yet, as each day breaks new records for our prison population in Ireland, many threats to human dignity proliferate within our prisons
At present, government messaging is gradually ramping up with a General Election in mind. A core plank of this re-election platform is prison expansion. Existing plans commit to an additional 700 beds over the next five years, and the mothballed site at Thornton Hall is being discussed again. Interestingly, future demographic projections are deployed to justify prison expansion, rather than a hardline message. This is a flawed argument. It assumes that the rate of imprisonment is inevitable, a sort of social constant. Nothing can be done to change it. It is as if this is a law of nature: as our society expands, so too must our prisons. But Nils Christie, a Norwegian sociologist, prompts us to recall that ‘the size of the prison population is a normative question’ and that ‘thoughts, values, ethics … must determine the limits of control, the question of when enough is enough’.1
With this guidance in mind, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice hosted a prison policy workshop in Dublin City University in January. Bringing together almost fifty attendees from academia, politics, civil service, prisons, and NGOs – with a focus on women’s imprisonment – three international speakers from Germany and the United Kingdom delivered papers to challenge current penal orthodoxy.
The first set of three essays in this special issue of Studies on ‘Power and Punishment’ focuses on penal policy questions from the prison workshop. In her essay ‘The Disruption of Women’s Imprisonment: Negative Consequences
and Non-Carceral Alternatives’, Shona Minson confronts the disruptive effects of women’s imprisonment on their children and then explores the questions that this raises about the proportionate nature of custodial sentences for mothers. Minson addresses the ‘pains of imprisonment’ experienced by mothers, but aher theorising around the concept of ‘confounding grief’ for the children left behind is both compelling and moving where ‘[t]here is an assumption that perhaps they [children] are better off without their mother, and therefore their grief is not appropriate’.
Continuing the focus on women’s imprisonment, Anna Schliehe investigates the rising popularity of ‘trauma-informed practice’ in women’s prisons. This is particularly timely as Ireland opened a new women’s prison in 2023, based upon ‘trauma-informed’ design considerations. In ‘Women’s Imprisonment and Trauma-Informed Practice: Where Do We Go from Here?’, Schliehe draws upon extensive prison fieldwork to test this emerging focus. She concludes that there may be future merit to the concept. At present, however, it lacks definitional robustness. Results, she concludes, were ‘surprisingly poor’. She explains that ‘inherent features of imprisonment create an environment that make it particularly challenging to deliver work that is truly trauma informed in all its facets’.
In the final paper of the workshop, ‘Sowing the Seeds of Change: Dissenting Voices, Subversive Knowledges and an Abolitionist Imagination for Our Time’, David Gordon Scott explores the penal abolitionist tradition to reflect upon penal legitimacy, penal utopias, and penological amnesia. These concepts are central to the symbiotic relationship of the state and penal reformers. Scott argues that ‘[i]n essence, the prison is what it is because it cannot be otherwise than an institutionalised form of punishment [author’s emphasis]’. Scott leans upon the writings and letters of Michael Davitt, Constance Markievicz and James Leo Phelan to demonstrate that penal abolitionist sentiments and thought are present in Ireland’s story, though maybe obscured.
The other three contributions to this issue consider prison and punishment from religious and theological perspectives. Two essays, Catherine Cox’s ‘Prison Chaplains and the “Modern” Prison System in Ireland, 1830s–1870s’ and Sheena Orr’s ‘Meeting Face to Face: the Essential Role of the Chaplain’
Keith Adams
consider the historical and contemporary role of prison chaplaincy to those whom society imprisons. In a sweeping account of nineteenth-century Irish penological history, Cox studies chaplains’ accounts to identify a ‘parallel but distinct response to the separate system of confinement’. This allows her to examine not only the ministries of the chaplains but how the prison regime overtly and covertly shaped their roles. In the face of much need, many chaplains ‘advocated against harsh and potentially harmful disciplinary regimes’.
Building upon her doctoral research conducted as a chaplain within the Scottish Prison Service, and prompted by pandemic restrictions, Orr reflects on the nature of face-to-face encounters, and how the chaplain provides a place of sanctuary, significance and Sabbath through their presence with the prisoner. Within an institution where bodies are shuttled around from one part of the prison to the next, where almost all interactions are treated with caution and trepidation, the handshake or holding of hands by a chaplain can offer some peace and sanctuary amid forces that would dehumanise, ‘as if by holding my hands the person is holding onto welcome, hospitality, acceptance’.
In the final essay of this section, Kevin Hargaden explores the place of the prison within the Bible and, rather than discovering positions at odds with contemporary penologists, finds texts that are either ambivalent or ‘deeply hostile to the prison’. The fundamental argument made by Hargaden turns on his re-reading of the Gospel’s account of Jesus’ last night before crucifixion, which he spent ‘unjustly detained in prison’. Drawing on biblical scholarship to fully describe the nature of what Jesus endured during detention, Hargaden concludes that ‘[i]f this is what the prison allows humanity to do to a person presented as perfectly full of life, it is fair to conclude that the biblical view of prison is as negative as possible’.
Keith Adams is Penal Policy Advocate at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dublin, and a doctoral candidate at Leuven Institute of Criminology.
Notes 1 Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry: towards Gulags, Western Style, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 14.
The Disruption of Women’s Imprisonment:
Negative Consequences and Non-Carceral Alternatives
Shona Minson Introduction
Punishment is not a binary process, affecting only victim and offender, nor a transactional process between the state and the punished. Punishment impacts not just those directly involved, but also families, communities, and society more generally. Punishment sets in motion events with longterm consequences, and very little attention is paid at sentencing to the lifechanging effects of even short sentences of imprisonment.
My particular interest is in the punishment of women and within that group the punishment of mothers. There are more than twice as many women in prison in England and Wales as there were thirty years ago, with the women’s prison population in England and Wales standing at around 3,600 on any given day. In the year to June 2023, a total of 5,286 women were imprisoned, on remand before trial, on remand between trial and sentence, after sentence, or when recalled to prison for the breach of a licence condition. Although no data is routinely collected, and it is therefore hard to know exactly how many women in prison are mothers of dependent children, inspections in His Majesty’s Prisons and Young Offenders Institution Bronzefield and Peterborough1 estimated that between 50% and 60% of women in those institutions were mothers to children under eighteen years. In Scotland, the daily women’s prison population is around 200 women, with approximately 900 women spending time in prison each year. In Ireland, a similarly sized jurisdiction, there were 800 female committals to prison in 2022, 2 with a daily population of approximately 230 women.
In this essay I will explore the disruptive effects of women’s imprisonment on their children and the questions this raises about the proportionate nature of custodial sentences for mothers. The way in which custody is used for women both pre- and post-conviction will be considered, within the context of our greater understanding of the pains of imprisonment for women. In the
last section of the essay, I ask whether the commitment to imprisonment as punishment could be disrupted if we punished in ways that are more likely to lead to positive outcomes for both individuals and communities.
Are all children equal?
Before I moved into academic research, I was a barrister in England, practising in family law. I specialised in care proceedings where the local authority sought to remove a child from the care of their parents due to the abuse, harm, or neglect of a child or the likelihood of a child experiencing those things in the care of their parents. The child’s welfare was at the heart of the process. The Children Act 1989 provides statutory protection for the children, stating in section 1(1) that the ‘best interests of the child are the paramount consideration of the court’. The court uses the ‘welfare checklist’ as the framework for decision making. The child’s wishes and feelings are considered, they are represented by state funded lawyers and a Guardian ad Litem, and if the child is separated from their parents, the state provides and funds alternative caregivers. When I began to look at the imprisonment of mothers in England and Wales, I found that unlike the family courts, the criminal courts gave little attention to the children who were being separated from their primary carer due to the actions of the state.
It was that differentiated treatment of children that really caught my attention and troubled me. Why were children whose mothers were going to prison deemed of less worth or value than children who were separated from their parents for other reasons? All children have equal worth, so to treat these children differently suggested that they didn’t suffer harm when their mother was imprisoned, or the state had restricted its own duty of care to children to exclude this group, or judges were not allowed to consider the consequences to children when they sentenced a mother.
I didn’t intend to become an academic, but I wanted to answer those questions, and so I began ten years of academic research into the sentencing of mothers. I spoke with children whose mothers were in prison and adults who were taking care of children during their mothers’ imprisonment. I found that children experience many changes to their lives as soon as their mother is imprisoned and many of those are harmful to them.3 Most women who are imprisoned are single parents, and if they were caring for their child prior to imprisonment, the child will have to move out of their home to live with a new carer when their mother is sent to prison. This may mean their
education is disrupted, if they have to move away from the area where they attend school. Siblings are often separated, as friends or relatives aren’t able to take on all the children, and many children experience multiple moves, as they are cared for by different people at different times.
Most people in prison are from a lower socio-economic demographic, as are their friends and families, so the burden of an additional child in a home means that the household experiences increased poverty. There is a great deal of stigma and shame around maternal imprisonment, so children often remove themselves from social groups and become isolated. The mother–child relationship is disrupted and altered, and this affects children’s immediate and future well-being and stability. Prison visits are emotionally challenging for children, but they are also difficult in practical terms, as the visiting hours are often during normal work and school hours, and there may not be an adult who can take them to visit during those times, nor is it easy for them to miss school.
Disproportionate punishment
I identified something I termed ‘confounding grief’ among the children I met. Most of the children were experiencing grief because of their mother’s absence; their expectations of their life had been confounded – everything about their day-to-day existence was turned upside down by their mother’s removal from the home. In addition, they had to deal with the fact that their grief confounded other people. When a child’s parents separate or a parent dies, those children are given extra attention and love, and people make special efforts to include them. This does not happen for a child whose mother goes to prison. There is an assumption that perhaps they are better off without their mother, and therefore their grief is not appropriate. People also seem to attach what has been called ‘secondary stigma’ to the child, viewing them as problematic because their parent has committed a criminal offence. Children experiencing this confounding grief manifest it in changed behaviours. Younger children often regress in sleep and toileting, and older children display more aggressive behaviour than before their mother’s imprisonment.
Parental separation and parental imprisonment are both categorised as Adverse Childhood Experiences. International research has evidenced that experiencing maternal imprisonment as a child creates what is known as a ‘turning point’4: a point in life where the trajectory changes, and it’s
impossible to go back. There is research evidence that adults who have experienced parental imprisonment as children are less likely to be in education, training or employment in later life and are more likely to have mental health and addiction problems. A study from the Netherlands in 2018 found that people who experienced maternal imprisonment as a child were more likely to die before the age of 65 than their peers.5 It is a sobering piece of data, demonstrating that the disruptive effects of maternal imprisonment on children are not short term, but may in fact shorten life expectancy. It is also relevant to note that maternal imprisonment often intersects with poverty, with implications for the well-being of children. In research I undertook during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, I interviewed adults in households where a child was living whose parent was in prison.6 Over half (53%) of these households had a total income of less than £15,000. A further 28% had a total household income of less than £25,000. Children affected by maternal imprisonment are unlikely to have their adverse experiences buffered by money.
Imprisoning a woman is a disruptive process and has the potential to cause life-long disruption to her children’s lives. If these women have committed serious crimes and the only appropriate punishment for them is imprisonment, then maybe the only thing that can be done is to mitigate the harms to their children through state support and changes such as increased provision for child-friendly visits at prisons, or cheaper telephone calls between prisoners and family outside. But, if they have not committed serious and dangerous crimes, there is a risk that the harms of imprisonment to their dependents are making punishment disproportionate.
Proliferation of short sentences
In England and Wales both crime rates and imprisonment increased through the second half of the last century. However, since the late 1990s, crime has decreased while imprisonment has continued to rise. It is penal policy, rather than crime rates, that increases prison populations. In the UK the increase in imprisonment has been fed by legislative changes including the creation of new offences with mandatory prison terms and longer minimum terms for existing offences. After changes were made in 2015 to the length of time a person was under supervision after leaving prison, there was an increase in people being recalled to prison after their release on licence. The supervisory requirements were made much more onerous for those sentenced to short
terms of imprisonment, and now anyone who is sentenced to more than two days in prison is supervised on licence for twelve months after their release. The breach of a term, such as non-attendance at a probation appointment, triggers a recall back to prison. There is little discretion in recalls. I met the mother of a young woman who had been recalled to prison shortly after the birth of her baby, because the hospital she gave birth in was in a part of London that she was precluded from entering under the terms of her licence. It is not unreasonable to assume that people in prison have been convicted of serious offences. The Irish penal code is built on the principle of proportionality, and in England and Wales Section 230(2) of the Sentencing Code, 2020 sets out that prison is reserved for the most serious offences and should only be used as a punishment if a fine or community sentence is insufficient. However, in England and Wales 58% of men and 69% of women sentenced to imprisonment have committed a non-violent offence. The most common offence for women is theft. 53% of women and 37% of men have been sentenced to less than six months in prison, which means they will spend only three months, half their sentence, in prison before serving the rest ‘on licence’ in the community.7 These short sentences indicate that they are not serious offences or offenders. Again, a similar sentencing pattern is evident in Ireland. Of the 4,162 sentences handed down in 2022, 23% were for less than three months, while over half (54%) were for less than six months.8 Gendered differences are clear, with 65% of men sentenced to less than twelve months while 85% of women received a similar sentence.
Not convicted but imprisoned
Perhaps even more surprisingly, around 20% of the people in prison in England and Wales have in fact not been found guilty of any offence. These people are in prison ‘on remand’, which means they have entered a not guilty plea and their trial hasn’t taken place yet. It was reported by the House of Commons Justice Committee in January 2023 that the use of remand was the highest it had been in fifty years. In September 2022, 14,507 people were held in prison on remand – an increase of 44% in the eighteen months since March 2020.9 In Scotland between 20% and 40% of the women’s prison population are held on remand. In the Irish prison estate in April 2024, 20% (almost 1,000 people) of prisoners were on remand. But the number was significantly higher in Ireland’s women’s prisons, with 26% not convicted of an offence.10 Remanding someone to prison before they have been found guilty of a
crime is supposed to be an unusual step to take. The Bail Act permits it when someone is not expected to comply with the conditions that would allow them to remain in the community on bail, or when they have committed an extremely serious offence. So again you may be surprised to hear that of those on remand, 52% overall, and 85% of women, have been charged with non-violent offences.11 It is thought that the high number of people remanded to prison is because remand is increasingly being used, at a cost of more than £50,000 (€58,500) per person per year, to manage issues such as homelessness, mental illness or addiction rather than the risk of offending. Although a person should not be held in prison on remand for more than six months, due to the long delays in bringing matters to trial, when the Justice Committee report was published, 770 prisoners had been held on remand awaiting trial for more than two years. One might argue that if all those people were then convicted of their crimes and given a custodial sentence, it might make sense, as it would all balance out eventually, but, in 2022, 10% of all those remanded into prison by magistrates’ courts were subsequently acquitted and a further 11% received a noncustodial sentence. In the Crown Court 14% were acquitted and 16% given a noncustodial sentence12 20% of people are on remand, which means, one would assume, that 80% of people in prison have been convicted of a crime and are receiving an appropriate and effective punishment. In order to determine whether prison is an effective punishment, we must consider the purposes of punishment. In Ireland, case law has established that the purposes of punishment are retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation13. In England and Wales, section 57(2) of the Sentencing Act 2020 sets out the five statutory purposes of sentencing: punishment, reduction of crime (including by deterrence), the reform and rehabilitation of offenders, the protection of the public, and the making of reparation by offenders to persons affected by their offences.
Pains of imprisonment
Prison undoubtedly punishes. Imprisonment is a painful process, and, for many reasons, prisons do not act and cannot act as a rehabilitative or reformatory space. Sykes, a sociologist and prison researcher, created a typography of the ‘pains of imprisonment’ in 1958.14 These were the deprivation of liberty, the deprivation of goods and services, the deprivation of heterosexual relationships, the deprivation of autonomy, and the deprivation of security. In the sixty years since there have been many expansions of the definition of
‘pains of imprisonment’ and for women the pain of separation from children and disruption of family relationships is recognised as a primary ‘pain’.
Recent prison inspections in England and Wales have found that prisons are not safe. The rates of self-harm and suicide in prison have increased; the self-harm rates among women reaching the highest recorded figures. We know that women in prison are among the most vulnerable in our societies and imprisonment compounds and exacerbates these vulnerabilities. In England and Wales, 53% of women in prison have suffered sexual, emotional, or physical abuse.15 48% committed the offence to support the drug use of someone else.16 76% report problems with their mental health, and 46% have attempted suicide.17 31% have spent time in local authority care.18 35% of all women cautioned and convicted were first time offenders, and 23% of women in prison are serving a prison sentence for their first conviction19 .
Recruitment of staff is an ongoing issue and with prisons at capacity, there are insufficient staff to run full regimes, including not just association time, or visits, but also education, physical activity, and behavioural intervention programmes. The lack of purposeful activity in prison negatively impacts prisoners. There is extensive and irrefutable research evidence that prison does not reduce reoffending; it actually increases it when compared to reoffending by people who have served community sentences.20 Women are more likely to go on to commit further offences if they are given a short custodial sentence rather than a sentence served in the community.
Disrupting women’s imprisonment
It is clear that imprisonment is a disruptive process. When women enter prison, they often lose their housing, any employment that they had, and their children. Short sentences and an under-resourced prison system do not allow offending behaviour or drivers of offending – poverty, addiction, mental ill health – to be addressed sufficiently. Prison punishes, but it often does so without even a nod towards rehabilitation, restitution, or reducing recidivism. In the next part of this essay I will consider three possible ways to disrupt women’s imprisonment. Firstly, through a requirement that all sentencers consider the impact of a sentence of imprisonment on dependent children. Secondly, by the implementation of a presumption against short custodial sentences. Thirdly, with an increased use of alternative forms of punishment for women.
1. Considering child dependents
The question raised, of course, is should the impact on children be relevant to the sentencing of primary carers? Those who would argue that it isn’t, tend to say firstly that it is unfair to defendants without children to allow sentence to be affected by dependants, and secondly, that the criminal court is not a welfare court. In response to those arguments, I would say that it has always been the case that the social situation of a defendant is relevant to sentencing, and sentencers are used to considering the personal circumstances of every defendant when they sentence. The court is not a welfare court, but there is case law in England and Wales, dating back to 200121, in which Lord Phillips stated that separating a parent and child is the most serious thing the court has the power to do and therefore the consequences of separation must be balanced against all other factors in sentencing.
Since 2011 the factor ‘sole or primary carer for dependent relatives’ has been included in the list of mitigating factors in every sentencing guideline. Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), a child has a right not to suffer discrimination because of the status or activities of their parents (Article 2), the right for their best interests to be a primary consideration in any decision concerning them (Article 3), the right to be heard in any proceedings concerning them (Article 12), and the right to special protection and assistance form the state if separated from their parents (Article 20). In England and Wales, the Human Rights Act 1998 also gives a right to family life (Article 8) and a right to non-discrimination (Article 14). If we consider the separation of children from their parents by the state in another court forum, the family division of the courts, it is clear that every effort is taken to minimise the disruption to children. Treating children differently when the state is separating them from their parents in the criminal courts is a form of procedural discrimination. This was confirmed by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights in the UK parliament and their findings and recommendations are set out in their report.22
Since that enquiry the Sentencing Council of England and Wales has set out in detail the consideration that should be given to a defendant’s children when sentencing.23 It is welcome that there is recognition of the fact that the impacts of maternal imprisonment on a child can ‘make a custodial sentence disproportionate to achieving the aims of sentencing’. In addition, the court is told that it ‘must ensure’ it has all relevant information about children before sentencing and should ask the Probation Service to prepare
a pre-sentence report addressing a defendant’s caring responsibilities. On 1 April 2024 a new sentencing guideline came into force directing the courts to particularly consider the impact of sentence on a woman who is pregnant, has given birth recently, or has a child under the age of one. It is clear that in England and Wales it is now uncontested that maternal imprisonment causes severe disruption to children’s lives and is a harm that should be avoided where possible.
2. A presumption against custodial sentences
As previously mentioned, many women are sent to prison for very short periods of time, with adverse consequences for themselves and their children. Scotland introduced a presumption against short sentences of twelve months or less in 2019, and it has been raised as a possibility in England and Wales. Is this a step in the right direction?
When in 2019 the Scottish parliament voted in favour of a presumption against short sentences of twelve months or less around 90% of women sent to prison in Scotland were sent for a year or less and many had experienced abuse, mental health, and addiction problems. The then justice secretary, later first minister, Humza Yousaf said:
We know from evidence and research that community-based interventions are more effective than disruptive short prison sentences. With such a high proportion of women prisoners serving custodial sentences of twelve months or less this extension could have a significant impact on women in the justice system.
More recently the Sentencing Bill has been introduced in England and Wales. If passed it will place a duty on the courts to suspend all sentences of twelve months or less. The principal rationale for doing so is efficiency: ‘The current sentencing framework is leading to inefficiencies in terms of substantial economic and societal costs resulting from high levels of reoffending.’ The policy objective is to ‘reduce the current high levels of re-offending and ensure the effective use of the prison estate’. The duty to suspend short sentences is ‘intended to highlight to the court that short sentences of immediate custody should only be used as a last resort and alternative disposals should be used wherever possible’.
If there is really a desire to ‘ensure a diversion from custody is the primary aim of judges and magistrates when considering sentencing decisions for those who would otherwise receive short sentences of immediate custody
of twelve months or less’, then I would argue that neither the Scottish nor the English and Welsh approach will achieve this. Professor Cyrus Tata of Strathclyde University has said the presumption against short sentences leaves prison available as a ‘last resort’, and therefore prison will continue to be used as the default when appropriate services aren’t available. 24 ‘Individual professionals (the judiciary) are left to shoulder the impossible burden of chronic societal failures’. Indeed, when Humza Yousef announced the presumption in Scotland, he said this:
This presumption is not a ban; it will encourage courts to consider alternatives to custody which can be more effective in rehabilitating individuals as they pay their debt to society. Impact will be monitored closely and there will always be serious crimes where it is decided in court that prison is the right option.
Suspending sentences leaves the possibility that the sentence will be breached, and the person will then serve time in prison. Under the current use of suspended sentences, when a judge has had discretion to choose it as the most appropriate sentence for a person, the breach rate is 20%. It can be assumed this will be higher if there is no judicial discretion. The average length of a suspended sentence is 19.7 months, and therefore people who might have been subject to a six-month custodial sentence will find themselves subject to both a longer period of supervision and potential time in custody if the sentence is breached.
If the intention is to reduce the female prison population, as was stated in the government White paper ‘The Female Offender Strategy’ in June 2018, there needs to be a shift in thinking and practice so that prison, rather than the alternative, must be justified as exceptional punishment. Professor Tata has suggested that will only happen if there is a date by which a prison will close and the budget shifts to the community services, and yet the use of community sentences in England and Wales has more than halved in a decade, and prison expansion continues in both the UK and Ireland. 25
3. Alternative forms of punishment for women
In my most recent work I’ve been looking at an alternative mode of punishment for women. These are women-specific courts that provide oversight or supervision of women during either a deferred or community sentence. The time during which they are under the jurisdiction of the court is used to support their engagement with services that enable them to address
the underlying needs that have destabilised their lives and have therefore contributed to their offending.
Many women in the criminal justice system have been through extraordinary trauma. Observing these courts, I have seen women whose lives have been riven by abuse, exploitation, violence, homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. If those criminogenic factors can be addressed, and women have agency restored to them, they are less likely to reoffend because they will have choices in the future. The supervision or problem-solving courts, two names by which they are known, create a supported pause. Every month the women return to the court for a conversation with a judge who explores how they are progressing with their housing, addiction, or health. For many women the loss of their children was a catalyst for their spiral into offending, so in the women’s courts there is a focus on the women’s efforts to reconnect with their children and some even succeed in having the children returned to their care. The courts aim to leave women in a much better situation than they were at the time of the original offending.
In the Glasgow Female Offenders’ Court (FOC) women are on a structured deferred sentence. This means that they’ve been convicted of a crime for which custody could be imposed, but as they have been deemed suitable for the FOC, the punishment is deferred until they’ve had time to address issues under the FOC supervision. If women are able to engage with the services offered and make progress with dealing with the presenting problems in their lives, they can end their time at the court by being ‘admonished’. This means that no further penalty is imposed, and the case is finished. In FOC in other jurisdictions, for example the United States, the conviction may also be deferred, meaning that if a woman successfully addresses the issues which led to her original behaviour, she may finish the process without a conviction. There are only a few of these courts operating in the UK currently, but it is an encouraging development that recognises the complexity of women’s pathways both into and out of offending. There is money in the budgets, but at the moment it is spent on imprisonment.
I met a woman who had gone through the problem-solving court in Texas. She was an addict with numerous convictions, and her two children had been removed from her care. She was pregnant again when she was arrested on another drug-related charge. In her words she ‘begged’ the judge to allow her to go to the problem-solving courts. ‘He said, “well why would I do that? You’re a disaster. You just want help because you’re pregnant. Why would
we waste our time on you?”’ Despite his view of her he was persuaded by her lawyer to give her a chance. She was sent to a facility for pregnant women. She kept her child, has been clean for several years, and works as a peer supporter for other women involved with the criminal justice system. I’ll leave you with the question she asked, ‘Why are we putting all of the money into punishments which don’t work? That is a high-risk strategy. Why don’t we take a different risk and put the money into keeping people out of prison and see what happens?’
Conclusion
Although, in comparison to the male prison population, few women are imprisoned, we must not be complacent about the continued use of imprisonment for women and mothers. Decades of research evidence confirm that imprisonment is a harmful process that neither rehabilitates individuals nor protects communities. Policy makers and sentencers must think harder about why imprisonment is used to punish, and money should be invested in community alternatives that more appropriately address and reflect the type of offending behaviour for which women are most often punished. Imprisoning women disrupts lives, and the thinking and behaviours that keep us fixed on imprisonment as punishment need to be disrupted. With courage and imagination, we could become a society in which punishment would lead to positive outcomes for women and their families.
Dr Shona Minson, Research Associate in Women’s Justice at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, is a former family and criminal barrister. Her work focuses on the sentencing of women, and she is the author of Maternal Sentencing and the Rights of the Child (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Notes
1 HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Inspection of HMP & YOI Bronzefield (London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2018); HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Inspection of HMP & YOI Bronzefield (London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2022).
3 Shona Minson, Maternal Sentencing and the Rights of the Child (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2019).
4 Daniel P. Mears and Sonja E. Siennick, ‘Young Adult Outcomes and the Life-Course Penalties of Parental Incarceration’, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 53:1 (2016), 3–35.
5
Steve G. A. van de Weijer, Holly S. Smallbone, Valery Bouwman, ‘Parental Imprisonment and Pre-Mature Mortality in Adulthood’, Journal of Development and Life-Course Criminology, 4 (2018), 148–161.
6 Shona Minson, ‘The impact of Covid-19 prison lockdowns on children with a parent in prison’, Oxford, 2021, <https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/migrated/the_impact_of_covid-19_ prison_lockdowns_on_children_with_a_parent_in_prison.pdf>
7 Ministry of Justice, HM Prison & Probation Service, ‘Offender Management Statistics for calendar year 2022’, <www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-october-to-december-2022/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-october-to-december-2022-and-annual-2022>
8 Irish Prison Service, Annual Report 2022
9 Justice Committee, The role of adult custodial remand in the criminal justice system: seventh report of session 2022–2023 (London: House of Commons, 2023).
10 Irish Prison Service, ‘Prisoner Population on Monday 1 April 2024’, <www.irishprisons.ie/ wp-content/uploads/documents_pdf/01-April-2024.pdf>
11 Ministry of Justice, HM Prison & Probation Service, ‘Offender management statistics quarterly: April to June 2023’, table 2.4b.
12 Ministry of Justice, ‘Criminal justice statistics quarterly: April to June 2023’, table Q4.4.
13 Law Reform Commission, Report on Suspended Sentences (Dublin: Law Reform Commission, 2020).
14 G. M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton University Press, 1958).
15 Kim Williams, Vea Papadopoulou, Natalie Booth, Prisoner’s childhood and family backgrounds: results from the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SPCR) longitudinal cohort study of prisoners (London: Ministry of Justice, 2012).
16 Ministry of Justice, ‘Women and the Criminal Justice System’, 2019, <www.gov.uk/government/statistics/women-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2019>
17 HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, Annual Report 2021–2022 (London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2022).
18 House of Lords written question HL8980, 17 July 2023.
19 Ministry of Justice, Statistics on Women and the Criminal Justice System 2021 (London: Ministry of Justice, 2021).
20 Table 1.1 Ministry of Justice (2023) Compendium of re-offending statistics and analysis
21 R (On the applications of P and Q) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2001] EWCA Civ 1151.
22 Joint Committee on Human Rights, The right to family life: children whose mothers are in prison (London: House of Commons, 2019).
24 Centre for Justice Innovation, ‘Expert Voices: Presumption against short sentences: the Scottish experience’, webinar, 9 January 2024, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP6zkXWkaIo>
25 Ministry of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly, (London, 2022)
Women’s Imprisonment and Trauma-In-
formed Practice: Where Do We Go from
Here?
Anna Schliehe
In many countries research on women’s imprisonment is underdeveloped. There is a lack of both qualitative and quantitative research on what life is really like for women in prison. Assumptions about gender are bound up in a particular way within carceral spaces,1 and there are many anomalies when it comes to women’s imprisonment and penal discourse around women who break the law. While women in prison have been primarily treated as prisoners, ‘their prison regimes have, at the same time, also been shaped by some of the most repressive, discriminatory and usually outdated ideologies of womanhood and femininity that have been prevalent in society at large’.2 Most of the literature on women’s imprisonment captures that in some way, but more often than not focusing on embodiment, identity and relationships. Ward is one of the first who tries to find ‘other’ explanations for the often extremely gendered and stereotypical undertones in studies that analyse the social organisation in women’s prisons. 3
Discussions of the ‘pains of imprisonment’ for women are somewhat diffuse in the literature, but many studies historically suggest that either women’s nature or their socialisation make prison a different, and usually more distressing, experience.4 In fact, it is challenging to disentangle gendered assumptions and empirical findings in many studies. Rowe notes how sociological research in women’s prisons continues to be influenced by the early emphasis on social relationships, e.g. in stating that women suffer disproportionately from the loss of social ties to the outside and a preoccupation with social identities such as motherhood, to the exclusion of other aspects of their prison experiences.5
In her analysis of the prominent themes in the literature on women’s imprisonment, Liebling criticises what she describes as an ‘obsession’ with emotional relationships on the inside: the emphasis almost always being on ‘women’s relationships with each other, and how sexual and family-like they are’, rather than on themes relevant to the prison, such as power, authority
and justice (that are conventionally found in studies of men’s prisons).6 She rhetorically asks why there is an emphasis in this literature on impulsiveness, manipulativeness and resistance to taking orders, but not on the emotions of anger and defiance. Jewkes and Laws recall Liebling’s observation that anger and defiance expressed by women in prison are viewed (if at all) as losses of control, rather than attempts to exert control (again, as commonly characterised in studies of male prisoners). 7
From the outset, then, discussions around gender and prison are loaded and challenging to navigate. Although women constitute a minority of prisoners across the UK and the Republic of Ireland (between 3–7%), their numbers are rising. In the Republic, conditions in women’s prisons seem to have deteriorated in recent years, with increasing overcrowding in both women’s facilities and no dedicated open facilities available for women at all.8 A new facility for women has just been opened at Limerick prison based on trauma-informed principles in consultation with Yvonne Jewkes.9 With other trauma-informed initiatives gaining popularity in prison practice and policy, it seems to be a good time to take stock.
Women’s imprisonment and its unique harms
Imprisonment does not happen in a vacuum but is tied into women’s preprison lives, which are often complicated and may be scarred by extremely challenging experiences. The list of potentially adverse experiences is long and in addition to mental, physical and sexual abuse, these may include loss and bereavement, witnessing parental abuse, being separated from children and other dependents. Women serving long sentences are often very impacted by their offences, including feelings of guilt, regret, anger and grief, which can result in forms of inward-facing violence (like self-harm and suicidal ideation), aimed at punishing the self. 10 Across the female prison population self-harm is a dominant and rising factor, and this is particularly prevalent at the start of a prison sentence as well as during times of early post-release.11 Owing to the comparatively small prison population and few prisons, women tend to be held much further from their homes than their male counterparts, with adverse implications for contact to family, mental health, and resettlement.
Exposure to violence is one factor that is identified by women as instrumental in their own offending behaviour, and it must be noted that incarcerated women have often been victims of significantly more serious
offences (often involving serious bodily and psychological harm) than those for which they are convicted (predominantly non-violent offences). According to Jewkes and her colleagues, 57% of imprisoned women state that they have been victims of domestic violence, and 53% state that they experienced emotional, physical, or sexual abuse as a child, however the authors underline that these are likely under-reported. 12 Further, they state that, in England, 65% of incarcerated women have been diagnosed with depression compared to 37% of imprisoned men, and women account for 23% of all prison self-harm incidents, even though they make up just 3–7% of the overall prison population. They often find themselves in the aforementioned cycle of offending and victimisation – and while their offending is often minor in comparison to the male estate, they may be victims of many adverse conditions, like controlling behaviour from a partner who may coerce them into offending and/or of poverty and neglect, which they may in turn pass onto their children.
This combination of victimisation and offending is closely related to (often) untreated trauma, and while many women are diagnosed with one or several mental health conditions, they are often perceived as being ‘untreatable’ and ‘unmanageable’, making criminalisation more likely –especially in situations of acute crisis.13 Baroness Corston reported on the multitude of complex vulnerabilities that women in prison experience related to their life in prison but also to their life on the outside, including ‘not being in control of their lives’ and ‘not having many choices’.14 She highlights that, in many cases, prison environments have not been designed for women, often with higher standards of security and harsher practices than necessary. This has not significantly changed since the publication of the report as ‘women have – because of their relatively small numbers in the context of the prison population as a whole – all too frequently been treated as an afterthought; an addendum to the adult male estate’.15
While institutional security levels often take into account lower risks posed by women, Britton found that the majority of officers in her study experienced working in the lower-security environment of women’s prisons as less desirable and more emotionally demanding, involving far more ‘shades of grey’. 16 This environment in turn also affects women who have no choice about being there, particularly ones who have severe experiences of trauma and other extremely challenging situations: Prisons are challenging settings for trauma-informed care. Prisons
are designed to house perpetrators, not victims. Inmates arrive shackled and are crammed into overcrowded housing units; lights are on all night, loud speakers blare without warning and privacy is severely limited. Security staff is focused on maintaining order and must assume each inmate is potentially violent. The correctional environment is full of unavoidable triggers, such as pat downs and strip searches, frequent discipline from authority figures, and restricted movement.17
While many women in prison have high levels of mental health and physical health needs, latest figures for England and Wales show that healthand social-care services across all women’s prisons are inconsistent and frequently inadequate.18 The period of entry into and exit from custody were described as particularly problematic: For many women, reception into prison and the early days in custody was traumatic, deeply distressing and bewildering. This was especially the case for mothers separated from their children and pregnant women.19
Figures from HM Inspectorate of Prisons in England and Wales seem to suggest that while living conditions within prisons are mostly reasonable, women’s experiences have been deteriorating for years with increasing number of women reporting mental health difficulties, increasing rates of self-harm, too little time out of cells, staff shortages, and more.20 The recent deaths of two babies in custody in England and Wales have further impacted incarcerated women but also led to calls for decarceration.21 Calls for ending imprisonment of women, and particularly pregnant women, are not new. In 2007 the Corston report argued that prison is ‘both disproportionate and inappropriate’ for most of the women consigned to it and has severe and long-lasting effects due to the fact that women are more likely to lose their home and their children as a result of their time in prison.22
On trauma, trauma-informed practice and the roll-out of ‘Becoming Trauma-Informed’
Research on trauma and understanding the impact of trauma has seen a significant increase in fields of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience but also within practice-based work in social care, education, and criminal justice, even though research that addresses the needs of women remains at an early stage.23 ‘Trauma’ is a term that appears frequently with regards to
women who experience imprisonment, not only during their time in custody but also relating to their experiences of life as a whole. As such, trauma has become a concept used to conceptualise the after-effects of violent and lifedisruptive experiences, including the ones described above. Despite the wide usage of the term, it is not uncontested, and there is a tension between trauma that is seen as connected to the individual and trauma that is relational and seen as emanating from wider social environments. While not specifically related to a custodial context, Ehrkamp et al describe how a growing body of critical health, social science and humanities literature suggests that symptoms associated with ‘traumatic’ stressors – such as flashbacks, or recurrent intrusive memories, emotional numbing, avoidance, heightened vigilance, general anxiety, trouble sleeping, depression, dissociation, and somatic pain – cannot be understood as individual psychological (or even biochemical) experiences. Rather, these experiences, and the language used to discuss stressors (or ‘triggers’) and make meaning of violence, are embedded in specific social, cultural and geopolitical contexts.24
The research literature differentiates between acute (time-limited), chronic (multiple or ongoing), or complex (a mixture) trauma, all of which can have long-lasting effects. 25 Trauma can affect people from all backgrounds, but there is a strong correlation between levels of marginalisation and risk of exposure. Prison populations are especially likely to include disproportionate numbers of people exposed to complex trauma from a young age.
Trauma-informed services are generally supposed to be set up in a way that does not treat symptoms related to traumatic histories, but instead provide a way of working that takes into account the needs of service users with histories of diverse trauma. This includes having knowledge of the trauma at hand and taking the resulting vulnerabilities into account in practice-based work.26 According to Muskett, it is key that, when providing trauma-informed care, service users ‘feel connected, valued, informed and hopeful of recovery’, and that staff are working in a way that is mindful and empowering as well as actively relational (together with family, friends, other services) while also protecting the autonomy of the individual (‘clientcentred care’). 27
As part of this more general trend of acknowledging the significance of trauma in a variety of settings, a cultural initiative, ‘Becoming Trauma
Informed’ (BTI),28 was introduced into prisons in England and Wales (and elsewhere) based on the work of American clinical psychologist Dr Stephanie Covington from 2015. 29 This included BTI training for prison officers in all twelve women’s prisons during 2015–17.30 These training modules are based on Covington’s model and include courses on ‘Becoming Trauma Informed: A Training for Correctional Professionals’ and ‘Healing Trauma – a Brief Intervention for Women’, which include particular goals and implementation plans as well as tools for ongoing assessment.31 Across the women’s custodial estate in England and Wales at least four thousand members of staff as well as certain prisoners have been trained in trauma-informed practice. On the whole the training has been well received by staff and two whole prisons have declared themselves to be ‘trauma informed’.32
Can prisons be trauma informed?
If we take into account the abovementioned principles of trauma-informed care that include feeling connected, valued, informed, and hopeful, and also staff working in ways that are empowering and relational, an immediate disconnect becomes apparent in connection with penal environments. In custody, women face situations that frequently involve punitive practices, and they live in an environment that is essentially designed as a punishment to keep them apart from social networks and their civic lives. For some time, researchers like Becker-Blease have highlighted some of the challenges in achieving trauma-informed practice in institutional settings as well as the fact that trauma-informed training has been highly marketised, with the production of expensive training programs that have not been tested in terms of their efficacy. 33 There are calls for critical engagement, without which there may be a risk of perpetuating damaging practices ‘by another name’34 or essentially just a different way of labelling and managing problematic individuals.35 It is important to keep in mind that the long-term effects of such interventions remain unknown, especially in the post-release period, when women remain at high risk.36 Research has pointed towards the troubled relationship between therapy and punishment, which shows the potentially problematic nature of trauma-informed programmes in the context of custodial institutions.
One of the main arguments for evaluating BTI practice in prisons that I have highlighted with colleagues is that before any ‘effects’ of traumainformed practice can be properly investigated, there needs to be clarity
Anna Schliehe
about what this is and whether it exists in practice, beyond the delivery of some highly promising awareness training. 37 We were interested in what trauma-informed setting might feel like for those who live in it and therefore what it means for a prison to be trauma informed. We attempted to explore all of these areas descriptively through the tested tool of a quantitative survey, which was accompanied by a more intensive qualitative methodology.38
The ‘trauma informed’ (TI) survey items were drafted by the team and a final agreed list of twenty-two items was produced. This group of items formed a subscale in a larger research instrument called ‘Measuring the Quality of Prison Life’ (or MQPL), 39 and they were also included in a separate research project called ‘COMPEN’.40 The TI items were initially used in two women’s prisons in England and Wales. The interpretation of the quantitative survey data was undertaken in conjunction with the coding and synthesis of a large amount of qualitative data, collected as part of the intensive MQPL and COMPEN research. This included data from written comments in the open-ended questions in the MQPL survey, as well as from the formal and informal interviews and observations during our field visits to the two sites.41
Examples from the field – Duke Hill
Duke Hill Prison is semi-open and located in a rural setting. The prison started to develop trauma-informed practice training for staff in 2016, and it has been praised by HMIP inspectors, while also receiving an Enabling Environment status.42 Having the status of a trauma-informed prison made it a suitable place to explore trauma-informed dimensions. The introduction of ‘non-invasive’ alternatives to physical searches, posters, and information on display in reception and the gate, a peer-led trauma-informed group, and training courses for staff were well advertised on site. One aspect that was generally regarded as positive was the physical environment of the grounds, which were kept very clean and well maintained. Many reported positive gym experiences and the promotion of a healthy lifestyle. With the open regime (all day unlock, free flow) many expressed a sense of ‘independence’.43
Overall, however, comments from staff and prisoners were mixed when it came to identifying implementation of a trauma-informed approach and an understanding of how this was carried on different levels of the prison. Staff often talked with a trauma-informed language, but trauma-informed practice was only very partially embedded in the culture, and many staff felt that they lacked the training and support to engage fully with it. Staff
Anna Schliehe
attitudes were raised as a general problem in this prison by both prisoners and staff. Although some officers were very motivated, passionate, and caring, many prisoners identified problems with the prison’s underlying culture. Staff and prisoners told the research team about incidents in which some staff intentionally antagonised, provoked, or shamed women in their care. Aspects of the staff culture were, then, punitive and uncaring, as some staff members acknowledged:
Some staff love to catch the women in the wrong and punish them. It’s like what they live for.
We see the words written on signs [about being trauma informed], but that’s where it stops.
People get lost in the system here, and the chaos and misery that it creates is dehumanising.
The team witnessed several incidents of verbal abuse of women by staff (e.g. ‘You don’t deserve a family visit’), and some observed practices, like the forceful removal of clothing from women suspected of hiding contraband, or hospital escorts accompanied solely by male staff, were likely to compound rather than neutralise past traumas. This was dispiriting to those senior managers and other staff who were invested in making trauma-informed practice and enabling environments a reality. While many staff used traumainformed language, trauma-informed practice was limited. Many staff felt that they lacked the training and support to engage fully with the concepts they had been taught. Often, staff expressed a view that the prison was addressing trauma only superficially, or was producing additional problems: I really believe in enabling environments, but this is not one – this prison is un-abling.
Prisoners could see that some staff in the prison took a future-oriented approach to their lives, but staff did not always situate their behaviour in the context of their biographical experiences. 58% prisoners disagreed or strongly disagreed that ‘time is taken to understand my personal history in this prison’. Some prisoners complained that prison staff had little meaningful understanding of their histories or exacerbated their problems: Trauma-orientation is bullshit – they do not look into the deeper reasons for your behaviour.
It’s [this prison that has] caused me trauma.
No one has even bothered with me.
Prisoners here reported moderately positively for only two of the twentytwo relevant items: ‘Staff in this prison believe I can grow and change’ (3.11), and ‘This prison helps me recognise my strengths’ (3.01, more ‘neutral’ than positive: 36% agreed and 33% disagreed). They reported negatively for the other twenty (see Table 1 below). The two lowest-scoring items are ‘Time is taken to understand my personal history in this prison’ (2.39), and ‘Care is taken to be sensitive to my past experiences in this prison’ (2.39), indicating that the some of the central components of trauma-informed work practice are not met.
Examples from the field – Swan Hall Prison
Swan Hall Prison was not officially described as a ‘trauma informed’, nor accredited as an ‘enabling’ environment. Nonetheless, aspects of traumainformed practice existed in its therapeutic community and PIPE unit (Psychologically Informed Planned Environment), and a course, ‘Healing Trauma and Becoming Trauma Informed’, was delivered at the time of research. Trauma-informed thinking was visible throughout the prison, with many posters around the prison advertising a trauma-informed approach and trauma-informed language used by some staff. In its most recent inspection report (2018), prison II was rated highly as a safe environment with low levels of violence. Similar to Duke Hill, one aspect that was generally regarded as positive was the physical environment of the grounds, which were kept well maintained – one particular area of interest was the pond and many prisoners actively followed the ducklings that were raised there.
This was not reflected in the responses to the survey, however, as the twenty-two survey items relating to trauma were all rated below the neutral threshold. The highest mean score was for the item, ‘Staff in this prison believe I can grow and change’, at 2.99, while the lowest was for the item, ‘In this prison I feel truly seen and heard’, with almost 60% prisoners disagreeing with the statement. Fewer than 20% prisoners agreed with the items, ‘Time is taken to understand my personal history in this prison’, and ‘Care is taken to be sensitive to my past experiences in this prison’. Fewer than a quarter of prisoners agreed with the statements, ‘This prison is sensitive and responsive’, and ‘Staff see me and treat me as a whole person’.
Anna Schliehe
These findings were strikingly close to those at Duke Hill Prison (see Table 1 above).
Staff attitudes were raised as an issue by both prisoners and also some staff. While there are some calm and supportive staff who do great work with trauma-informed elements, 44 it is problematic how many prisoners feel they are ‘targeted’ by certain officers, which again reveals the issue of too much familiarity and closeness used in a controlling and unacceptable manner. 45 Prisoners reported:
I avoid officers like the plague … They antagonise you and abuse their authority … Some are preying on vulnerable women.
When you’re not a good prisoner, officers target you. When you are on their radar, you’re fucked.
This jail in general doesn’t have many officers who understand emotional needs of trauma certain women have been through. 20–30% are homophobic, and I feel targeted by at least three officers. Related to this, 55% disagreed with the statement that ‘This prison allows me to express difficult feelings’. In interviews there was a clear indication that this was particularly the case for prisoners who were categorised as ‘trouble’ (often black, younger women from around London) but also for prisoners struggling with chronic illnesses and prisoners with mental health problems and/or learning difficulties. Many women talked about the negative effects on them due to not being fully ‘seen’, including feelings of loneliness: ‘All you are here is a number. In here you are very alone – extremely lonely.’ Likewise, many participants described being unable to fully communicate their problems and concerns. Some participants experienced high levels of stress relating to negotiations to see children, receiving authorisation for home visits, or managing the stark difference between emotionally intense visits and the subsequent feelings of separation. Overall then, trauma can be found in prisoners’ backgrounds but also in the way the prison operates. The experience of trauma for certain groups of women is more invisible than for others. Trauma often seems to be seen as a ‘retrospective’ (developmental) issue (of life circumstances) rather than something that can be caused by the prison or exacerbate conditions. Talking to one ‘Healing Trauma’ facilitator at Swan Hall revealed that she thought it would take years for a culture change to take place. She explained that staff
are quite understanding when they run the course, but there is no difference in levels of trust either way afterwards.
Conclusion
Overall, the development of trauma-informed work is important and promising, and reflects much effort and engagement, as well as a deeply felt relevance and need. While it is vital to recognise the intention and values underlying this development, it is important to connect this to the lived experience on the ground. It is imperative to understand what is meant by the concept, as well as what difference trauma-informed work makes to the treatment and experience of prisoners. This is why – at the request of the organisations involved – the TI items were developed in order to operationalise the concept of trauma-informed practice.
At both prisons, the results on the new TI items were surprisingly poor. The self-declared status of being a ‘trauma-informed prison’ did not differentiate it from a prison without this status.46 To recap: only two of twenty-two relevant items were scored at or above neutral; most were scored negatively. This shows that while trauma-informed practice has been developed to address severe issues, and our findings should not be seen in any way as a criticism of its goals, there is much work to be done – from understanding what is to be achieved, how to put it into practice and to further develop independent tools to measure outcomes. The inherent features of imprisonment create an environment that make it particularly challenging to deliver work that is truly trauma informed in all its facets. Furthermore, trauma symptoms (like flashbacks, anxiety, dissociation and more) are particularly difficult to manage in a penal environment. It is difficult to see how key elements of trauma-informed practice, like actively relational work that is mindful and empowering, supports autonomy, and makes women feel hopeful, valued, and connected (see above) can be realised fully in a prison context. Jewkes and colleagues are more optimistic, highlighting that: if properly implemented, TICP has the potential to ameliorate the traumas experienced by women in custody, but that it must be viewed as a holistic set of practices that include and are inextricably linked to the environmental context in which they take place. 47
While the focus here lies very heavily on the design of prisons (and Jewkes and her team have been involved in the planning of the new Limerick
prison for women, which has just been built), our work shows that while carceral environments do matter a great deal, the social and socio-political conditions – the important relational aspects that underlie prison work – are where the real challenges lie when it comes to addressing trauma: We need consistency, we need clear boundaries and guidelines, but we also need compassion … I am constantly in a state of anxiety, every day, as soon as that door opens … because you don’t know what officer is on, you don’t know what mood they’re in, you don’t know whether they’re going to be helpful to you today or they’re going to be dismissive. (prisoner, interview prison II)
A key theme throughout has been the relative powerlessness and vulnerability of women in prison, which produces particular forms of need and dependence on staff. 48 At the same time, the women’s biographical experiences made them acutely sensitive to the use and misuse of authority. This is partly why women’s prisons represent a challenge to models of penal order, authority, and legitimacy – but also to initiatives like trauma-informed work that rely on trustworthy relationships in a social environment that is often complex, charged, and ambiguous.
A focus on trauma seems integral in prison spaces that have seen dramatically rising numbers of violent incidents and self-inflicted deaths in custody in recent years. Prison inspectorates in all four jurisdictions in the UK and the ROI have highlighted the pressing problems facing the penal systems. Not despite this, but because of it, particular vigilance is needed with regard to the implementation of trauma-informed work.
Dr Anna Schliehe is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Trier in Cultural and Political Geography, visiting scholar at the Instiute of Criminology in Cambridge and the author of a number of works, including Young Women’s Carceral Geographies: Abandonment, Trouble and Mobility (Leeds: Emerald Publishing Ltd., 2021).
Notes
1 A. K. Schliehe, Young Women’s Carceral Geographies: Abandonment, Trouble, and Mobility (Bingley: Emerald, 2021).
2 P. Carlen, A. Worrall, Analysing Women’s Imprisonment (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004).
3 J. Ward (1982), ‘Telling tales in prison’, in Custom and Conflict in British Society, ed by R. Frankenber (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 235–257.
4 R. Giallombardo, Society of Women: A Study of a Women’s Prison (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966).
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5 A. Rowe, ‘Tactics, agency and power in women’s prisons’, British Journal of Criminology, 56:2 (2016), 332–349.
6 A. Liebling, ‘Women in prison prefer legitimacy to sex’, British Society of Criminology Newsletter, 63 (2009), 19–23, p. 20.
7 Y. Jewkes, B. Laws, ‘Liminality revisited: Mapping the emotional adaptations of women in carceral space’, Punishment and Society, 23:3 (2021), 394–412.
8 Ireland has two prisons for adult women: the standalone Dóchas Centre at Mountjoy Prison Dublin (operational capacity 146) and the new Limerick women’s prison (operational capacity fifty-six, with eight assisted-living apartments). Total operational capacity is therefore at 202 places. The current numbers for 2024 lie at 221, with a current percentage of 4.5% of total prison population and 4.1% female prison population rate. See <www.prisonstudies.org/country/ireland-republic>
9 Yvonne Jewkes, ‘Limerick women’s prison: an architecture of hope’, Architects’ Journal, 14 July 2022, <www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/limerick-womens-prison-an-architecture-of-hope>
10 B. Crewe, S. Hulley, S. Wright, ‘The gendered pains of life imprisonment’, The British Journal of Criminology, 57:6 (2017), 1359–1378.
11 B. Carlton, M. Segrave, Women Exiting Prisons: Critical Essays on Gender, Post-Release Support and Survival (London: Routledge, 2014).
12 Y. Jewkes, M. Jordan, S. Wright, G. Bendelow, ‘Designing “Healthy” Prisons for Women: Incorporating Trauma-Informed Care and Practice (TICP) into Prison Planning and Design’, Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health, 16:20 (2019).
13 See Jewkes et al, ‘Designing “Healthy” Prisons’, and Schliehe, Young Women’s Carceral Geographies
14 J. Corston, The Corston Report (London: Home Office, 2007), p. 4.
15 Jewkes et al, ‘Designing “Healthy” Prisons’, p. 3.
16 D. M. Britton, At Work in the Iron Cage: The Prison as Gendered Organization (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 124.
17 N. A. Miller, L. M. Najavits, ‘Creating trauma-informed correctional care: A balance of goals and environment’, Eur. J. Psychotraumatol, 3 (2012); see also Jewkes et al, ‘Designing “Healthy” Prisons’.
18 NHS England, ‘A review of health and social care in women’s prisons’, November 2023, <www. england.nhs.uk/long-read/a-review-of-health-and-social-care-in-womens-prisons/>
19 NHS England, ‘A review of health and social care’.
20 HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, Annual Report 2022–23 (London: HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2023), and for analysis of previous years see Jewkes et al, ‘Designing “Healthy” Prisons’, p. 55.
21 ‘The inspectorate iterates that the concerns raised by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman on the deaths of two babies in prisons, including one at Bronzefield, had been carefully considered and responded to’, Corston Report, p. 61. However these have led to increased calls for decarceration of women and particularly pregnant women.
22 Corston, Corston Report, p. 16
23 T. Hales, N. Kusmaul, T. Nochajski, ‘Exploring the dimensionality of trauma-informed care: Implications for theory and practice’, Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 41:3 (2017), 317–325.
24 P. Ehrkamp, J. M. Loyd, A. Secor, ‘Embodiment and memory in the geopolitics of trauma’, in Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration, ed by K. Mitchell, R. Jones, J. L. Fluri (Cheltenham: Elgar Publishing, p. 121).
25 See for example: M. Randall, L. Haskell, ‘Trauma-informed approaches to law: Why restorative justice must understand trauma and psychological coping restorative justice’, Dalhousie Law Journal, (2013), 501–534; A. S. Crisanti, B. C. Frueh, ‘Risk of trauma exposure among persons with mental illness in jails and prisons: What do we really know?’, Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 24:5 (2011), 431–435.
26 Harris and Fallot were the first to call for a ‘paradigm shift within service delivery systems’ along these lines. M. Harris, R. D. Fallot, ‘Envisioning a trauma-informed service system: A vital paradigm shift’, New Directions for Mental Health Services 89 (2001), 3–22.
27 According to C. Muskett, ‘Trauma-informed care in inpatient mental health settings: A review of the literature’, Int. J. Ment. Health Nurs., 23 (2014), 51–59, p. 52 and p. 58., see also D. E.
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Elliott, P. Bjelajac, R. D. Fallot, L. Markoff, ‘Trauma-informed or trauma-denied: Principles and implementation of trauma-informed services for women’, Journal of Community Psychology, 33:4 (2005), 461 – 477; and Bateman et al 2014 for similar accounts in other national contexts.
28 Covington defines trauma-informed services as ‘services that have been created to provide assistance for problems other than trauma, but in which all practitioners have a shared knowledge base and/or core understanding about trauma resulting from violence’, see S. S. Covington, ‘A woman’s journey home’, in Prisoners Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration and Reentry on Children, Families, and Communities, ed by J. Travis, M. Waul (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press), 67–104. Trauma-informed training interventions promote awareness of the significance of trauma in an individual’s everyday life in order to support recovery (see E. A. King, ‘Outcomes of trauma-informed interventions for incarcerated women: A review’, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 61:6 (2017), 667–688; N. A. Miller, L. M. Najavits, ‘Creating trauma-informed correctional care: a balance of goals and environment, Eur. J. Psychotraumatol., 3, 2012). This is important in criminal justice settings where inadvertent re-traumatisation via unthinking staff or poor cultural practices may be more likely than support for recovery (Covington, ‘A woman’s journey’, 2003), particularly among female prisoners (see P. Eastel, ‘Women in Australian prisons: The cycle of abuse, disadvantage and dysfunctional environments’, The Prison Journal, 81:1 (2001), 87–112.
29 See S. Kubiak, S. S. Covington, C. Hiller, ‘Trauma-informed corrections’, in Social Work in Juvenile Justice and Criminal Justice Systems, ed by D. W. Springer, A. R. Roberts, fourth edn (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 2017), 92–98; S. S. Covington, Becoming Trauma Informed: A Training Programme for Criminal Justice Professionals (La Jolla, CA: Women’s Estate Center for Gender and Justice, 2016); Covington, ‘A woman’s journey’; S. S. Covington, E. Russo, (2019) Healing trauma. Available at: https://www.stephaniecovington.com/healing-trauma. php (accessed 10 September 2023).
30 For further information, see K. M. Auty, A, Liebling, A. Schliehe, B. Crewe, ‘What is traumainformed practice? Towards operationalisation of the concept in two prisons for women’, Criminology & Criminal Justice, 23:5 (2023), 716–738.
31 S. S. Covington (2019) Healing trauma. Available at: https://www.stephaniecovington.com/ healing-trauma.php (accessed 10 September 2023); S. S. Covington, R. Fallot, Implementation Plan and Goal Attainment Scale: In the Trauma and Gender Criminal Justice Toolkit, 3rd edn (Hamden, CT: Connecticut Women’s Consortium, 2015).
32 This involves staff being aware of the backgrounds and vulnerabilities of those in their care, being sensitive, protective, offering help, affirmation and safety, and looking after their own health and well-being at work in order to provide the right kind of environment. See Auty et al, ‘What is traumainformed practice?’.
33 K. A. Becker-Blease, ‘As the world becomes trauma informed, work to do’, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 18:2 (2017), 131–138; A, DePrince, E. Newman, ‘Special issue editorial: The art and science of trauma-focused training and education’, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 3:3 (2011), 213–214; R. F. Hanson, J. Lang, ‘A critical look at trauma-informed care among agencies and systems serving maltreated youth and their families’, Child Maltreatment, 21:2 (2016), 95–100.
34 E. J. Tseris,‘Trauma theory without feminism? Evaluating contemporary understandings of traumatized women’, Affilia, 28:2 (2013), 153–164.
35 S. Pollack, ‘Taming the shrew: Regulating prisoners through women-centered mental health programming’, Critical Criminology 13:1 (2005), 71–87.
36 H. Harner, A. W. Burgess, ‘Using a trauma-informed framework to care for incarcerated women’, Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing, 40:4 (2011), 469–476.
37 See Auty et al, ‘What is trauma-informed practice?’
38 In our attempt to quantify complex experiences and processes, we faced the tricky issue of assigning a positive or negative value to each item. Some items, for example, ‘this prison allows me to express difficult feelings’ could be seen as an uncomfortable yet positive experience, and fairly typical of the experience of good trauma-informed care. Prisoners negotiate the expression of feelings and experiences in complex situations in prison in which their ‘risk’ is continually evaluated. This should be kept in mind while analysing the data (Auty et al, ‘What is trauma-informed practice?’).
39 The MQPL survey aims to capture the cultural, moral, and social dimensions of prison life. Its development was based on the use of appreciative inquiry in which the form of engagement is
‘collaborative, respectful, appreciative, and based on real, but peak, personal experiences’. For these TI items mean scores were produced for each item, including the new ‘trauma-informed’ items. Those with a score of 3.00 or higher indicate an overall positive view for that item. Scores below 3 are negative. Based on cumulative experience carrying out MQPL exercises in more than thirty prisons, we treat scores approaching 2.50 or below as ‘alarming’ or crossing a dangerous threshold, see K. Auty, B. Crewe, J. Laursen, A. Liebling, B. Schmidt, B. Laws, D. Kant, M. Morney, A. Cope, ‘Measuring the Quality of Prison Life at HMP/YOI Drake Hall: Key findings from the Cambridge MQPL+’, unpublished internal report, Prisons Research Centre, University of Cambridge, 18 June 2018.
40 To increase the database, we included these MQPL items in our survey for the COMPEN project (<www.compen.crim.cam.ac.uk/>), which was then used in one of our fieldsites, a single sex women’s prison in the South of England. Our work there consisted mainly of over 110 qualitative interviews plus ethnographic data from a comparative study of women’s prisons in England and Norway. See B. Crewe, A. Ievins, S. Larmour, J. Laursen, K. Mjåland, A. Schliehe, (2022), ‘Nordic penal exceptionalism: A comparative, empirical analysis’, British Journal of Criminology, 63:2 (2023), 424–443.
41 For a more detailed description of methodology and analysis please read Auty et al, ‘What is traumainformed practice?’.
42 See Auty et al, ‘What is trauma-informed practice?’.
43 However, for many women the open environment and low supervision meant that it was easy to get into trouble and/or be at the mercy of other prisoners. For the more vulnerable women, e.g., the ones with serious mental health problems or the ones susceptible to drug taking/getting into debt, this created additional stress.
44 For example one officer taking quite a lot of time out of her day to sit on a bench by the pond one on one with a distressed prisoner who is struggling with voices in her head and calmly discussing her experiences and what she could try to deal with this (COMPEN Fieldnotes AKS).
45 My interviewee lost her ID card and is challenged by officer who calls her a ‘dick’, when she tries to explain what happened she gets a strange look. Once we are done explaining she is suddenly called ‘love’ – the banter is so changeable, which is unsettling (COMPEN Fieldnotes AKS).
46 While we received positive feedback on our items (women assured us that we were measuring the right things), our findings were disappointing. However, we do not claim that we have exhausted the possibilities or achieved full operationalisation of this important area of work. There were strong correlations between items in the ‘trauma-informed’ dimension and those in the existing MQPL dimensions, ‘Respect’, ‘Humanity’ and ‘Staff-Prisoner relationships’. See Auty et al, ‘What is trauma-informed practice?’.
47 Jewkes et al, ‘Designing “Healthy” Prisons’.
48 Throughout our COMPEN data, see B. Crewe, A. Schliehe, D. A. Przybylska, ‘“It causes a lot of problems”: Relational ambiguities and dynamics between prisoners and staff in a women’s prison’, European Journal of Criminology, 20:3 (2023), 925–946.
Prison Abolition in a Time of Overcrowding: Sowing the Seeds for Change
David Gordon Scott
This article reflects upon questions around penal legitimacy and the importance of sowing the seeds of change in Irish penal policy. It is argued that prisons should be regarded as an inherently problematic institutional response to criminalised behaviours and that further prison reforms are an insufficient remedy to such endemic problems In so doing it is hoped that the article will help open a space for reflections on a very a different way of approaching penal and social harms in Ireland – the idea of penal abolition.1 Prison abolitionists ask us to consider whether the harm and suffering created by prisons and punishment are justified. People normally think harming other people is morally wrong, and penal abolitionists argue that if the grounds for penal confinement are not morally water-tight, then we should abandon our presumption of imprisonment in response to human wrongdoing and instead develop rational alternatives that are morally justifiable.
Abolitionists recognise that not all social harms in society are criminal offences2 and that it is impossible to repair or redress a harm by inflicting further harm. The basic abolitionist message is that we urgently need to find ethical responses that reduce harm, unnecessary suffering, and victimhood. Paraphrasing Soyinka, the fulfilment of penal abolitionist aspirations requires a ‘colossal effort’ from all of us to prevent or overcome the tragic personal and social consequences generated by penal confinement.3 Whilst prison’s dehumanising barriers can crush the human spirit and leave those it contains in despair, the struggle against imprisonment is a genuine force for good and can play an important part in facilitating progressive social and penal change.4 However, this can only happen if sufficient collective will, belief, commitment, and solidaristic action can be mobilised. Penal abolitionists aim to facilitate such a popular mobilisation of anti-prison sentiments and belief that justice can be re-imagined through a non-penal lens as abolitionism is grounded in a ‘philosophy of hope’.5 Central to this philosophy is the cultivation of an abolitionist imagination
Discussions on prisons today, especially in mainstream politics, are largely constrained by their ‘immediatism’. Immediatism, which means focusing only on the present and immediate few years preceding it, can produce a profound sense of penological amnesia that invisibilises failed prison policies and practices from further back in the past.6 One of the key goals of this article is to acknowledge historical penal continuities and reveal insights from evidence of prisoners, prison staff, and penal administrators on the profound failures of prisons in the past. It is only through such historical awareness that policy and other decision makers can break away from a ‘penal merry-go-round’, where exhausted and failed penal policies and reforms are rolled out again and again in quick succession.7 Penological amnesia also helps to obfuscate the perennial fact that prisons are almost exclusively filled with people from impoverished social backgrounds. Although not a central focus of this article, the reader should be in no doubt that the current excessive use of imprisonment is intimately tied with neo-liberal political economy and the management of social divisions under carceral colonial capitalism.8
While undoubtedly it is important to raise questions about prison conditions and overcrowding in the present moment, it equally essential that we look beyond this limited horizon. This is not to say that concerns about prison conditions and overcrowding are unworthy – overcrowding exacerbates the worst aspects of penal confinement and can lead to an intensification of suffering – but rather to emphasise the point that the failure of the prison is much more than simply its over-usage or exceeding of official capacity or poor physical condition. The very existence of prisons –institutions justified in terms of deliberately inflicting pain – should in and of itself be of urgent moral and political concern.
The pre-existing legitimacy of the prison should not be taken as a given. Claims of penal legitimacy should be contextualised within historical continuities of suffering and avoidable and premature deaths in the prison place. The dissenting historical voices of people with lived experience of penal institutions – whether prisoners or prison workers – who have been courageous enough to question its moral or political validity should be heard. Prisoner accounts that challenge penal power have told nothing but the same old story for centuries – that prisons have been characterised by intolerable pain, distress, ill-health, violence and death.9 This is equally true in historical testimonies of dissenting Irish prisoners, something explored later, especially through the life and writings of Michael Davitt. Remarkably it is also so with
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regards to several published testimonies from those who have worked within prisons. They reinforce the same message – that prisons are an abject failure. Some of these dissenting voices (albeit from English prisons) from the past are also platformed later in the article.10
My own pathway to a questioning of penal legitimacy and subsequent development of an abolitionist imagination started as a prison researcher, nearly thirty years ago.11 While undertaking an ethnographic study of prison chaplains in six prisons in the north east of England for Heavenly Confinement?, 12 I witnessed first-hand the harms, suffering, misery, and moral indifference that typify daily life in the prison place. I saw the suffering of prisoners and heard the dissenting voices of those working within prison. Seeing suffering etched on the face of prisoners, their bodies widely scarred through self-injury, and talking to people clearly in distress and experiencing mental health problems seemed to me like a terrible and totally unnecessary example of man’s inhumanity to man. Further ethnographic prison research was to confirm and further sensitise me to the dehumanisation of penal confinement, but the research for Heavenly Confinement? was formative. In this research, I spoke to over a dozen prison chaplains for many hours. Some of the chaplains had worked in prisons for decades. I ‘shadowed’ the chaplains on their daily duties, visiting vast areas of the six prisons in the study unannounced. I was often mistaken as a ‘trainee chaplain’ by prisoners and staff and my presence went by relatively unnoticed. The chaplains themselves were candid about the failings of the prison. None of the chaplains I spoke with felt prisons worked (or could work) in terms of rehabilitation. Several were sympathetic to abolitionist ideas. For example, an Anglican chaplain at HMP Durham, Steve Mann, when asked what he viewed to be the purpose of prison, stated: God knows, I don’t. I haven’t the faintest idea. It seems to me that the prison is a total failure. Frankly I think prisons are keeping people out of sight and out of mind. Prisons are such a terrible waste.13
Critical historical studies on ‘reformed prisons’ from the early 1800s evidence that avoidable and premature deaths and self-harm have deeply embedded in the workings of the prison place since its inception.14 Literally tens of thousands of prisoners have died in prisons over the years in England and Wales. Avoidable deaths and harm continue to plague prisons in England and Wales today. Self-harm is at epidemic proportions. In 2023, it
was officially recorded that there were 733 incidents of self-harm per 1000 prisoner.15 From April 2022 to March 2023, there were 88 self-inflicted deaths, one of highest death tolls on record. In 2023, 305 prisoners in total died in prisons in England and Wales.16 There have been over 3,000 deaths in prison in England and Wales since 2010. It is now also known, from several longitudinal research studies, that prisons have a devastating negative impact on life expectancy. Serving a prison sentence slowly eats away at a person’s lifeforce. Prison time takes years off people’s lives. According to research published over the last decade for every one year served of a prison sentence two years are taken off a prisoner’s life expectancy.17 Prison environments are also toxic for staff. It is estimated that prison officers in England and Wales have a life-expectancy of only eighteen months post-retirement. This further evidences claims that prisons are inherently problematic and should be closed down.18
Thinking beyond prison reform
Despite the overwhelming evidence of extensive avoidable and deadly harms, there is still the temptation to think that ‘reformist reforms’ are an option. Yet this is nothing but penal utopianism. It may be hard for people to escape the dichotomy that the only alternatives available to us are either prison reforms or maintaining the status quo, but, if we are to end the penal merry-go-round and its associated cycle of failure, that is exactly what must be done.
Penal utopias – ‘what ifs’ and ‘what is’
What if prisons could be freed from the dehumanising doctrine of less eligibility, which dictates that prison conditions must always be inferior to those of the poorest labourer on the outside? What if all prisons were below capacity and the spectre of crowding could be banished once and for all? What if there were plentiful, well trained, and motivated prison staff who wished to be more than merely ‘caretakers of punishment’? What if the old and decrepit prison buildings were replaced by new ecologically sustainable and ‘modern’ prison buildings? These ‘what ifs’ reflect a kind of ‘penal utopian thinking’.19 Whilst penal utopias continue to have political currency, it is important to recognise that in fact they are morally bankrupt. Even if these ‘what ifs’ did come to fruition, then we still have the ‘what is’ of the prison – the residue of the essential character of the prison place that remains irrespective of physical conditions. In essence, the prison is what it is because it cannot
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be otherwise than an institutionalised form of punishment. Its raison d’être is to hurt, damage, injure, and inflict pain. Punishing people is something the prison does well, and it cannot escape its base (in fact de-based) function. Prisons are inevitably places of pain and blame. Seeped in institutionally structured violence, prisons systematically fail meet basic human needs.20 Rather than meet someone’s existing needs, they inevitably spawn new ones. Prisons are all about loss, estrangement, endings, boredom, wastefulness, and a profoundly damaging saturation in time consciousness. Prisons operate with a ‘batch’ mentality and as such cannot accommodate individual need. 21 Prisons waste life. The iatrogenic harms of the prison place cannot be ameliorated by simply building better prisons, employing more staff, or increasing prison capacity. These ideas have already been proved to fail. It has long been noted that the failed prisons of today already are reformed prisons. It is time to think very differently and consider abolitionist inspired ‘negative reforms’ that can dismantle the penal apparatus of the capitalist state and facilitate the building of alternatives that can genuinely meet human need.22
Seeing through the cracks and exploiting contradictions
It is important when reflecting on penal abolition to consider what is ‘feasible’ in the here and now. The aim of penal abolitionism is obvious: abolition refers to an end point of a journey – a world with no prisons. It is, though, important to be very conscious about where we are starting from and what is required to move forward. This means thinking strategically about how to achieve this goal. Abolitionism is not a utopian fantasy detached from current realities. It is about following a non-penal pathway to a certain destination. On that pathway abolitionists must attempt to reach progressive waystations or stage posts as they make their way towards their goal. Prison walls are unlikely to come crumbling down without social and political change. In our times of colonial carceral capitalism, penal abolitionists must strategically ensure that they are part of the debate in the here and now. That is, that their ideas and proposals for change are not immediately defined out, silenced, or ignored. Yet, at the same time, for an abolitionist intervention to be ‘abolitionist’ it must contradict penal logic and its claims to legitimacy.23 One way of exploiting contradictions is through the generation and dissemination of subversive knowledge on penal realities.
Subversive knowledge, bearing witness and truth telling
I think it would not be unfair to say that any honest reflections on the damage wrought by penal incarceration is likely to undermine its legitimacy. If the bearing witness to prison questions penal power and legitimacy, it should be regarded as a form of subversive knowledge and such knowledge generation is strategically important for the abolitionist cause. Hearing the voice of those experiencing penal repression and resisting power, and the honest voice of those embroiled in the exercise of penal power, can shine a spotlight on the brutal realities of penal regimes like no other. For prisoners and exprisoners, this may entail writing or talking about their experiences within what is sometimes referred to as the ‘belly of the beast’ and the devastating and deadly harms and useless suffering generated by penal power. Of course, the voice of the prisoner may be disqualified, disregarded, and subjugated,24 but subversive prisoner testimonies can be invaluable in transforming understandings of those prepared to listen without prejudice.
For those working on the inside of the penal machinery, acting counterintuitively in terms of professional interests may be the first step. It takes courage and integrity to tell truth to power as well as to try and hold power to account through subversive knowledge. Connecting with abolitionist campaigners or radical journalists on the outside, whistleblowing and providing evidence about abuses of power, cover-ups and corruption, and simply widespread truth telling about the actual state of the prisons in public can all help undermine the stranglehold of penal logic on public opinion and the assumption that prisons can be successfully reformed.
The important point to make is that dissident voices from the inside can generate subversive thinking that can be strategically important in the journey towards penal abolition. It is now to the voice and testimonies of dissident prison staff and prisoners in the past that we now turn.
Questioning
prison legitimacy from within
It has been argued that many of the most powerful voices questioning penal legitimacy are from those who have directly experienced it as either a prisoner or member of staff. I have extensively drawn upon prisoner voices elsewhere to evidence the iatrogenic harms of imprisonment and will do so again in the following section.25 Here I would like to focus on the concerns raised by people working within prisons. Prison staff and administrators have also recognised the endemic failure of the prison and highlighted the
need to do something very different in response to illegalities. The following dissenting voices are all from the past, but they are worthwhile remembering, because they highlight how many of the concerns about prisons today have been consistently raised by prison workers for literally centuries.
Dissenting English voices from the past
Subversive knowledge revealing that prisons are profoundly dangerous to people’s long-term health and well-being has been present since the first reformed prison in England opened at Millbank, on the River Thames in London in 1816. In 1852, Dr William Baly, medical officer at HMP Milbank, noted there were significant dangers of an ‘increasing risk of insanity that attends the protraction of imprisonment’ and that prisoners of ‘any considerable degree of imbecility or great dullness of intellect will certainly be rendered actually insane or idiotic by a few months separate confinement’.26 Despite the mounting evidence of failure, HMP Pentonville opened in 1842. The devastating impact this ‘model prison’ had on prisoners was equally transparent. In 1848, the prison commissioners admitted the large number of self-inflicted deaths in HMP Pentonville left them short of an answer, noting that ‘it may be difficult to offer a certain explanation of the great number of cases of death and insanity that have occurred within the past year’,27 other than, of course, that ill-health and death were systematically generated by the prisons themselves.
One of the most widely cited critiques of imprisonment in the nineteenth century came from Sir Godfrey Lushington, who was Permanent Undersecretary of State for the Home Office from 1885 to November 1894. Though firmly adhering to the doctrine of political liberalism, Lushington was scathing of the idea that prisons could bring about positive changes in people. For Lushington a prison sentence could never lead to reformation. He famously made his position clear in his evidence to the House of Commons, Report from the departmental committee on prisons (The Gladstone Committee) on the 11 February 1895:
I regard as unfavourable to reformation the status of a prisoner throughout his whole career; the crushing, of self-respect, the starving of all moral instinct he may possess, the absence of all opportunity to do or receive a kindness, the continual association with none but criminals, and that only as a separate item amongst other items also separate; the forced labour, and the denial of all
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liberty. I believe the true mode of reforming a man or restoring him to society is exactly in the opposite direction of all these; but, of course, this is a mere idea. It is quite impracticable in a prison. In fact, the unfavourable features I have mentioned are inseparable from prison life.28
Lushington was not alone in recognising that something was very wrong with daily prison life. Perhaps the most influential reformer of prisons at the beginning of the twentieth century was Sir Alexander Paterson. From 1922–1946, Patterson was Commissioner of Prisons and Director of Convict Prisons in England and Wales, and he famously established the ‘Borstal regime’ in the early 1900s. Borstal was an institution for children modelled on Eton public school and took its name from the village in which it was established. Paterson called for decent education and recognition that the deprivation of liberty was punishment in its own right. For Paterson, prisons were ultimately a ‘sentence of living death’ and a place which could ‘so easily become an unhealthy little cesspool’.29 By the time he got to the end of his career, Paterson went as far as to suggest a civilised society should abandon the idea of calling state-organised institutional-confinement ‘reform prisons’ or ‘penitentiaries’. For Paterson, there should exist places that can house people for psychiatric examination and diagnosis and to help with people with mental health problems. He also argued that that they should be institutions that aim to train and educate those who have lost their way. But most importantly he argued for non-punitive ‘places of detention’.30
One final example of a dissenting voice from the past is Dr Maurice Hamblin-Smith, who ended his long career working in penal institutions with doubts about at least certain aspects of its legitimacy. From 1919 to the mid-1930s, Hamblin-Smith’s supervised a special mental health unit at HMP Birmingham. Hamblin-Smith had over thirty years’ experience as medical officer in several prisons in England and authored Prisons and a Changing Civilization in 1934, which contained detailed reflections on his time spent working in prisons He claims that across his career he presided over 200,000 prisoners. As well as calling for the abolition of short-term sentences, Hamblin-Smith argued that responses to harms and wrongdoing (he had a rather sophisticated understanding of the social construction of crime for the 1930s) must move beyond ideas of ‘blame and punishment’ and like Patterson expressed desire for the development of non-penal forms of detention. Hamblin-Smith noted not only ‘growing doubts as to the efficacy
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of imprisonment’ but that the ‘dangers of prison life, especially as regards the mental health of those subjected to it, are beginning to be recognised’.31 Prisons as they were constituted at that time could not be an effective means of delivering psychological treatments or other means of therapy because they were fundamentally undermined by its overarching punitive ethos.
Penological amnesia
What is striking about these accounts by Baly, Lushington, Patterson and Hamblin-Smith is that despite the significant time lapse between today and when they were originally written, they continue to speak to key concerns regarding prisons in the here and now. Historical evidence and critical accounts of penal incarceration are strategically important for penal abolitionism in terms of challenging penal amnesia. If prison reform was a plausible answer, then reformers would be able to evidence their many long-term success from the past. They cannot. The history of the prison is the history of failed reforms. Further, the subversive voices of dissent by those working within the penal machine are less likely to be disqualified than those of prisoners. Hence, subversive knowledge from penal administrators and prison staff presents a particularly heavy blow to the credibility and legitimacy of the prison.
Studying the continuities in prison history over many decades reveals that calls for penal reform today are doomed. No wonder reformers have penological amnesia. To keep on trying to do the same thing again and again in the same unchanged circumstances as before indicates not only a lack of imagination but also a sure-fire recipe for failure.
Dissenting Irish voices and the abolitionist imagination
Discussion of the dissenting voices from the past and the subversive knowledge they bring hopefully may provide inspiration for those working in penal regimes today to also speak out, including those in the Irish Prison Service. So far, much of the evidence has focused on the case for prison abolition in England and Wales. But how might an abolitionist imagination be developed and cultivated in the Irish context? The cultivation of an abolitionist imagination might inspire the mobilisation of popular support for radical penal and social change and thus help generate the necessary political will. Yet, such an imagination cannot be simply imported from elsewhere. As chapters from abolitionists all around the world provide testimony to in
the International Handbook of Penal Abolition, 32 an abolitionist imagination must evolve organically and be derived from the distinct and historically embedded political and ethical traditions of a given nation.
Abolition in Ireland must be indigenous and grow from Irish seeds. Irish penal abolitionism must speak the language of the people and their collective beliefs. Sowing the seeds for change in Ireland then means connecting or reconnecting with Irish penal abolitionist sentiments in the past and the present. Such abolitionist sentiments might be found in some unique nonpenal Irish responses to harm and wrongdoing before English colonialism, or maybe latent abolitionist ideas can be found in popular folk beliefs or Irish philosophies or certain Catholic theological ideas and practices. For sure though, abolitionist sentiments can be found in the dissenting voices of Irish political prisoners, and it is to these dissenting Irish voices from history that I now turn. I do not wish to pretend I am an expert in Irish history, nor claim to have understanding of all the nuances of the political context in Ireland at that time or in the present, but I do in good faith wish to draw attention to the anti-prison writings of Michael Davitt, Constance Markievicz and James Leo Phelan for illustrative purposes and to help others as they look to connect with and develop an organic Irish abolitionist imagination. While they are not explicitly ‘abolitionists’, I think their lives and writings could still provide inspiration for those calling for penal abolition in Ireland today.
Michael Davitt
Let us first consider the legacy of Michael Davitt, an Irish nationalist MP instrumental in the formation and propagation of the Land League. Michael Davitt was born in County Mayo, in March 1846, although he spent much of his childhood in Haslingden, in east Lancashire, after his family was evicted during the great famine. While a child labourer at a cotton mill in the near town of Accrington, he lost an arm in an industrial accident. Previously he had witnessed the death of another young boy in an industrial accident. Due to his injury Davitt was supported in his education and as an adult he became committed to the Irish nationalist cause. On 11 July 1870 he was convicted of ‘treason felony’ (which meant he was denied the status of political prisoner) and sentenced to fifteen years of penal servitude in English prisons for organising to buy armaments for Fenian rebels. He was to serve time in five English prisons, primarily HMP Millbank and HMP Dartmoor, until his release on ‘ticket of leave’ in December 1877.33 The psychological and physical toil on Davitt was palpable. While in prison Davitt was subjected
David Gordon Scott
to hard labour. This included, at times, carrying manure, working near a cesspool, and at other times he was harnessed to a cart full of stone. Davitt was still expected to use his body to move stones, if he was not able to break it with just one arm. Despite his amputation, during his imprisonment he was also expected to turn the crank and undertake oakum picking (teasing apart the fibres of two foot of old ship rigging a day). At one point so physically demanding was the work that the stump/bone of his amputated arm started to protrude through his flesh. When he entered prison, he was measured at six feet tall; when he was released, after over seven years of back breaking penal servitude, he was five feet, ten and one-half inches and weighed less than nine stone.34 Four years later Davitt had his ‘ticket of leave’ revoked for his political activism with the Land League. During this further year long term of imprisonment at HMP Portland, he was elected as an MP for Meath. Michael Davitt wrote extensively about his prison experience.35 Davitt accounts powerfully and poetically express the pains and harms of prison, both for those that impacted upon his own well-being and health and more generally on that of other prisoners. Davitt notes how he struggled to ‘preserve [his] reason’ and witnessed prisoners driven to an ‘an animallike voracity’ by a ‘a system of half-starvation’.36 Davitt also gave extensive evidence to the Gladstone Committee (1895).37 For Davitt, ‘the grave evils of prisons were “barbarous” and “Inhuman” ... [characterised by] suffering and humiliation, vindictiveness and hardships that … reduce [prisoners] to the level of untamed beasts’.38 The ‘torture of the four whitewashed walls’ of the prison cell resulted in a ‘tomb-like atmosphere and embrace’.39
The prison was a brutal dehumanising machine. As well as arguing that prisons were merely conduits for further criminal activity, Davitt also evidenced prison officer violence during his time at HMP Dartmoor, although the Gladstone Committee were quick to dismiss his claims.40 Rather than recognise that the dissenting voice of Davitt could shine a spotlight on the violence of prison staff, the Gladstone Report merely noted the small number of officially recorded data and asserted that in their opinion most prison staff undertook their duties with due diligence, forbearance, and kindness. Overall Davitt called for a series of what today would be called ‘partial’ or ‘selective’ abolitions.41 His abolitionist agenda included the ending solitary confinement and the worst excesses of penal servitude. as well as abolishing the imprisonment of children.
The physical and emotional violence he experienced in prison undoubtedly
changed Davitt. Upon his release from Dartmoor, Davitt now advocated nonviolent forms of political change and what was referred to at the time as ‘moral force’. Indeed, Davitt was to later become an inspiration for Gandhi. Davitt was to prove beyond his time in other ways too. In later life he became a journalist and, in his writings, questioned English colonialism not only in Ireland, but also in Australia, New Zealand, and North America.42 Davitt recognised the importance of hearing dissenting indigenous populations and the necessity of unravelling of the colonial project. Davitt questioned the universality of white man’s law and the recourse of the colonial state to bullets and violence to maintain its power.43 Davitt was therefore not only a pioneer in promoting partial abolitionism but also of counter-colonial criminologies. It is this combination of abolitionist ‘negative reforms’ contextualised within counter-colonial struggle that could prove so inspirational for Irish and other abolitionists today.
Constance Markievicz
The republican political activist and MP Constance Markievicz was periodically in and out of English and Irish prisons in the eight year period from 1916–1923. Following her participation in the 1916 Easter Rising, she was sentenced to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment because she was a woman. After serving time in HMP Aylesbury, from which she was released following the general amnesty in 1917, like many Irish republicans she was re-imprisoned, this time in HMP Holloway, for alleged German sympathies during the Great War, in 1918. In the four years that followed Markievicz also spent time in Cork, Mountjoy, and Dublin prisons.
The author of numerous letters while imprisoned, which were later published,44 her actual reflections on prison life itself are rather fragmented, partly because, as she wrote in a letter whilst in Aylesbury Prison on 8 August 1916,45 ‘I do not suppose an “essay on prison life” would pass the censor.’ That Markievicz questioned prisons is clear from her actions – she undertook a hunger strike while in prison – and from occasional references in her writings. In a letter on 9 June 1917 from Aylesbury prison, she wrote, ‘I think I am beginning to believe in anarchy. Laws work out as injustice, legalised by red tape.’ She found prisons boring and lonely, noting in the same letter that the ‘hours slip by like rosary beads of dragons’ teeth’. Through her isolation she may also have experienced hallucinations. In letter on 5 May 1917, also from Aylesbury Prison, she wrote:
David Gordon Scott
… did I ever tell you, the first cell I had here was haunted – it was haunted by a man. I often wondered if he was Irish, but he never spoke, ‘tho he often kept me company …
Despite her often reiterated words in her letters telling her friends not to worry about her and that she was doing fine, she does seem to have been against imprisonment. For example, in a letter dated 11 September 1918, from Holloway Prison, she stated, ‘[w]e were frightfully excited by the Peelers strike. Why don’t the jailers do ditto! And by way of sabotage, destroy the jails!’
James Leo Phelan
The third dissenting voice of an Irish prisoner from the past that I would like to draw attention to is James Leo Phelan (1895–1966), who wrote several books on prison life, including Lifer and Jail Journey, the latter published in 1940. Phelan had been an activist with the Irish Citizen Army [ICA], a working-class and trade-union based army that had been strongly committed to protecting worker rights and aspired to the development of a ‘workers republic’ in Ireland. Formed by James Connolly and James Larkin following the ‘great lockout’ [strike] of 1913, members of the ICA participated in the 1916 Easter Rising. Phelan was involved with the ICA until at least 1922, when the group split into different factions following the Anglo-Irish treaty. In 1923, Phelan took part in a post office robbery in Bootle, Liverpool, where someone was killed. Whilst Phelan was not the perpetrator of the killing, he was convicted of murder under the joint enterprise doctrine and initially given a death sentence. On the eve of his execution in 1924, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he remained a prisoner in English jails until his release in 1937. Phelan served in three prisons, including HMP Dartmoor.
Jail Journey provides a damning account of the English prisons in the 1930s. Phelan describes how prisoners were treated like ‘beasts’46 and state that ‘compared with a lifetime of confinement it is an easy thing to be strangled to death by a rope at the hands of a paid killer’.47 Phelan believed that imprisonment could have a profoundly dangerous impact upon some prisoners. ‘Apathy, quietude, languor, laziness and silence with a desire to be left alone – these things mark the man who has Gone Dead.’48 Prisons were places of zombification, filled with the living dead. The prison was also completely useless as a means of addressing working-class illegalities. He
provides this description of what an honest penal administrator would say about the aims of imprisonment:
We will put you in our jail-machine. You will be squeezed of all initiative and resource, till you become like a mummy or an automaton; or you will be driven into neurosis, perhaps insanity; or you will become violent and dangerous; or, again, you will be a good prisoner while retaining your sanity and initiative – [but only] if you can learn to behave like a professional pick-pocket.49
An abolitionist imagination for our time
The previous discussion has reflected on the strategic importance of historical narratives and continuities for our understanding of both the nature of the prison place and the likely success of future calls for penal reform; the importance of generating subversive knowledge of those ‘from the inside’ who have questioned penal power and legitimacy; and the importance of any Irish abolitionist movement developing organically and taking inspiration from already present Irish counter-colonial traditions, philosophies, theologies, and witnessing of political prisoners. It is my contention that collectively these three aspects, alongside the situating of the prison within its socio-economic and political contexts and structural inequalities,50 can be integrated together to help develop an Irish abolitionist imagination for our time. This abolitionist imagination – grounded in historical knowledges, structural contexts, traditions, counter-colonial ideas, and peoples indigenous to Ireland – can inspire collective work towards the subversion of penal power and flattening of social and economic inequalities. Challenging the prison within the context of the dark and brutal of legacy English colonialism may also raise new question marks about the legitimacy of penal confinement in Ireland today.51 Here reflecting once again on the life, prison experience, and political ideas of Michael Davitt may prove to be of some assistance for activists today. The evolution of a distinct Irish abolitionist imagination for our time may prove inspirational for people to do things and live differently in the future.
In the here and now it is essential that people with experience of the prison place are prepared to bear witness to the terrible harms and hurt wrought be penal confinement. This subversive knowledge should be a clear and forceful rejection of penal legitimacy. There must also be hope and a strong commitment and will to change. The seeds for change should be sowed in
David Gordon Scott
the here and now, and they must somehow find a way to grow strong despite the challenges of the current social, economic, and political circumstances, in Ireland and elsewhere. Most important though, ordinary rebels must continue to believe that things can still change for the better. Abolitionism is a philosophy of hope: a hope that progressive change is currently just beyond our reach, a belief that a world without prisons is both desirable and possible. Without hope people lose motivation, acquiesce to power, and are debilitated by a kind of moral and political stasis.
There are many ways that abolitionism can move forward in Ireland (such as calling for prison building moratoriums, the closing of the worst prisons, the advocation of alternatives in place of prisons)52 but perhaps the place to start is with the developing of an Irish abolitionist imagination that can help sustain campaign work and the building of a social movement that can work towards public education about the harms of prisons and a lasting cure for penological amnesia.
Dr David Gordon Scott works at The Open University. He is the founder of the Weavers Uprising Bicentennial Committee and his recent books include For Abolition (Hook: Waterside Press, 2020) and Demystifying Power, Crime and Social Harm (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Notes
1 This article was originally presented as a paper at the ‘Disrupting Prison Policy’ in Dublin in January 2024 (see <https://jesuit.ie/news/workshop-on-disrupting-prison-policy/>). It is hugely encouraging for this author that a few months later, in May 2024, there was a further gathering held in Cork about the development of an Irish penal abolitionist network.
2 See D. Scott, J. Sim, Demystifying Power, Crime and Social Harm (London: Palgrave, 2023) for further discussion on this point.
3 W. Soyinka, The Man Died: his classic prison writings (London: Arrow Books, 1985).
4 D. Scott, Against Imprisonment (Hook: Waterside Press, 2018).
5 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); D. Scott, For Abolition (Hook: Waterside Press, 2020).
6 Scott, For Abolition
7 Scott, Against Imprisonment
8 D. Scott, Penology (London: Sage, 2008); D. Scott, H. Codd, Controversial Issues in Prisons (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2010).
9 Scott, Against Imprisonment.
10 See also Scott, For Abolition
11 D. Scott, Heavenly Confinement? (London: Academic Press, 1996); Scott, Against Imprisonment.
12 Scott, Heavenly Confinement?
13 Cited in Scott, Heavenly Confinement?, p. 76.
14 Scott and Codd, Controversial Issues.
15 Ministry of Justice, ‘Self-harm incidents per 1,000 prisoners’, <https://data.justice.gov.uk/ prisons/safety-and-order/self-harm-rate>
16
INQUEST, ‘Deaths in Prison’, May 2024, <www.inquest.org.uk/deaths-in-prison>
17 E. Patterson, (2013) ‘The Dose-Response of Time Served in Prison on Mortality: New York State, 1989–2003’, American Journal of Public Health, 103:3 (2023), 523–528; C. Wildeman, ‘Incarceration and Population Health’, Criminology, 54:2 (2016); E. S. Barnet, L. Abrams, and T. Dudovitz, et al. (2018) ‘Child incarceration and long-term adult health outcomes: a longitudinal study’, International Journal of Prisoner Health, 14:1 (2018), 26–33; R. Sundaresh, Y. Yi, and M. Harvey, et al, ‘Exposure to Family Member Incarceration and Adult Well-being in the United States’, JAMA Network Open, Public Health, 4:5 (2021).
18 Scott, Penology
19 Scott, Against Imprisonment.
20 D. Scott, Emancipatory Politics and Praxis (Bristol: EG Press, 2016).
21 Scott and Codd, Controversial Issues
22 T. Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1974); D. Scott, ‘Visualising an abolitionist real utopia: principles, policy and practice’, in Crime, Critique and Utopia, ed by M. Malloch, W. Munro (London: Palgrave, 2013).
23 Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition; Scott, 2013.
24 Scott, Emancipatory Politics.
25 Scott, Against Imprisonment; Scott, For Abolition; D. Scott, ‘Libertarian socialism and the struggle for liberative justice’, in Abolitionist Voices, ed by D. Scott (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2024).
26 1852, cited in J. Gunn, J., G. Robertson, S. Dell, C. Way, Psychiatric Aspects of Imprisonment (London: Academic Press, 1978), p. 6.
27 Cited in G. Coggan, M. J. Walker, Frightened For My Life (London: Fontana, 1982), p. 203.
28 G. Lushington, ‘Evidence to the Gladstone Committee on Prisons’, in Gladstone Committee Report (Evidence Section), 11 February 1895.
29 A. Paterson, Paterson on Prisons: Being the Collected Papers of Sir Alexander Paterson (London: F. Muller, 1951), p. 24.
30 Patterson, on Prisons, p. 27.
31 M. Hamblin-Smith, Prisons and A Changing Civilisation (London: John Lane, 1934), p. 69.
32 Coyle and Scott, 2021
33 Davitt also served one month in HMP Portsmouth towards the end of his sentence and spent two months on remand at HMP Clerkenwell prior to sentencing.
34 T. W. Moody, ‘Michael Davitt in Penal Servitude 1870–1877’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review , 30:120 (1941), 517–530; S. T. O’Brien, ‘The Prison Writing of Michael Davitt’, New Hibernia Review, 14:3 (2010), 16–32.
35 M. Davitt, ‘Some Particulars of Treatment While a Prisoner’, in Michael Davitt: Collected Writings, 1868–1906, ed by C. King, vol. 1 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), 43–80; M. Davitt, ‘Evidence to Parliamentary Commission, 20 June 1875’, in Commission of Inquiry into the Working of the Penal Servitude Acts, vol. xxxvii (London: House of Commons,1878–9), 685–715; M. Davitt, ‘Penal Servitude’, Contemporary Review, 44 (1883); M. Davitt, Leaves from a Prison Diary, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885); M. Davitt, (1894), ‘Criminal and Prison Reform’, in The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 36:214 (December, 1894), 875–89; M. Davitt, ‘Evidence to the Gladstone Committee on Prisons’, in Gladstone Committee Report (Evidence Section), 9 February,1895, 382–394.
36 Davitt, Leaves from a Prison Diary
37 Davitt, ‘Criminal and Prison Reform’.
38 Davitt, ‘Criminal and Prison Reform’.
39 Davitt, ‘Criminal and Prison Reform’.
40 1895, cited in Scott, For Abolition
41 Davitt, ‘Criminal and Prison Reform’.
42 Davitt also visited Samoa and Hawaii during his travels in 1895. See M. Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia (London: Methuen & Co., 1897).
43 Davitt, Life and Progress
44 C. Markievicz, Prison Letters and Radical Writings, ed by Lindie Naughton (Dublin: Merrion Press, 2018).
45 All letters from Markievicz, Prison Letters
46 J. Phelan, Jail Journey (London: Secker & Warburg, 1940), p. 10.0
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47 Phelan, Jail Journey, p. 11.
48 Phelan, Jail Journey, p. 296.
49 Phelan, Jail Journey, p. 296.
50 Scott, Penology
51 R. McVeigh, B. Rolston, Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution (Dublin: Beyond the Pale Books, 2021).
52 See for example Scott, Emancipatory Politics; Scott, Against Imprisonment; Scott, For Abolition; Scott, Abolitionist Voices.
Prison Chaplains and the ‘Modern’ Prison System in Ireland, 1830s–1870s
Catherine Cox
From the eighteenth century, new penal reform theories and technologies emerged across the Western world, and these were deeply rooted in varied Christian contexts. Pope Clement XI, for example, opened the city of Rome’s first modern prison, San Michele a Ripa, in 1703, which is said to have influenced Ghent House of Correction in Belgium (1772).1 Into the nineteenth century, the reform of the criminal continued to be ‘a complex idea with deep religious roots’.2 By then, the penal reform theories that were most influential in the Irish and British context, notably the separate system of confinement, were devised by adherents of varieties of Protestantism, specifically strands of evangelical Anglicanism and Protestant dissent. Critical to the separate system of confinement was an initial lengthy period that convicts spent in isolation in cells where they worked, ate, and reflected on their crimes. This contrasted with other experimental regimes which allowed association among prisoners. In the 1830s, the key advocates of the separate system in the British Isles were the prison inspectors for London, Rev. William Whitworth Russell, a Church of England minister, and William Crawford, who was deeply influenced by the evangelical revival of the period. Impressed by the regime of the Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, Russell and Crawford re-imagined the function of the gaol and shaped the disciplinary regime, implementing the separate system of confinement in specially designed institutions, such as Pentonville Model Prison, London (1842) and later at Mountjoy Convict Prison, Dublin (1850).3
At the core of the separate system of confinement was the idea that criminals could and should be reformed through religion, work, and education, and, in the early years of the implementation of this disciplinary regime, prison chaplains were fervent supporters of the system. As senior members of prison staff, they were tasked with bringing about the complete transformation of convicts and were at the forefront of the disciplinary regime. They had unique access to convicts and were required to regularly visit prisoners’ cell during an initial probationary period, when inmates were kept in cellular isolation
(effective solitary confinement), which, at Pentonville, where the severest form of the regime was implemented, could last for eighteen months.4 The initial period in isolation in Pentonville was subsequently reduced while at Mountjoy, which was modelled on the Pentonville regime, it was set at eight months when the prison opened in 1850. Chaplains, with the assistance of the prison surgeon, were required to oversee prisoners’ mental as well as their spiritual states, and prison regulations underlined the importance of chaplains vigilantly monitoring the ‘state of mind of every prisoner’.5 During the early years of the regime in English prisons, excessive religious exhortations by prison chaplains, such as Rev. Daniel Nihil, who strictly enforced the separate system at Millbank Prison, London, were associated with instances of mental breakdown among prisoners. As prison officials came to acknowledge that cellular isolation inflicted harm on the minds of prisoners, the rigour of the regime was eased.6
Given their centrality to prison disciplinary regimes, and their staunch advocacy of separate system of confinement, scholars of the early nineteenthcentury British prison system have paid significant attention to high profile and influential prison chaplains who were usually of the Anglican faith. In this article, however, I wish to delve into commentaries by Roman Catholic prison chaplains, particularly those employed at institutions such as Mountjoy Convict Prison, alongside their Church of Ireland counterparts, to unpack a parallel but distinct response to the separate system of confinement. In the early years of the ‘modern’ prison system in Ireland, most Catholic chaplains operated at a confessional border between a majority Catholic prison inmate population and the senior prison staff – prison inspectors, directors, governors, and doctors – who were predominantly members of the Church of Ireland. While chaplains were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century institutions, as Carmen Mangion notes, their role and the nature of their religious practices in institutions is underexplored.7 In the Irish context, most historians have focused on the involvement of chaplains, Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland, in acrimonious and often high-profile disputes involving allegations of proselytism in a variety of institutional settings, including workhouses, lunatic asylums and prisons, and consequently, we know less about other aspects of their role and duties.8
Focusing on critical decades for prison reform in Ireland, leading up to, and in the immediate aftermath of, the implementation of an ameliorated version of this separate system, this article explores whether prison officials
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were concerned that the ministries of Roman Catholic prisons chaplains could potentially destabilise not only the prison regime but also the minds of prisoners. Did Roman Catholic prison chaplains share in the enthusiasm, expressed by Protestant counterparts, for the separate system of confinement as potentially beneficial for the moral reformation of convicts or were they concerned about the potential harm it posed to the morals and minds of prisoners? If not, was their comparative scepticism grounded in a distinct Catholic analysis? This article also examines the spiritual and pastoral ministries, and workloads, of chaplains, and considers how the disciplinary regime of prisons shaped their roles as religious and officials of the system.
Prison and religious reform movements, 1820–1850
From the late eighteenth century, prison reformers, doctors, penologists, and administrators visited and critiqued prisons in different countries, exchanging ideas and theories in their publications, in official reports and through organisations. Consequently, the reform of the prison system in Ireland mirrored many of the developments in England and in Europe. By the 1820s, theorists of prison discipline in Ireland supported the separate system of confinement, despite the apparent failure of early experiments with the system, and advocated for its implementation in prisons and gaols as the reform movement gathered renewed momentum.9 The appointment of faith-based prison chaplains, Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland, was legislated for in 1826. The legislation authorised the appointment of Roman Catholic clergy, and ‘proper and discreet’ members of the Church of Ireland as well as Protestant dissenting ministers to prisons. Chaplains were required to visits prisons twice a week, read prayers to prisoners every Sunday, and visit each prisoner in their cells to ‘converse with and exhort’ inmates. The legislation also mandated that they inspect the food provided to the prisoners to ensure it was of good quality and of sufficient quantity.10
This phase of prison reform in Ireland coincided with a period of significant religious revival and with the separate but parallel reforms of the structures of both the Protestant Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. Within Protestantism in all its varieties, from the 1820s onwards, evangelical revival informed that internal reform and was accompanied by a vigorous mission movement that sought to convert the Catholic population in Ireland, a development sometimes referred to by its more enthusiastic supporters as the ‘second reformation’. Meanwhile, the Irish Catholic Church became
more aligned with Roman ‘Tridentine’ practices, which emphasised obedience, discipline, and conformity to conventional religious practices, thus transforming popular practices, a shift influentially described as the ‘devotional revolution’.11 These developments greatly increased political and sectarian tensions from the early 1820s, and, as new medical, penal and welfare institutions were established in the 1830s and 1840s, provision of religious services and the appointment, duties, and behaviour of chaplains generated highly charged debate and sectarian clashes.12 In this context, the adoption and implementation of the separate system of confinement in prisons had significant potential to inflame sectarian tensions, given that it envisaged an important role for chaplains. They were to be prisoners’ confidantes and reformers, with unique access to inmates, chiefly through their individual cell visitations. Further, they were highly paid and senior prison staff, at the fore of the internal life of prison.
A controversy at the Richmond General Penitentiary in the 1820s provides a rich example of how prison reform intersected not only with anxieties around proselytism but also concerns about the impact of religious exhortation on the minds of prisoners. Modelled on Millbank Penitentiary, London, Richmond received its first convicts in 1820.13 Governed centrally from Dublin Castle, the prison was organised around a version of separate confinement based on a long ‘course of industry, reflection, and instruction’. The appointment of Governor William Rowan in 1823 resulted in a more rigorous implementation of the regime. Prisoners of both sexes were placed in segregated confinement and divided into three classes, progressing to first class with good behaviour. In 1826, however, ten recently released Roman Catholic convicts, supported by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray, alleged that seventeen prisoners had been subjected to cruelties, punishments, deprivations, and tortures to induce them to convert to Protestantism.14 A subsequent commission of inquiry, initially tasked with investigating these allegations, was expanded to consider other allegations of cruelty. The commission revealed that some of the converts were ‘insane’, while George Keppell, an ex-penitentiary officer, asserted that the ‘irritation of the mind’ experienced by prisoners under punishment had prompted conversions to Protestantism.15 In 1826, the commissioners concluded that although torture had not been used, wholesale conversions to Protestantism were uncovered and many staff members, including the governor, were described as ‘fanatical’ evangelicals swept up in the Anglican ‘second
reformation’ and the Methodist revival then sweeping across Ireland.16
Despite this early failed experiment, which highlighted the potential dangers the regime presented to the management of prisons as well as to prisoners’ mental condition, reform embracing similar models endured. Through the advocacy and influence of the prisons inspectors of Ireland, especially Dr Francis White, later appointed Inspector of Lunacy for Ireland, the separate system of confinement was embedded in penal policy and prison design. Most importantly, a model prison, based on the Pentonville regime of separate confinement, and designed by Sir Joshua Jebb, was opened at Mountjoy in Dublin in 1850. The Richmond scandal, and the events Pentonville in the 1840s, when significant numbers of prisoners experienced mental breakdown, preoccupied the Irish prison administrators as Mountjoy Model Prison, with 450 single occupancy cells, was about to open. Henry Martin Hitchins, the Inspector General of Government Prisons in Ireland, aware of the concerns expressed about excessive religious exhortations and of the reports of high rates of mental breakdown, visited Pentonville in January 1850.17 He subsequently modified the regime for Mountjoy, reducing the amount of time convicts spent in separation to eight months and concluded that the ‘religious results’ of the Pentonville regime were a ‘dead failure’.18 He also attempted to decouple religion from education: chaplains of both denominations were required ‘to visit convicts in cells for conversation every day and visit school classes’, but were forbidden from exercising ‘direct control over the School master’, as they did in Pentonville. The school master, in turn, was to confine his work to secular education. Hitchins also insisted that, what he characterised as, the ‘disturbance’ of chaplains’ visitations to cells should not interfere with convict labour. The strength of the regime at Mountjoy, according to Hitchins, depended on the ‘minds of the prisoners being fully occupied’ by enforcing education, labour, and industrious habits, rather than spiritual reflection.19
Despite these efforts to distinguish the roles of the chaplain from that of the teacher, chaplains retained significant authority within the prison, especially as they were ‘Implicitly confided in by the convicts, the depositary of his secret thoughts and wishes’.20 When appointing Church of Ireland chaplains, a key concern for Hitchins and other prison administrators was to avoid replicating the experience of the regime at Millbank, Richmond, and Pentonville and to safeguard convicts and the prison regime against the ministries of ‘low church’ Protestant clergy, principally those involved in conversionism and
evangelical revivalism, whose excessive exhortations during cellular visits and sermons might prompt high levels of mental breakdown among inmates. Hitchins sought out and appointed Protestant chaplains of ‘high character’, such as Rev. Gibson Black, a Church of Ireland curate from St George’s parish, Dublin, who was assigned to Mountjoy Convict Prison, while Thomas R. Shore, another Church of Ireland clergyman, was appointed to Smithfield Prison.21 Both men held appointments at other institutions, while Shore had proven his reliability when he replaced a controversial Protestant chaplain at the North Dublin Union Workhouse, who had been removed from his post for distributing controversial religious tracts among the Roman Catholic inmates.22 Shore, however, was an opponent of Tractarian Protestantism or Anglo-Catholicism.
The appointment and retention of Roman Catholic chaplains also involved careful consideration. When selecting the Catholic chaplain for Spike Island public works convict prison in Cork, which held approximately 2,400 Roman Catholic convicts in the early 1850s, Hitchins approached the local bishop, who recommended Rev. Timothy Lyons, a curate with twenty-one years’ experience in parish work. Subsequently, when the bishop, dissatisfied that the chaplain’s salary, set at £100, was too low, threatened to remove Lyons, Hitchins feared Lyons’ replacement would be a person ‘of less liberal and enlightened views’ and doubled Lyons’ salary.23 In the case of the appointment of a Roman Catholic chaplain to Mountjoy, Archbishop Murray’s input was not sought, possibly due to his involvement in the Richmond scandal in 1820s. Instead, Mountjoy prison officials approached the Vincentian congregation, thus ensuring that Catholic chaplains appointed to that prison were not secular clergy under Murray’s direct control. Two members of the Vincentian order, Rev. Neal McCabe, later ordained Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise (1867), and Rev. Michael Cody, were appointed to Mountjoy; McCabe started in 1850, while Cody served in the role from 1856 until his departure in 1885.24
The decision to approach the Vincentian order, a congregation deeply involved in the ‘devotional revolution’ at the time of the appointments, brought two chaplains, associated with religious excitement and volatility, into Mountjoy prison. The Vincentian congregation was one of several religious orders and congregations to participate in the ‘parish mission movement’, which, Emmett Larkin argues, brought about a national religious revival.25 The ‘missions’ were labour-intensive pastoral interventions:
Catherine Cox
clergy from a visiting order spent a number of days or weeks in a parish, celebrating masses, preaching sermons, hearing confessions, and conducting personal visitations to most families. Their activities, according to Thomas McNamara, a founding member of the order in Ireland, created widespread ‘excitement’ in a parish.26 McCabe’s and Cody’s religious ministry at Mountjoy closely resembled Vincentian parish missions, and, by 1854, the involvement of the Vincentian order in the prison chaplaincy at Mountjoy was confirmed as ‘one of the works of the community’.27 The workload of the prison chaplains was high: they were responsible for approximately 800 Roman Catholic convicts per annum, far larger than the Church of Ireland’s chaplains’ congregation, which averaged at 60–80 convicts. The Vincentians also adopted some of the modalities of mission work when interacting with convicts. Parish mission, according to Larkin, ‘prescribed’ three forms of address to ‘penitents’: ‘the Sermon, the Instruction, and [the] Catechism’,28 and these activities preoccupied the Roman Catholic chaplains, rather than individual cellular visitations, generally regarded to be the core of the separate system of confinement. McCabe, for example, delivered sermons twice on Sundays as the prison chapel, which was divided into 234 individual stalls to ensure separation among the convicts, could not accommodate c. 500 Roman catholic convicts at one service. He complained to Mountjoy officials that the prison chapel was not suited for Divine Worship according to the rites of the Catholic Church, as prisoners could not see either priest or altar during services, and he requested a ‘small pulpit to move on castors so that it might be placed under the gallery in the chapel’.29
McCabe also sought an increase in the number of catechism lessons and the integration of education and catechism through greater ‘co-operation of the Roman Catholic teachers in imparting religious knowledge by catechetical instruction’, thus departing significantly from Hitchins’ original rules. Education and catechetical ‘instruction’ were important, McCabe argued, not only to enable ‘spiritual reformation’, but to strengthen the minds of prisoners:
The great object of the teacher should be to exercise the judgement of his pupil – to make him think. … they must know the signification of each word positively and negatively … by persevering in this method of instruction we would make them thinking beings … A skilful teacher can impart a vast amount of collateral information in the simplest lesson. The development of their minds is far more
important than the amount of positive information contained in their schoolbooks.30
McCabe thus resembled Reverend Joseph Kingsmill, chaplain at Pentonville, who linked mental well-being to prisoners’ capacity to be reformed.31
References to cellular visitations, and one-to-one private exchanges between the chaplain and prisoner, were not prominent in the two Vincentians’ published accounts of their religious ministries, except in descriptions of ministering to sick and dying convicts and of confessions heard according to liturgical practices. They, and other Catholic chaplains, adhered to the requirement that they visit convicts held in solitary confinement in the punishment cells but questioned the efficacy of such visits ‘in producing on his [the convict’s] mind the intended salutary effect’, as their status as prison employees rather than as ‘friend and protector’ further alienated and irritated convicts.32 The Catholic chaplains at Spike Island, Revs Lyons and O’Sullivan, had ‘tried the experiment of instructing and of hearing the confessions of the convicts in the evenings after their work’ but abandoned it as most of the convicts were ‘so fatigued in body, and so little disposed in mind to attend then to our instructions and duties, that we considered it useless, if not imprudent, to persevere.’33
Cellular visitations were more embedded in the work of the Protestant prison chaplains. Rev. John Black, Gibson Black’s successor at Mountjoy, summarised the religious ministry of Protestant chaplains as ‘the public services of religion in the chapel, catechetical instruction during the week, and individual application of all the principles and motives to religious and reformed life, during my constant visiting of the prisoners in their separate cells’.34 At Smithfield Prison, Chaplain Shore insisted ‘that religious instruction given in class to a number together seldom impresses the minds of prisoners, if not followed up by that private application of it which bring it home individually’.35
The enthusiasm for cellular visits among Protestant chaplains formed part of their overall support for the separate system of confinement, especially during the formative years. Gibson Black, who insisted that his small congregation of protestant convicts provided sufficient opportunity to accurately test the results of the system, claimed it was an ‘instrument of sound repentance, peace and hope’, although he acknowledged the potential dangers of prolonged periods in cellular isolation.36 Catholic prison chaplains
were less enthusiastic, and their support for the regime waned over time. A common theme in their criticism of the regime was that it bred dishonesty among convicts. McCabe, for example, noted his preference for association to a system under which they [convicts] are incessantly endeavouring to communicate with each other, and with success, whilst pretending the strictest regularity. Now, such a system of dissimulation is most injurious to their moral training; for sincerity and openness of character are virtues which convicts, in general, require to learn.37
Other high profile Roman Catholic clerics, including Bishop William B. Ullathorne, the first Roman Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Birmingham (1850), who had served as vicar-general to the Bishop of New South Wales, shared McCabe’s preference for allowing prisoners to associate. In a pamphlet published in 1866, he praised the San Michele prison in Rome and the Ghent House of Correction for granting prisoners opportunities to associate, while also emphasising the Catholic roots of the modern prison system. Ullathorne claimed:
The prisoners lived in them [cells], took their food in them, and only assembled together for work, instruction, and divine service. The silence was not enforced so unmercifully but that the prisoners could talk quietly together in recreation for half an hour on Sundays and holidays. More prolonged solitude in the cell was reserved as a punishment for disorder. Thus, the solitary, separate, and aggregate systems, were combined into one in these prisons.38
Ullathorne, when commenting on the length of time a convict could survive in isolation ‘without breaking down, or sinking into imbecility’,39 observed that ‘he [man] is neither his own object, nor his own end, nor can he create resources for himself. This is the secret of his dependent condition.’40 Man’s nature was formed through, and dependent on, social relations, and therefore cellular isolation could not bring about meaningful reform: The first sentence which the Creator uttered to his intelligent creature, was, that ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ Apart from God, and cast upon his individual resources, man is neither a light or a fountain of supply to himself. From the Eternal Word, as its primal fountain, he derives his connatural ray of reason; and that reason is developed through the agency of society, and the help of a reason already developed. Whether from God, or through
the creatures around him, he is the recipient before he can be the giver, whether of mental or of physical good.41
Ullathorne likened protracted periods in cellular isolation to ‘shutting up a living body within a dead’.42 Catholic chaplains working in Irish prisons appear then to be aligned to with a wider Catholic position that was comparatively sceptical of the separate system of confinement and individual cellular visitations. This critique was framed in a manner and in language that conceived of the prisoners as social beings, among whom spiritual improvement and mental fortitude was best inculcated through a regime that included some collective activity.
Chaplains and the ‘Irish’ marks system
In the late 1850s, Sir Walter Crofton’s graduated marks system was introduced to the Irish convict prisons.43 Under this system, convicts were kept in separate confinement at Mountjoy for the first or probationary stage, which could last from eight to twelve months, depending on their conduct. For the first three months of this period, they were forbidden work except for picking oakum in cells. Prisoners then progressed to the second stage: those with a trade remained at Mountjoy, others were sent to Spike Island, while ‘weak’ convicts were sent to Philipstown Prison. At the final stage, convicts were sent to the intermediate prisons. Crofton’s marks system re-enforced the emphasis on religion and education, which was welcomed by chaplains, hopeful of the regime’s potential to improve the minds of convicts.44 The revised prison rules, published in the 1860s, stressed the importance of the relationship between the convicts and chaplains. Chaplains were tasked with ensuring they were informed of their charges’ moral state and were to encourage convicts to confide in them. Other responsibilities included maintaining a journal, visiting the sick, and keeping a register of burials.45
By the end of the 1860s, however, Catholic chaplains had become increasingly critical of Crofton’s regime, with Rev. Cody advocating for a reduction of the period convicts spent in separation and the employment of healthy prisoners after the first or second months of their sentences. In his annual report for 1866, following ten years of service at Mountjoy, he publicly abandoned his earlier endorsements of the system, noting that ‘the discipline … as carried out at Mountjoy, is excellent when applied to the reformation of criminals for a short time, but I find that few minds can preserve their full powers when subjected to it for a lengthy period’.46 In
a detailed critique of the system, he argued that prolonged periods spent in isolation contributed to repeat offending among convicts as the ‘moral man’ becomes ‘enfeebled or, as the French say, demoralised … and when he obtained his liberty had not the firmness ... to resist temptation … I find such men usually convicted a second time’.47 With the further hardening of prison policy in the late 1860s and early 1870s, many prison chaplains, Catholic and Protestant alike, became increasingly vocal in their criticism of the prison regime. This resulted in the Director of the Convict Prisons, Captain Barlow, retracting sections of the reports submitted by Rev. Flemyng, the newly appointed Protestant chaplain at Mountjoy.48 Cody, repeating in 1874 his earlier criticisms, described eight months in separation as ‘undoubtedly a very severe punishment and in my opinion too severe’.49 He echoed also the disquiet expressed by Mountjoy’s Medical Officer, Dr Robert McDonnell, about excessive or extreme punishments and the impact on convicts’ mind, noting that the convicts fell into ‘despair and its consequences, recklessness, and insubordination’.50 Cody concluded his annual report for 1873 with the observation that ‘most men would prefer a speedy death to the torture and misery in an imprisonment for life’.51
From the late 1860s, Rev. Cody was more attentive to convicts’ mental and physical health, and on several occasions clashed with the newly appointed prison medical officer, Dr Young, when advocating for convicts. One such case occurred in February 1868, when convict M. Lynagh died in the prison hospital. During the subsequent inquest, Cody reported that he had found Lynagh in his cell ‘in a very weakly state’. He had complained on behalf of the convict, yet Young did not transfer him to the prison hospital for another four days, where he later died. At the inquest, Cody swore that the conditions of the convict’s cell, and the delay in removing him, contributed to Lynagh’s death. However, Barlow, the Director of Convict Prisons, focused his displeasure on Cody’s behaviour, chastising him for not bringing Lynagh’s case to the attention of the senior prison staff as required under prison rules.52
One month later, no doubt mindful of the Lynagh case, Cody contacted the directors of the convict prisons about another prisoner, convict Wm. Crawford, who he believed was suffering from insanity. He had not contacted Dr Young about the case, and when Director Barlow, again critical of Cody’s ‘irregular’ behaviour, requested the prison doctor examine the prisoner, Young concluded that Crawford was free of symptoms of insanity. Due to the difference in opinion, Barlow consulted an external expert, Dr George
Hatchell, the Inspector of Lunacy, who agreed that there were no symptoms of insanity, however, he recommended convict Crawford be removed to the ‘prison hospital for observation as the prisoner appears in a nervous state probably from his having been deprived for some time of the stimulants he used before conviction’.53 Once again, Barlow reprimanded Cody, ‘for withholding information from the governor and medical officer’, observing that, as the prison chaplain, Cody likely had ‘valuable information as to a prisoner’s state which might escape the notice of prison officers not possessing the same opportunities for observation as the office of chaplain affords’.54
Despite Barlow’s criticisms, and Cody’s obvious scepticism about the regime, the chaplain’s proximity to convicts compelled the inspector to rely on him for information on prisoners’ mental states, and from this position Cody influenced prison policy. In 1874, for example, when the lunacy inspector, Hatchell, recommended the removal of twenty-six ‘weakminded’ and epileptic convicts from Spike Island prison to a dedicated division at Mountjoy Prison, Barlow consulted Dr Young and Rev. Cody, as an experienced prison chaplain with knowledge of the mental state of prisoners. ‘Weakminded’ convicts were regarded as particularly difficult to manage in prison as they could be ‘of violent and uncontrollable temper’, ‘unfit for punishment’, and ‘although not fit objects for the central asylum are to a great extent irresponsible’. Barlow, Young, and Cody rejected Hatchell’s recommendation on a variety of grounds including expense, however, Cody’s opposition emphasised the tendency of the prison regime at Mountjoy ‘to debilitate the mental faculties of many of the prisoners’, leading him to conclude that Mountjoy was ‘the least favourable place for the treatment of the twenty-six prisoners’.55
While the prison rules implemented in the 1860s accorded significant authority to prison chaplains, they continued to be forbidden from interfering with the ‘course of instruction’ in prison schools, although chaplains were permitted to visit and inspect the schoolroom.56 Both prison chaplains and teachers regarded education as a tool to strengthen minds of their charges but differed on how to achieve their complementary if often distinct aims. As Rosalind Crone argues, ‘many contemporaries and educational providers saw religious instruction as education, and the teaching of the skills of reading and writing as mere tools to enhance that instruction’.57 With new opportunities for the education of convicts under Crofton’s regime, prison chaplains sought
to collaborate with the school masters, while teachers approached the task of educating prisoners with near religious zeal.58 Michael Harold, head teacher at Spike Island prison, with responsibility for over 1,000 convicts, likened his work to that of a doctor: ‘The efforts of their teachers are (like the prescriptions of physicians for chronic diseases) very often baffled, but the skilful medical practitioner is not disheartened by failures.’ He argued that the most effective ‘method of imparting instructions’ required a ‘certain degree of cheerful vigorous instruction … applied as a sort of remedy for despondency, the worst species of mental disease’.59
In some prisons, however, a fault line opened up between teachers and chaplains. This often occurred along confessional lines, over the primary purpose of prison education, and its role in fortifying the minds of convicts. Harold and Headmaster Edward McGuaran at Mountjoy, in lengthy annual reports, outlined their pedological approach, including observations on convicts’ educational attainment in the 3 Rs, however, the chaplains tested convicts’ educational attainment through an assessment of their knowledge of catechism. Both teachers and chaplains frequently requested additional reading materials for prisoners under the prison rules.60 Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, tensions developed between teachers and chaplains over Roman Catholic chaplains’ demand that teachers deliver catechism instruction in schools and the attempts by some chaplains and teachers to smuggle controversial and proselytist reading materials into the prison.
Conclusions
In Ireland, the work of faith-based prison chaplains in the early to midnineteenth century was extremely diverse, wide ranging, and often onerous, especially for Roman Catholic chaplains, who had responsibility for much larger congregations than their protestant counterparts. Chaplains were deeply embedded in prison life and were required to act as preacher, confessor, confidante, admonisher, and meditator to prisoners. Many embraced these personae with eagerness and determination, and, despite substantial workloads, advocated against harsh and potentially harmful disciplinary regimes. The chaplain’s role, thus, extended significantly beyond the familiar trope of the fire-brand proselytist solely preoccupied with converting inmates of institutions, although confirming prisoners in the faith was an important part of prison work.
It would also appear that senior prison officials developed a reluctant
dependence on Roman Catholic prison chaplains, despite the deep-seated distrust of Catholicism as a political and religious peril to the colonial state in nineteenth-century Ireland and the importance of prisons in state formation. ‘Low-church’ protestant evangelicals were viewed as posing the greater threat to the management of the prison and to the mental well-being of prisoners, and prison officials were careful not to appoint them. Meanwhile, the sheer size of the Catholic congregations in prisons such as Mountjoy and Spike Island afforded Roman Catholic chaplains influence, grounded in the reality that they had become highly experienced prison officials.
When assessed along confessional lines, it is also possible to discern differing attitudes between protestant and Roman Catholic chaplains towards the disciplinary regime of the convict prison system. One of the key planks of Catholic chaplains’ critique of the separate system of confinement rested on their scepticism of the isolation of convicts for lengthy periods, with clerics framing isolation as inimical to man’s nature, thus prompting the mental collapse of convicts. The emphasis they placed on convicts as social beings is noticeably different from critiques of the regime by their Protestant equivalents. In addition, Roman Catholic chaplains were relatively indifferent to expansive private conversations with convicts during cell visitations, a practice that, in theory, sat at the core of the separate system, was enforced through prison rules, and favoured by protestant chaplains. This suggests that they did not engage in ‘a prototype of psychoanalysis’, as argued by Sean Grass.61 While the role and duties of the prison chaplains were circumscribed by prison regulations, in practice their work more often depended on the interplay of their individual enthusiasm and dedication with the attitudes and exigencies of prison management.
Professor Catherine Cox is current Head of School at the School of History, University College Dublin. Her most recent book, co-authored with Professor Hilary Marland (University of Warwick), is Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Notes
1 Bishop W. B. Ullathorne, On the Management of Criminals (London: Thomas Richardson and Son, 1856), p. 24.
2 Hilary Carey, Empires of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 3.
3 W. J. Forsythe, ‘The beginnings of the separate system of imprisonment 1835–1840’, Social
Catherine Cox
Policy and Administration, 13:2 (1979), 105–110; Bill Forsythe, ‘Crawford, William (1788–1847), prison inspector’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, website, <www.oxforddnb. com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-6646>
4 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, ‘“He must die or go mad in this place”: Prisoners, Insanity and the Pentonville Model Prison Experiment, 1842–1852’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 92 (2018), 78–109.
5 The Times, 1 May 1843, 24 November 1843.
6 See Cox and Marland, ‘“He must die or go mad in this place”’, and Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), chapter 2.
7 Carmen M. Mangion, ‘“Tolerable Intolerance”: Protestantism, Sectarianism and Voluntary Hospitals in Late-Nineteenth-century London’, Medical History, 62:4 (2018), 468–84.
8 For example, see J. Robins, ‘Religious issues in the early workhouse’, Studies, 57 (1968), 54–66; P. M. Prior and D. V. Griffiths, ‘The Chaplaincy Question: The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland versus the Belfast Lunatic Asylum’, Éire-Ireland, 33 (1997), 137–53.
9 A. T. Rubin, ‘A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion’, Law and Society Review, 49 (2015), 365–99.
10 1826 Prisons (Ireland) Act.
11 Emmet Larkin, ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, The American Historical Review, 77:3 (1972), 625–52.
12 Irene Whelan, The Bible War in Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), p. xvii.
13 Cited in H. Heaney, ‘Ireland’s Penitentiary 1820–1831: An Experiment that Failed’, Studia Hibernica 14 (1974), 28–39, p.28.
14 Heaney, ‘Ireland’s Penitentiary 1820–1831’, p. 32.
15 ‘Report of the Commissioners Directed by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to Inquire into the State of the Richmond Penitentiary in Dublin’ (1827) [C. 335], p. 82.
16 ‘Report of the Commissioners into the Richmond Penitentiary’, p. 4; Heaney, ‘Ireland’s Penitentiary 1820–1831’, pp. 32–3.
17 Hitchins was employed at the Chief Secretary’s Office in 1826 and had little prison experience prior to his appointment as Inspector General of Government Prisons in 1847. See T. Carey, Mountjoy. The Story of a Prison (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 52.
18 Dublin, National Archives of Ireland (NAI), Government Prison Office, Letter Book, 12, 7 July 1849–14 December 1851, Letter from Henry M. Hitchins to unknown, 12 February 1850, p. 53; Cox and Marland, Disorder Contained, pp. 51–4.
19 NAI, Letter Book, 12, p. 63; ‘Annual Report of the Inspector of Government Prisons in Ireland’, 1851, (1852–53) [1634], p. 43; Carey, Mountjoy, p. 53.
20 NAI, Letter Book, 12, p. 63.
21 NAI, Letter Book, 12, p. 63.
22 For details on Shore, see Ciaran McCabe, Begging, Charity and Religion in Pre-Famine Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), pp. 34, 77, n. 59. For information on Gibson, see Slater’s National Commercial Directory of Ireland (Manchester and London, 1846), pp. 27, 228, 233; Rev. Gibson Black, The righteous blessed in their death: The substance of a sermon preached in St Catherine’s Church, on Sunday, the 26 April 1846, on the occasion of the death of the Rev. Thomas Gregg, A. M. (Dublin, 1846).
25 Emmet Larkin, ‘The Beginnings of the Devotional Revolution in Ireland. The Parish Mission Movement, 1825–1846’, New Hibernia Review 18:1 (2014), 74–92, p. 75.
26 Larkin, ‘The Beginnings of the Devotional Revolution in Ireland’, 79–81, cited, p. 82.
27 IVA, Minute Books, 20 November 1854.
28 Larkin, ‘The Beginnings of the Devotional Revolution in Ireland’, p.79.
29 NAI, Letter Book, 12, B series, 7 July 1849–14 Dec 1851, p. 212; letter from H. H. to the Commissioners of Public Works, 27 Jan 1851.
30 ‘Annual Report of the Inspector of Government Prisons in Ireland’, 1851, p. 62.
31 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, ‘“He must die or go mad in this place”’.
32 ‘First Report of the Inspectors of Convict Prisons in Ireland’, 1854 (1854–55) [1958], p. 27.
33 ‘Second Report of the Inspectors of Government Prisons in Ireland’, 1852 (1854) [1813], p. 31.
34
‘Fifth Report of the Inspectors of Convict Prisons in Ireland’, 1858 (1859 Session 2) [2531], p. 27.
35 ‘Annual Report of the Inspectors of Government Prisons in Ireland’, 1851, p. 84.
36 ‘Second Report of the Inspectors of Government Prisons in Ireland’, 1852, pp. 42–43.
37 ‘Annual Report of the Inspectors of Government Prisons in Ireland’, 1851, p. 63.
38 Ullathorne, On the Management of Criminals, p. 25.
39 Ullathorne, On the Management of Criminals, p. 26
40 Ullathorne, On the Management of Criminals, p. 25.
41 Ullathorne, On the Management of Criminals, p. 25.
42 Ullathorne, On the Management of Criminals, p. 26.
43 Sir Walter Frederick Crofton (1815–97) was an influential authority on prisons and penal reform, and developed a version of Alexander Maconochie’s progressive or staged system of penal discipline. As well as serving as Chair of the Directors of Convict Prisons for Ireland, he was special commissioner in Ireland for prisons, reformatories, and industrial schools (1868–69) and inaugurated the industrial schools system (1869); appointed to the Irish Privy Council in 1869 and was Chairman of the General Prisons Board in Ireland (1877–78). He was Commissioner of County and Borough Gaols in England (1865–68) and was involved in the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. See Martin McElroy, ‘Crofton, Sir Walter Frederick’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed by James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
44 ‘Second Report of the Directors of Convict Prisons in Ireland’, 1855 (1856) [2068], p. 57, pp. 101–3.
45 Rules to be Observed in Mountjoy Male Prison (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1867), pp. 20–3.
46 ‘Thirteenth Report of the Directors of Convict Prisons in Ireland’, 1866 (1867) [3805], p. 23.
47 ‘Thirteenth Report of the Directors of Convict Prisons in Ireland’, p. 23.
48 Dublin, National Archive of Ireland (NAI), Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers (CSORP), 1874/4814, Letter from Captain Barlow, Director of Convict Prisons, to the Under-Secretary, 19 July 1871.
49 NAI, CSORP, 1874/4814, Letter from Rev. Michael Cody to Patrick Joseph Murray, Director of Convict Prisons, 20 January 1872.
50 ‘Seventeenth Report of Directors of Convict Prisons in Ireland’, 1870 (1871) [C.392], p. 16.
51 ‘Nineteenth Report of Directors of Convict Prisons in Ireland’, 1872 (1873) [C731], p. 15.
52 NAI, Letter Book, 8, letter no. 59, 19 February 1868.
53 NAI, Letter Book, 8, letter no. 59, 19 February 1868.
54 NAI, Letter Book, 8, letter no. 92, 29 March 1868.
55 NAI, CSORP, 1874/4814, Correspondence related to weakminded convicts on Spike Island.
56 Rules to be Observed in Mountjoy Male Prison, p. 23.
57 Rosalind Crone, ‘The Great “Reading” Experiment: an Examination of the Role of Education in the Nineteenth-century Gaol’, Crime, History and Societies, 16:1 (2012), 47–74, p. 50.
58 ‘Second Report of the Directors of Convict prisons in Ireland’, 1855, p. 3.
59 ‘Second Report of the Directors of Convict Prisons’, p. 41.
60 ‘Annual Report of the Inspector of Government Prisons in Ireland’, 1852, p. 31.
61 Sean Grass, The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 37.
Catherine Cox
Meeting Face to Face: the Essential Role of the Prison Chaplain
Sheena Orr
During the Covid pandemic the need for many face-to-face services within prisons were questioned and all but essential staff were left in direct contact with prisoners. Like the Irish Prison Service, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) replaced face-to-face visits with virtual ones. Also, in SPS, individual mobile phones, previously illegal, were issued to every prisoner, complete with 300 minutes call time per month. People were locked behind doors, sometimes for as much as twenty-three hours a day. However, while most service providers retreated such as social work and education, in SPS chaplains remained on duty within the prisons providing face-to-face contact, albeit with social distancing, masks, and at times in full Personal Protective Equipment. Why were chaplains regarded as essential workers with face-to-face contact, when all others apart from essential security and health staff remained? What is it about the chaplain’s role that makes face-to-face contact so vital? What do prison managers recognise in the role of the chaplain that sets them apart? Why can’t chaplains just sit at the end of a telephone line or record religious services? What it is that chaplains provide that makes their physical presence so essential?
This article explores these questions by reflecting on the nature of faceto-face encounters, and the way that through them, the chaplain provides a place of sanctuary, significance, and sabbath. It draws on my own research working as a chaplain in SPS, before and during Covid, which explored the underlying worldviews of Church and prisons and how everyday practices or liturgies can either be graceful of disgraceful.1 It highlights the importance of face-to-face contact in developing relationships that can ultimately lead to the rehabilitation of prisoners and thus safer communities.
Chaplain as sentinel
The chaplain’s day is structured around seeing people who have requested a visit or who are identified as vulnerable – those in prison for the first time, the suicidal or self-harming, the bereaved or distressed, or those wishing support
and guidance from a religious perspective. By engaging in visits (from the French visage, meaning face), I am seeing people as well as making them visible. If I see someone, I am recognising them as a person, and I am making them socially visible.2 This recognition, as practiced by a chaplain, also includes a spiritual visibility, as the inner world of a person, their thoughts and emotions, disappointments and hopes, are appreciated and given space. As a Christian chaplain, I try to see people through God’s eyes, through eyes of love. In this sense the chaplain’s gaze is a loving gaze, a gaze that seeks the fulfilment and flourishing of those who are seen.
This way of seeing is different from the surveillance found in prisons. Surveillance has a negative connotation. It is to do with over (sur) seeing (veiller – to watch), and this overseeing becomes the coercive means by which discipline is exercised. This is achieved, not only by the design and layout of buildings, but by the presence of cameras in almost every crevice of the incarcerated space. And it is not just prisoners who are watched. Surrounding areas, car parks, and approaches are also surveyed as are staff as they walk around the prison, along the corridors and in the halls. Cameras at the side of doors allow entry and exit from one area to the next to be closely monitored. Signs remind everyone that there are CCTV cameras. All phone calls made by prisoners are also monitored, letters are opened and checked for illicit content such as a SIM card or drugs. Scanning technology looks for phones and other electronic devices being brought into a prison, whether by staff or prisoner.
Surveillance, and particularly video surveillance, implies the loss of eye-to-eye contact. It is asymmetrical, and this lack of reciprocity leads to a dehumanising of the people being watched. Recognition is lost. But, ironically, there is something about the role of surveillance that is recognised by the prison service as detrimental to the pastoral relationship between chaplain and prisoner. This emphasises that there are different ways of seeing the prisoner, for prison rules affirm the right of the chaplain to see a prisoner without surveillance.3
The work of looking at the prisoner through God’s eyes is very different from the work of surveillance in evidence throughout the prison building. The Church of England draws on this richer meaning of watching over people through its use of the word ‘sentinel’ in the Church of England service of ordination. Being sentinel is part of the work of a priest whose task is, among other things, ‘to watch for the signs of God’s new creation’.4 Watching is
fundamental to the vocation of the sentinel. This involves waiting and watching, focused on God, open to our mind and will being shaped, ready for the task ahead.5 From the perspective of chaplaincy, exercising such a ministry of imagination can only take place when they are embedded and immersed in the everyday life of those to whom they minister.
The word ‘sentinel’ means more than just seeing in the visual sense. Drawing on the Latin sentire, it goes beyond sight. It is about feeling, about perceiving by the senses. This is the inner sight, the opening of spiritual eyes, as in the story of the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, when eyes are opened and the same person is seen differently. With seeing, new horizons open. Lovesteeped eyes see beauty and possibility where others cannot. Love-steeped eyes make love appear in the harshest of places.
The way we see somebody determines how we behave towards them. If we see people as a threat or security risk, we will treat them accordingly. If we see someone as valuable, made in God’s image, vulnerable, hurt and lonely, our reaction will be different. There will be a desire to provide a safe space, a place to feel valued, to get away from it all, a place to heal, a place to find out who we really are. And as it happens, these are all essential elements in helping people stay out of prison once released. But just as crucially, they are based on relationship, on face-to-face encounters, on building up trust with someone, even where there is only a short amount of time.
The following sections look at three key chaplaincy practices that are integral to the way chaplains see people: providing sanctuary, sabbath, and significance.
Providing sanctuary
In a similar way to which cities of refuge were provided for those running from revenge and punishment in the Old Testament (Num 35 and Jos 20), so a chaplain can provide a place of emotional and physical safety, of hospitality and acceptance, an escape from the noise, uncertainty, violence, and fears of the everyday. The most obvious place of sanctuary is the chapel itself. Whenever possible, people are invited into this space. Like walking into most sacred places, there is a sense of peace, which people often comment upon, especially when coming to light a candle for someone they have lost, to pray for a loved one in ill-health, for a quiet talk about what lies ahead, or the weekly rhythm of Mass. Chapels are faith-full spaces. They tell a particular story, often through the symbolism of consecrated furniture or a stained-glass
window.
Sanctuary, however, is not dependent on physical location. Often, visits or meetings take place on the landing in any room that might be spare. Sanctuary is dependent on something beyond the physical surroundings. It is embedded in the purpose of the meeting, the careful shaping of the space by the chaplain, and the intent of those involved. The door to sanctuary is welcome and attentive listening. It lets people know they are wanted. It tells people that you have time for them. The simple welcome handshake and offering Gucci (i.e. good quality) coffee also signals a willingness to include and value those who may otherwise be excluded. And shaking hands is a politeness that has added meaning in a place where violence, and the threat of it, is more common than the peaceful touch between two humans. Sometimes the handholding continues beyond the initial shake – an unspoken bonding between individuals constrained by time and place but rising above class, culture, diversity of opinion. Not infrequently, the chaplain can experience handholding as a seal of sanctuary found, as if by holding my hands the person is holding on to welcome, hospitality, acceptance. Hospitality has become distorted. It is more about short-lived entertainment. In contrast, Newman suggests that: hospitality is a practice and discipline that asks us to do what in the world’s sight seems inconsequential but from the perspective of the gospel is a manifestation of the kingdom of God … a practice of small gestures. In fact, when we look at faithful practitioners of hospitality, without exception they emphasise the importance of the small, the apparently insignificant, the vulnerable and the poor.6
For Oden, hospitality is about having eyes to see the stranger: if the first step of living in hospitality is remembering who we are as Christians, the second step is recognising who the stranger is, standing before us … the apparent stranger is not simply the poor, the stranger, the widow, the sick who knock, but Christ himself. For those with eyes to see, hospitality offered to another is always hospitality offered to Christ.7
In these accounts of hospitality, the emphasis is not on physical space and cosy meals between friends but on the practice of recognition of the stranger and the welcoming of the vulnerable, whoever they are and wherever they may be.
Hospitality can be offered by the chaplain in every look, every interaction, every gesture, every action. Time and place can be transformed even in a dingy room. It is not just that we have come off the landing, it is because hospitality is given in small gestures that translate into a sense of welcome, of being accepted and listened to.
‘It feels safe here’, says Stephen.
‘We would never close our eyes on the landing’, says Kyle.
‘You don’t feel judged in here. Everyone’s equal. It’s what we’re all going through together. I find it relaxing’, says Andrew.
‘It’s different in here. If we was to say something in the hall, like the stuff we’ve been talking about, you would have ten or fifteen people slaughterin’ you, everybody judging you … but here I can talk about things, you know about God and stuff, and people listen and don’t laugh at you’, says Cammy.
Sanctuary can be made as an escape from the general culture and atmosphere of the prison and a place where people can be themselves in a way they cannot on the landing. Although it can be experienced as a physical place, it is experienced much more as a spiritual and psychological sanctuary. A place where people can become aware of and express things of the soul.
Sabbath
The concept of Sabbath is a radical idea and something that chaplains provide as a matter of course. If providing sanctuary is about coming away from, Sabbath is about coming away to. We need sanctuary to experience the Sabbath. We need a place to go, to get away from everything that threatens to crush us. Sabbath can be seen as a resistance to all those things that attempt to crush us: anxiety, coercion, exclusivism, multitasking, even the heavy yoke of imprisonment.8 God is as concerned with social injustice as with the religious worship. God is concerned with relationship over the tyranny of constant surveillance and with neighbourliness over collective exploitation and abuse.9 The Sabbath is (as my computer-gaming sons would say) a call to return to base, a reminder of a different way of being, a different set of values, a different way of orientating life.
For the Christian, the Sabbath, traditionally, is the setting aside of a portion of time on a weekly basis. Indeed, the right to practice one’s religion is set down in law and is interpreted as the right to attend weekly worship, whether of the Catholic or Protestant tradition.
But of much more importance is the creation of Sabbath moments for
those who do not come to a religious service each week but with whom the chaplain has contact. For some there is the frequent Sabbath, for others the fragmented Sabbath. It is the fragmented Sabbath that most people experience, and, indeed, this is where chaplains are probably most involved. They take fragments of the Sabbath to people, to where they are, and, often, do so subversively as Jesus did. Jesus was a master at subversion. Until the very end, everyone, including his disciples, called him Rabbi. Rabbis were important, but they didn’t make anything happen. On the occasions when suspicions were aroused that there might be more to him than that title accounted for, Jesus tried to keep it quiet, ‘Tell no one.’ Jesus’ favourite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Jesus continually threw odd stories down alongside ordinary lives (para, alongside; bole, thrown) and walked away without explanation or altar call. Then listeners started seeing connections: God connections, life connections, eternity connections. It was only the religious people that Jesus challenged directly by doing things on the Sabbat,h which the Pharisees thought against the law. Jesus was redefining the Sabbath.
Being subversive is useful when trying to overthrow a status quo that is wrong, where there is a sense that there is another liveable world, which is not visible, and where ‘the usual means by which one kingdom is thrown out and another put in its place … are not available’.10 Parable and prayer are tools of subversion. Early on in my journey as a chaplain, I came to realise that there is little else that I can do to change some situations other than offer private prayer to God. It is only God that can make the difference. But there are also times when a fragment of Sabbath erupts more immediately, as the everyday concerns of a person slip out of the kingdom of anxiety, coercion, and exclusivity and are caught up into God’s kingdom – such as praying for a lost child, or the bereavement of a beloved nine-year-old nephew taken by cancer, or an errant husband with promises that he will turn his life around. Beyond these there are the casual conversations on landings, in corridors, in passing, at the dining table. For some it is experienced as the slow drip-drip of kingdom love, for others the sudden invasion of a messy moment, or the sharing of communion over coffee and biscuits.11 The task is to offer the relevant fragment of Sabbath, hoping and praying that in time the fragments will come together for that person.
Significance
The important thing about sanctuary and Sabbath is that they contribute to better decision-making, different behaviour, and ultimately desistance from crime by helping people feel valued and significant. Feeling insignificant, unworthy, and incapable limits people from making better choices about their life. Conversely, a feeling of significance increases a person’s belief in their own ability to change. This is called self-efficacy and is recognised by psychologists as fundamental to changes in behaviour. We are told that there are four practices that help to develop this life-changing belief in self: 1) having role models in life showing what new ways of being look like, 2) being encouraged by another person to change and try something new, 3) having the opportunity to practice these new ways of doing things, 4) reframing the story about ourselves and what is possible. Chaplains are uniquely placed to provide a safe, encouraging environment, where these practices can take place.12
Chaplain as role model
Seeing others succeed is important on the journey of transformation and having positive role models is important in changing behaviour. Jesus is the consummate role model of what it means to be human. Christian chaplains are also seen as role models. Role-modelling is provided by others further along the journey demonstrating graceful ways of being. And while setbacks and slips are not uncommon, the perseverance and encouragement of others makes a difference. Testimonies of life-change and healing by ex-offenders can be particularly powerful in this context, and the chaplain is always looking for opportunities to highlight role models as well as being role models themselves.
Chaplain as encourager
Encouraging and supporting a different way of being are a fundamental task of the chaplain. The chaplain influences a person’s self-efficacy by stirring up and encouraging (Heb 10:24) and by building up (1 Thess 5:11). Building a community of people who are struggling with the same issues and aiming for the same goals allows for an environment where people can encourage one another through word and action. Within a faith community, encouragement of one another can take many forms, including the verbal telling of faith stories, by the written word, and by small acts, such as encouraging someone to read out loud in a service to increase their confidence. Belonging to a
community of faith within a prison setting is, itself, a mechanism of social influence to those who belong and to those around. But the chaplain is also there for those who do not belong to a faith community and encouragement to live a fuller life is given in all sorts of situations, planned and unplanned. The significance of chance encounters should not be underestimated.13 A chance encounter with a chaplain can cut across existing social and emotional ties, offering new values and a different social milieu, with a lasting impact on a person’s life path.
Chaplains as supporters of new practices
Mastering new ways of being involves finding ways to overcome obstacles by persevering and learning the rules and strategies for managing the demands of everyday life. In Biblical terms we are called to persevere (1 Tim 4:16; Jas 1:12), to set aside the things that hold us back and run the race (Heb 12:1). The Bible provides the rules (principally, to love God and our neighbours as ourselves) and the strategies (prayer, worship, forgiveness, trust, stewardship, hospitality, etc.) to shape and support perseverance in making the right choices. By providing a safe place (sanctuary), the chaplain creates the opportunity for people to master new experiences, practicing new ways of being. We have already heard from prisoners who can talk about spiritual things in a way they could not on the landing. Liturgies of hospitality and community building create an environment where people can ‘try out’ being kind, compassionate, forgiving, and trustworthy in a loving environment with others on a similar journey. The non-judgemental atmosphere makes it easier for constructive feedback to be given and a level of self-monitoring and awareness begins to take place. Little changes in daily habits begin to be made.
Chaplain as perspective shakers
How people feel physically and emotionally affects their ability to deal with difficulties or to decide to change their behaviour. When people feel low or are struggling with their mental health, as is the case for many in prison, it is difficult to feel a sense of self-worth and value, the very things that are necessary if current ways of being and doing are to be changed. Reducing stress levels, raising emotional moods, and correctly interpreting bodily states are all ways of altering efficacy beliefs. The laments of the Psalms are often the starting place for helping people gain a perspective on how they are feeling, recognising low feelings, helping people making sense of them,
and helping the person move to a more positive place. By helping people to reflect on the things they do and how they feel about themselves, the chaplain facilitates the process of significance making. Bringing all this information together, making significance out of the fragments, leads in time to shifts in identity, but it is a difficult process. It is in this context that the chaplain can influence a person’s self-assessment of themselves by helping them to reflect realistically on their potential to act, reinforcing the significance of the journey of change in a person’s life. This shift in perspective leads people to seeing themselves differently by letting go of old beliefs and embracing new ones.
Paul writes of such a shift when he urges the recipients of his letter, ‘do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind’, and he speaks of sound judgement as part of an alteration in thinking (Rom 12:2–3). This shift has been identified as a vital element in desisting from crime. Research on desistance suggests that people who abandon criminal activity make identifiable changes to their personal identity and transformed self-narrative, producing a new, improved self that no longer coheres with offending. While there are limits to demonstrating desistance within a prison environment, the fact that desistance is a process in which increased self-efficacy plays an important part gives scope for the chaplain to support it.
These practices are of value to all. Although informed and shaped by the Christian religious tradition, within the prison setting they become practices that help people to think about how they want to live out their lives. They help make a connection between the inner and outer worlds, bringing together ‘the transcendent – the sense of what is beyond ourselves and the immanent – the sense of the divine or the spirit within ourselves’.14 This recognises that not all spirituality is religious. There can be religious spirituality, spiritual but not religious spirituality, and secular spirituality.15 But there is a common ground in the most basic facts of our existence: that we are here at all, that we exist in and through this body that somehow breathes, that we build selves through and for others, that we’re a highly improbable part of an unfathomable whole, and of course, that we will inevitably die.
Ultimately, while some of the chaplain’s practices are explicitly religious (such as the celebration of Mass), the underlying values are empowering for all. It is in this context that I, as a chaplain, through the practice of Sabbath and sanctuary, help people to reflect on their own significance, on the significance
of others (family, friends, victims or any other), and of the significance of the things they do or do not do.
Chaplain as beyond measurable indicators
In each encounter that the chaplain has, there is something beyond outcomes and any measurable indicator. But this can only happen when meeting face to face with a person. In those moments and minutes, a different way of being is offered and modelled, and a different set of values is demonstrated. Through the embodied practice of transformative, graceful relationships the responsibility to act in a compassionate and moral way towards another is assumed. In doing this the chaplain gives of their selves, drawing on the selfsacrifice of Christ. That is not to say there are no tensions. It can be no other way when so many parts of the criminal justice system, and wider society, are broken (evidenced in part by the high prison population in Scotland, the lack of community options for sentencing, the high proportion of people on remand who are subsequently found not guilty, and the subsequent stigmatisation of offenders). But through daily, face-to-face encounters, the prison chaplain helps people to sense that perhaps the future can be different from the past and that they are a valued member of society.
Rev. Dr Sheena Orr is the Church of Scotland Chaplaincy Advisor to the Scottish Prison Service and an ordained Church of Scotland minister. Her doctorate from the University of Glasgow, Transforming Liturgies: The Autoethnography of a Prison Chaplain, explored how chaplains challenge the organisational culture through everyday liturgies of word and action.
Notes
1 The article draws heavily on section 5.3 of my thesis, ‘Transforming Liturgies: The Autoethnography of a Prison Chaplain’, University of Glasgow, 2021.
2 See Andrea Brighenti, ‘Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences’, Current Sociology 55:3 (2007): 323–42, where she discusses the importance of recognition as a basic human category and the dehumanisation that occurs when absent.
3 The Prison and Young Offenders Institutions (Scotland) Rules, 2011, Rule 44(4): Any visit to a prisoner by a member of the chaplaincy team must be held outwith the sight and hearing of an officer except where (a) the member or prisoner concerned requests otherwise; or (b) the Governor considers it would be prejudicial to the interests of security or safety for an officer not to be present.
4 Church of England, Common Worship: Ordination Services (London: Church House Publishing, 2007).
5 Cottrell
6 Elizabeth Newman, Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers: The Christian Practice of Everyday Life, series ed by David S. Cunningham and William T.
Cavanaugh (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Pree, 2007).
7 Amy G. Oden, And You Welcomed Me: A Sourcebook of Hospitality in Early Christianity (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001).
8 Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2017), p. xiv.
9 Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, p. 10.
10 Eugene H. Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), p. 34.
11 George Gammack, ‘Ministry of Messy Moments’, Contact, 132:1 (2000), 27–34.
12 Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997).
13 Albert Bandura, ‘The Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths’, American sychologist, 37:7 (1982), 747–55.
14 Fiona Gardener, Critical Spirituality. A Holistic Approach to Contemporary Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
15 This and the next sentence are drawn from Jonathan Rowson, Spiritualise: Revitalising Spirituality to Address 21st Century Challenges (London: RSA, 2014), <www.thersa.org/ globalassets/pdfs/reports/spiritualise-report.pdf>
The Place of the Prison in the Bible
Kevin Hargaden
Introduction: justifying the question ‘What does the Bible say about prisons?’, appears, at first glance, to be a question that, we could only charitably grant, has a relatively niche interest. It would be an understandable response to assume that this question only has relevance for the diminishing numbers of people who read these texts devotionally, and even then, it is hardly a central hermeneutical lens through which to consider their tradition.
In exploring the place of the prison in the Bible, I propose that we find a perspective that is of relevance for those who read these texts as Scripture and also a perspective that can constructively inform readers who approach the question of criminal justice without any consideration of religious or theological angles. Exactly because the biblical texts are composed as if in a strange, old world so different from ours, we find in, that distance, a clarity for our present situation through how earlier civilisations perceived the penal institutions of their day.
What we discover is that the critical disposition towards the prison deployed by the peoples who assembled the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek New Testament are at least as sophisticated and cutting as that of contemporary criminologists. This is a significant finding, because it offers historical and cultural support to critical criminologists. One need not invest the Bible with any ‘scriptural’ authority to grant that it is an important insight if we find that the texts are ambivalent or, indeed, at times, deeply hostile towards the prison.
In this essay I will establish this case. First, I will offer a methodological comment on how biblical theologians read the texts, especially keen to protect against anachronistic readings. Then, I will offer a survey of the major texts engaging prison found in the Bible, particularly focusing on the older Hebrew Scriptures. The pinnacle of the argument concerns the relationship that Jesus of Nazareth had with prison. It is much too rarely recognised that the one that Christians insist is God spent his last night unjustly detained in prison. By attending to the gospel accounts of this historical event, we see clearly that there are profound objections to the prison implicit within the
biblical tradition. In conclusion, I will suggest how some of these readings could serve to advance conversation about criminal justice.
Against anachronistic readings
It is appropriate to begin by stating assumptions and issuing some qualifying clarifications.
The core of this argument consists of an overview of biblical material relating to imprisonment. These are necessarily brief descriptions of texts that have been commented on and studied for millennia. Entire monographs could be written on each textual reference in the argument that follows. So, the first thing to note is that this essay is a mapping exercise, an attempt to sound the depths of this hermeneutical perspective.
The readings extended here seek epistemic neutrality on the questions of faith and devotion. The Bible is a sacred canon, and the texts are handled with appropriate respect, read in context, and alert to how they have been received in the tradition. But this particular argument neither assumes nor requires religious faith or the investment of any particular authority in these texts. It is sufficient to grant the historical and sociological reality that this collection of texts has had a decisive impact on cultures across the globe and continues to have a formative influence on the lives of billions of people.
The most important qualification required is to recognise the sheer distance between our contemporary society and the world in which the Bible was composed. The socio-historical gulf that is spanned when we read these texts for contemporary relevance is vast and real and cannot be forgotten. Turning to accounts of ancient Israelite society to inform contemporary Western European societies is a suspect move.
What is proposed here is not that we can read the Bible on prisons and translate it into policy today. It is anachronistic to try to read a text from 3,000 years ago as a basis for our policy design today. It is to mis-read the text.
Instead, a sort of imaginative resonance can be established, as we read these stories written by people very different from us, facing radically distinct challenges, who nonetheless intuit that the prison is a tool of oppression. In this reading, the benefit we find in reading the biblical texts is exactly their foreignness. The Law of Moses that guided the Hebrew people had 613 separate regulations, and not once do we find any reference to a penitentiary. Being alert to how different societies in different places at different times
construed criminal justice differently informs that very contemporary instinct that another world is possible. Turning to the Bible on criminal justice does not imply we have to enshrine the lex talonis in our legal code any more than it suggests we should implement a Jubilee year every half-century. But it does allow us to see, through difference, a commonality around justice. The prison – even granting that the Roman prison is not the same as the Babylonian prison and neither is the same as a modern EU prison – is a technology ripe for corruption.
A final assumption, implicit in this essay, is that Christians have a particular responsibility to the prisoner. There is a clear, indeed unavoidable basis for ministry to the prisoner, sourced in Jesus’ very last parable: ‘I was in prison and you came to visit me’ (My 25:36b).1 But Christians have no particular obligation to the prison. For those who do read the Bible as Scripture, there is an implication in this argument that the Church must be a much more articulate critic of the penal institution. For those with ears to hear, let them hear.
The
‘prison’ biblical texts
What is the perspective of the prison as an institution that we find in the Scriptures?
The first person who is imprisoned in the Bible is Joseph. It is important to note that this is not the first crime recorded in Scripture. Indeed, Joseph committed no crime. He was imprisoned after rebuffing the sexual advances of his boss’ wife. It is corruption that frames the first engagement with prison.
The first criminal act recorded in the Bible is the murder of Abel. Cain did not get sent to prison. As Lee Griffiths puts it, ‘Cain is as guilty as sin, and yet in violation of all human “justice”, God protects him.’2 There are many other crimes to be found between Genesis 4 and Genesis 39, but the prison is clearly not part of the biblical perspective on how to restore justice. Joseph suffered in prison for two years until he was liberated. We find in this first text a motif that re-occurs throughout the rest of the biblical texts – that God has a particular concern for the prisoner. We read, ‘while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him’ (Gen 39:20b–21). As the pages turn, this is an idea that is repeated. God attends to those behind bars. Isaiah tells us that the Lord intends ‘to free captives from prison’ (Isa 42:7). The Psalmist cries, ‘Let the groans of the prisoners come before you Lord’ (Ps 79:11), and rejoices that ‘He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives
food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free’ (Ps 146:7).
As we scan the Scriptures to find actual prisoners, a remarkable picture emerges. Micaiah is imprisoned for telling politically uncomfortable truths (1 Kgs 22:13–28). Hanani meets the same fate (2 Chr 16:10). Jeremiah is imprisoned for being a complete hassle for the king, Zedekiah (Jer 32:3–5 and 37:15–16). In time, this same Zedekiah was a prisoner of war (Jer 52:11), as was Jehoiachin (the King of Judah), whose unexpected release after thirtyseven years had a symbolic significance for the restoration of Israel (Jer 52:31–34). Daniel is imprisoned as part of a conspiracy set against him by his jealous peers (Dan 6:16–28), while Shadrach, Mishnach, and Abednego are detained for their civil disobedience (Dan 3:1–30). The bulk of the texts – and the most significant texts – depict the prison as a means by which the state disposes of population groups it finds inconvenient. In the Bible, the prison is corrupt.
There are some cases where the moral status of the imprisoned person is located closer to a scoundrel than a saint. Samson was certainly imprisoned as an act of political vengeance at the hands of the Philistines, but his own final actions seem to disregard the Mosaic law’s limitation on violence and vengeance, as he becomes a sort of suicide terrorist (Jud 16:21). The prison is not just corrupt; it corrupts.
There are other more ambiguous cases. Hoshea was the king of Israel in Samaria who conspired against the Assyrians with the Egyptians and ended up in prison (2 Kgs 17:1–5). Jehoahaz was imprisoned by Pharoah Necho after three months of incompetent and corrupt rule (2 Kgs 23:31–34). And there is at least one biblical narrative where the story maps onto the contemporary political rhetoric around prison. The wicked King Manasseh is imprisoned in 2 Chronicles 33:1–13 and faced with the difficulty of his captivity, he repents. This seems true to life – we can expect prison to work about 10% of the time!
However, perhaps the most significant factor at play here is that the Mosaic law at no point references prison as part of the criminal justice system.3 And even where we do find imprisonment occurring, it often seems ad-hoc. We are told in passing that Zedekiah had no prisons in which to hold Jeremiah, so a temporary detention centre was established in the home of his secretary Jonathan (Jer 37:15). In so many of these cases, the prison is a device operated by a foreign power or by a Hebrew king who was close to a vassal. It is not until Ezra 7:26 that we find the prison established on
some legal footing: ‘Whoever does not obey the law of your God and the law of the king must surely be punished by death, banishment, confiscation of property, or imprisonment.’ The words ‘your God’ should be noted. The person establishing the law is the Assyrian king, Artaxerxes II.
Of course, things do not improve in the New Testament. John the Baptist is detained as a political prisoner (Mt 14:3–12). The violent insurrectionist, Barabbas, is that rare case – someone who is imprisoned for a reason that aligns with contemporary legal thinking. And he is released (Lk 23:18–25). The apostles endure some kind of detention at the hands of the high priest and his associates (Acts 5:17–20), though an angel sets them free. Peter is imprisoned as part of Herod’s persecution (Acts 12:1–19). Paul and Silas find themselves imprisoned because they got in the way of the untrammelled market activities of human traffickers (Acts 16:16–40). This is a critical text to consider, because it is God’s dramatic intervening action that opens the prison to the world and the jailor is among those who are liberated. And we must not forget that Paul spends much of the end of his life imprisoned and the dignity with which he faces this indignity testifies to what chaplains maintain – the intrinsic worth of the prisoner (Phil 1:12–30).
Jesus’s last night
Jesus spent his last night before his death incarcerated. The technical term for a reading of a biblical text that places Jesus as the hermeneutical centre is ‘Christological’, and it has a longstanding validity as a means to interpret texts.4 A Christological reading of the prison is an obvious approach from which to consider the meaning of the prison in the Bible, a means to draw these disparate threads together. While ‘cloaked’ is circumspect language, it is clear that behind the walls of the detention centre, Jesus is sexually abused, publicly humiliated, and tortured by a crowd. If this is what the prison allows humanity to do to a person presented as perfectly full of life, it is fair to conclude that the biblical view of prison is as negative as possible. Jesus is tried and convicted – procedures of a sort were implemented before he was detained. But the entire pursuit is a sham. He is successfully prosecuted for sedition; a crime he clearly did not commit. The whole process is presented as a conspiracy to serve political aims. The prison is never more central in the narrative logic of the Scriptures than here and it is never more transparently a tool of oppression. If the controlling prison narrative in the Bible is going to be the story of
Jesus’ captivity, then it is important we attend to the detail that is only visible below the text. The work of drawing that out has been done recently by the Aotearoan biblical scholar, David Tombs, among others. Tombs begins his work by reminding us that the crucifixion was ‘more than the punishment of an individual’ but ‘were instruments within state terror policies directed at a wider population in the ancient world’.5
The biblical text does not say that Jesus was raped. It does report that he was stripped naked in public in at least two instances, clearly a form of sexual abuse. But as Tombs demonstrates, rape as a form of discipline against detainees in Rome was commonplace, as evidenced by ‘the close connection between rape and capture … in the Latin verb rapere’.6 Both the Gospels of Mark and Matthew underline that the torture in the Praetorium involved ‘the whole cohort of soldiers (normally 600 men)’.7 The Greek preposition that Matthew deploys indicates that this was not a crowd of men dispersed with some small sub-section taking responsibility. A good translation of ep’ auton is that the soldiers are called and respond to gather around him. There is proximity here. It is a mob. They have stripped him naked, and they are beating him with rods (Mt 27:27–31). ‘After they mocked him’, they took him to be crucified.
Tombs details painstakingly how we can interpret these sparse sentences in the light of studies of sexual assault in prison cultures across the globe. He is clear that there is no mention of rape in the gospel texts – we would expect, for a range of reasons, for them to be silent on that topic. But in the scene depicted, it is hard for a critical criminologist to not recognise that what we are being presented with here is a scene of profound and unjust violence.
Within the Bible, the prison is corrupt.
Summation: what we can conclude about the prison from the Bible Tombs notes that ‘stripping and nudity are first steps towards other forms of sexual abuse’.8 This is not what happens (habitually) in a modern prison. But every prisoner in the Western world is stripped and searched upon arrival and regardless of whatever processes might be put in place and whatever professionally might be displayed, what occurs here is that the prisoner is from that point ‘stripped of autonomy and under the complete control of guards’.9 And even the most progressive and enlightened of penal institutions exists to deter and to punish. ‘Stay out of trouble, or we will do to you what we do to this criminal.’ There is more than a family resemblance between
what Jesus endured and what any single prisoner could endure. Whether justly convicted or not, the prisoner is at the mercy of an institution granted unique exceptions to violate and trample their natural rights.
There is an emerging approach to reading the Scriptures from within the prison. These ‘carceral hermeneutics’ seeks to take seriously that even calculating conservatively, ‘twenty-four of sixty-six biblical books are written from prison, from exile, or about prison and exile’.10 Bob Ekblad had an earlier and more popular version of this argument in his Reading the Bible with the Damned. Ekblad found his middle-class, Anglo-framed, seminary-formed interpretation of the Scriptures constantly challenged as he read the Bible with prisoners and immigrant communities. Only by going to the prisoner could he come to see Jesus as the ‘good coyote’ who smuggles people into the true promised land.11
What I have proposed here is, in some senses, the inverse of these projects. To Christians, I strongly recommend as a practice going to the prison to read the Bible. But I think it is also useful that we go to the Bible to read the prison. There we find a deeply morally conflicted institution which is, as a matter of course, sliding always into corruption. A pillar of justice, that ends up intensifying injustice.
Dr Kevin Hargaden is Director and Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dublin. He is the author of several books, most recently Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age (Eugene, Oregon, US: Cascade, 2018).
Notes
1 Naomi K. Paget and Janet R. McCormack, The Work of the Chaplain (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2006), pp. 5–8.
2 Lee Griffith, The Fall of the Prison (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 88.
3 There are cases of ‘custody’ being implemented during the Exodus wandering. There is a son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father who gets in a brawl and who blasphemes the name of God in Leviticus 24 who gets placed ‘in custody’, but this is explained in the text as a temporary arrangement as the people waited upon clarity from the Lord about what to do with them (Lev 24:10–12). A Sabbath breaker is put to death in Numbers 15:32–34, and again we find that he is held as if under ‘remand’ as they waited for the Lord’s verdict.
4 This interpretative tradition can be traced by to the earliest Christian thinkers. Writing about Augustine of Hippo’s tendency to read the texts Christologically, theologian Michael Cameron writes, ‘Like the sightings of the risen Christ after his resurrection, he [Christ] comes and goes every-where in the old books. In Joseph’s fiery trials, in Moses’ burning bush, in Passover’s slain lamb, in Israel’s flowing rock, in Joshua’s brave exploits, and in hundreds of other people, events, and images he dazzles readers with kaleidoscopic visions that excite their spiritual love.’ Michael Cameron, Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis
Kevin Hargaden
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 281.
5 David Tombs, ‘Crucifixion and Sexual Abuse’, in When Did We See You Naked?: Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse, ed. Jayme R. Reaves, David Tombs, and Rocío Figueroa (London: SCM Press, 2021), p. 16.
6 David Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross (London: Routledge, 2023), p. 31.
7 Tombs, Crucifixion of Jesus, 35.
8 Tombs, Crucifixion of Jesus, p. 29. Emphasis original.
9 Tombs, Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, p. 8.
10 Sarah Jobe, ‘Carceral Hermeneutics: Discovering the Bible in Prison and Prison in the Bible’, Religions, 10:2 (2019), p. 2.” the art of interpreting Scripture from within prisons as, or alongside, incarcerated persons. Reading the Bible in prison reframes the Bible as a whole, highlighting how the original sites of textual production were frequently sites of exile, prison, confinement, and control. Drawing on the work of Lauren F. Winner, the author explores the “characteristic damages” of reading the Bible without attention to the carceral and suggests that physically re-locating the task of biblical interpretation can unmask interpretative damage and reveal alternative, life-giving readings. The essay concludes with an extended example, showing how the idea of cruciformity is a characteristically damaged reading that extracts Jesus’ execution from its carceral context. Carceral hermeneutics surfaces a Gospel counternarrative in which Jesus flees violence and opts for his own safety. Jesus as a refugee (Matt 2
11 Bob Ekblad, Reading the Bible with the Damned (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005), pp. 179–196.
John Bruton: An Appreciation
Kevin Rafter
Whether it was powering down the corridors in Leinster House or hastily arriving into a radio studio, the image of John Bruton that sticks in my mind is of a man on the move. He did not have the easy gait of an athlete, but he walked with powerful intent. And then there was the laugh, raucous but warm. It almost wrapped itself around those in his company. In my work as an academic, and my previous career as a political journalist, I interviewed John Bruton many times – as leader of Fine Gael, as taoiseach, and also in his very active years after leaving national politics in Ireland. He had been ousted as Fine Gael leader when we met, in late 2001, to discuss my biography of Martin Mansergh, then still a backroom advisor in Fianna Fáil and someone who had been an influential participant in the early clandestine moves to convince the Provisional IRA to end its campaign of violence. During our conversation, Bruton took issue with a point I raised. The information had been provided by another interviewee for my book. ‘Not true, not true’, Bruton replied, as he moved swiftly across the office to an adjacent storage room. Some moments later, he re-emerged holding a large cardboard box. Seated again at the table alongside me, he went through the contents – dozens of exercise copybooks, the type normally used by children in primary school. The pages were filled, in his own pen, with snatches of conversations and notes of meetings from the dramatic weeks in December 1994 when he became taoiseach.
Leafing through the copybooks, he found what he wanted. ‘Look, my notes from the meeting you mentioned’, he said, making the case that my earlier interviewee’s recollection was faulty. My attention had, however, been drawn to a separate copybook now also on the table. The opened pages contained the names of several Fine Gael TDs. There were lines through some names, others had departmental portfolios alongside them. Here was evidence of a party leader – a prospective taoiseach – doodling his fantasy cabinet. Seeing where my gaze had landed, Bruton quickly closed the copybook. ‘You’ve no need for that’, he said, with the booming laugh, as he returned the cardboard box back to the storage room.
Bruton: An Appreciation
Numerous times in subsequent years, I mentioned those copybooks and encouraged Bruton to write his memoirs. He was reluctant to embark on the project. ‘I do think about a memoir, but the work would be enormous because my memory is bad’, he wrote, ‘I would have to do a lot of research and even then could get things wrong. The notebooks tell nothing on their own.’1 It is a shame that John Bruton died in 2024 without penning his own record of a political career populated with achievement, drama, and controversy: from his election to Dáil Éireann in 1969 at the age of twenty-two, to holding junior and senior ministerial positions in governments led respectively by Liam Cosgrave (1973–77) and Garret FitzGerald (1981–82; 1982–87), to becoming leader of Fine Gael (1990–2001) and serving as taoiseach (1994–97).
There were also several contentious leadership battles, including the one that finally ended his tenure as Fine Gael leader in 2001. An Irish Times/ MRBI poll in late January 2001 convinced his internal critics that the time for a much debated leadership change had finally arrived. Support for Bertie Ahern’s Fianna Fáil was at 41% (an increase of one point since a similar poll the previous September), whereas Fine Gael had slipped four points to 20% and was now in third place in Dublin behind Fianna Fáil and Labour. The findings contained other bad news for Bruton. He registered a personal satisfaction rating of 37%, his lowest level since November 1994 (just before he was unexpectedly elected taoiseach).2 Bruton called on his party colleagues ‘not to desert the colours’ but two senior Fine Gael figures, Jim Mitchell and Michael Noonan, smelt blood. In a parliamentary party where even critics of Bruton acknowledged his decency and hard work (and his record as taoiseach), Mitchell’s words were particularly bruising. ‘Regretfully, John Bruton is like a weak currency which can no longer be propped up,’ Mitchell wrote in a caustic newspaper article.3
I was working in Leinster House as a journalist on 31 January 2001, when the seventy-two members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party gathered to consider the no-confidence motion. The meeting lasted for seven-and-a-half hours. To the end of the meeting, nobody was clear about the outcome. It was just 10pm when news of the result leaked out of the meeting room. The vote was tight – Bruton had been beaten, but three votes switching sides would have allowed him to remain as leader (although his credibility in the role would have been seriously undermined). There was something momentous about the decision that I reported into Vincent Browne’s radio programme on
John
RTÉ that night. It wasn’t just a party leader being removed from his position but also someone who had served as taoiseach. A few minutes later Bruton was on the steps of Leinster House looking out over the plinth towards Kildare Street. ‘I fully accept this democratic decision’, he said. His voice was full of emotion as he spoke of the ‘extremely adverse conditions’ of the previous few days. Standing alongside him there were tears among loyal supporters including his brother, Richard. The dignified manner in which he accepted the outcome spoke greatly of a deeply-held commitment to democratic politics. It was a commitment mentioned frequently in the myriad of tributes offered in the days after his passing on 6 February 2024 at the age of seventy-six.
The rainbow coalition
The many assessments of John Bruton’s political career covered similar ground – the budget defeat that led to the collapse of the minority Fine Gael–Labour coalition in early 1982, leadership contests, the intervention in the 1995 divorce referendum, and a long-standing apathy to militant republicanism. Bruton’s passing, however, also presents an opportunity to consider what factors form a successful political career and, in particular, what qualities are needed to become taoiseach. A commitment to public service is an essential starting point. You would hope societal ambition, a desire to leave the country a better place. Durability is certainly a fundamental quality, especially with the heightened demands on both the ‘time and through’ of those who hold high office. The days of a taoiseach going home for lunch and signing off on the job at 5pm are long gone. The contemporary era also requires enhanced communications skills and an ability to deliver the public performance aspects of the position.
John Bruton was more than a lucky politician who stumbled into the office of taoiseach in the midst of huge political turbulence in late 1994. Taken as a whole, his thirty-five year career in Dáil Éireann shows a serious politician, someone who was conservative in his thinking on the economy and moderately liberal in considering social issues. He made mistakes, but he also enjoyed success, as would be expected from such a prolonged commitment to political life. He had an intellectual curiosity and an interest in the world beyond his constituency and country. He demonstrated an ability to consider a long-term perspective and, within that, to allow his views to evolve as other societal and economic factors changed. With contemporary
politics increasingly framed in terms of a ‘horse race’ between winners and losers, his career is a reminder of the difficulty of political life and the complexity of governing.
John Bruton was elected taoiseach on 15 December 1994. It was the first time since the foundation of the Irish state that a new government had been formed during the life of a parliament without a general election being called. The three-party coalition comprising Fine Gael, Labour, and Democratic Left presided over a significant improvement in the performance of the Irish economy, which preceded the so-called Celtic Tiger era. There were challenges with the peace process, especially when the first IRA ceasefire ended in early 1996. More significantly, and perhaps more evident in retrospect, serious political process was made in conjunction with the British government, work that ultimately paved the way for the Belfast Agreement in 1998. The rainbow government was also defined by a genuine progressive ethos and introduced reforming policies in the tax and social welfare codes. Bruton’s legacy as taoiseach, however, will probably be defined by the divorce referendum in November 1995. His role in the successful campaign to remove the constitutional ban on divorce unquestionably guarantees a place in the history books.
He sought to lead the 1994–97 coalition on a consensus basis, although that did not mean there were no differences between the three government parties. There were strains surrounding the separate resignations in controversy of two senior Fine Gael ministers, Hugh Coveney and Michael Lowry. There were also policy disputes, but Bruton worked to lead a cabinet built on consensus. Among his government colleagues, there was strong praise for his ability to change his stance if convinced of the merits of a particular policy proposal. Proinsias De Rossa, the Democratic Left leader and Minister for Social Welfare, recalled one experience during the Irish presidency of the European Union in the second six months of 1996. ‘We were negotiating a new language in the [EU] treaties to allow for poverty programmes and anti-discrimination. We had been sort of battering Bruton’s head about poverty and social inclusion and how important they were, and how you couldn’t have a modern economy without dealing with them and so forth. And Bruton’s going, “tell me again about this social exclusion?”’4
There were very different relationships between the other two party leaders. Bruton and Labour’s Dick Spring had served in the 1982–87 Garret FitzGerald-led coalition. Set against a depressed economic backdrop of the
John Bruton:
1980s, Bruton’s preference for private sector involvement in economic life and support for significant reductions in government expenditure ensured poor relations with Spring. By way of contrast, the positive relationship between the leaders of Fine Gael and Democratic Left was a genuine surprise. From an original position of political antagonism, largely influenced by their differing experiences of the Northern Ireland conflict, Bruton came to admire and respect his Democratic Left counterpart. ‘I remember having lots of conversations with Proinsias de Rossa. Of course there were things on which we profoundly disagreed, like abortion, but I found his method of discussion was one that was very easy for me to enter into. I knew if I said something to Proinsias he mightn’t answer me there and then, but he would go away and think about it.’ For his part, De Rossa saw the Fine Gael leader as a conservative politician, but he admired his intellect: ‘For all of Bruton’s instincts as a big farmer he is a highly intelligent man.’
Pat Rabbitte, a Democratic Left Minister of State who attended cabinet, witnessed their exchanges in government, ‘It was very odd, a rancher from Co. Meath who previously had shown a very conservative disposition, and an inner city radical. It was very peculiar.’ Rabbitte offered an explanation for the positive chemistry, ‘I think maybe their like-mindedness on Northern Ireland was probably a factor. And Bruton changed his views as he progressed in life and in politics. By the time he finished in that government he was quite a convinced social democrat and he had come from a very conservative position.’
After national politics
For many political leaders the loss of office is the end. Some pull the shutters down and retreat back into private life, others live out their days hankering for the adrenaline rush of their past political career. John Bruton, however, found another route that allowed him to continue to have an active role in public life. He had a second coming as the European Union’s Ambassador to Washington (2004–09). Many people urged him to consider being a candidate for the presidency when Mary McAleese’s second term ended in 2011, but he said he would not be comfortable in the position. Instead, among other involvements, he contributed with verve and acumen – and not a little controversy – to various national debates.
As well as lectures and media contributions, he wrote considered book reviews. I was very grateful for his positive review of my book on the
rebuilding of Fine Gael after the disastrous 2002 general election (the contest that Bruton’s critics claimed they would win).5 He was less convinced about the party’s coalition with Labour in 2011, as the country grappled with an economic crisis of historic proportions. ‘[The book] gave just credit to Enda Kenny before it became fashionable to do so. But the qualities you described so well helped the party win office, but may not have served it so well in negotiating the Programme for Government.’6 In the years after he returned from Washington, those on his list of email contacts became familiar with messages that opened with the sentence, ‘I am sending you herewith something I have written about … ’ He was keenly interested in the decade of centenaries, the future of Northern Ireland, and the implications of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union. Several of these contributions were published in Studies.
Bruton long held a torch for John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) from 1900 until his death in March 1918.7 Redmond, a MP for Waterford, had helped to heal the bitter rift in the IPP after the Parnell schism. He also successful secured constitutional change at Westminster, which facilitated the passing of Home Rule legislation in 1914. In March 2018, Bruton spoke at a conference at Westminster to mark the centenary of Redmond’s death. In the IPP leader, Bruton saw the essence of his own understanding of what politics was about – namely, the importance of public service and the use of parliamentary activism to deliver change. He marvelled at how Redmond had worked to end the parliamentary veto of the House of Lords, rating it as a ‘a major constitutional achievement’. He long believed this legacy had been undervalued, in particular as removing the blocking veto facilitated the enactment (but not the delivery) of Home Rule in 1914. ‘The enactment of Home Rule, and its signature by the king, meant that the British parliament, and its sovereign, had consented to the principle of Irish legislative independence’, Bruton wrote. In itself this constitutional change was important but, in light of the revolutionary era that followed, Bruton was equally keen to emphasise that Redmond’s achievement came ‘without taking anyone’s life’.
Bruton may have overestimated Redmond’s political relevance once the Home Rule Bill was paused on account of the start of World War I, but Redmond’s commitment to peaceful political activism strongly influenced Bruton’s forceful, antagonistic view of Sinn Fein, not just in the historical context of the revolutionary era from 1916 into the 1920s but also in
contemporary life on the island of Ireland. In Redmond, Bruton saw an Irish nationalist leader who made a serious attempt to understand, in a respectful way, the real fears and aspirations of Ulster unionism. In that regard, he considered Redmond a more appropriate model for a twenty-first century world than many of the so-called icons of Irish republican history. ‘Redmond’s example of courtesy, sincerity, and creative compromise is the best model for all of us to follow in this small European continent, as Europeans of all nationalities seek to protect ourselves in an increasingly dangerous and protectionist world, of the population of which we in Europe constitute a diminishing minority. “Ourselves Alone” is not the best way.’
Bruton supported the idea of Irish unity but only in circumstances where a unitary state offered stability and was not encumbered by a disgruntled minority population. Before consideration might be given to eliminating the border between the two jurisdictions on the island, he argued strongly for delivering the ambition of the Belfast Agreement of 1998. As he put it, this was the ‘vital task of this generation’.8 The principles underpinning the Belfast Agreement ended the zero-sum game of the Irish conundrum, where for centuries either the British identity had to win or the Irish identity had to win. As Bruton saw it, the 1998 deal offered the possibility of ending the contest between these two identities to allow for peacefully co-existence in Northern Ireland. The three interconnected stands at the core of the Belfast Agreement – power-sharing in the North, North–South cooperation and East–West relations – created a new type of politics.
A border poll
The Belfast Agreement allows the British secretary of state to hold a poll in Northern Ireland should the British government believe that a majority in Northern Ireland would support unification with the Irish Republic. But, as John Bruton correctly observed, the Belfast Agreement offers little guidance on the criteria that might guide such a far-reaching decision. There is also silence in the 1998 peace deal on the Dublin government’s role in ensuring how the different communities in Northern Ireland – and especially the one that wants to remain part of the United Kingdom – might be made welcome in a united Ireland. Neither, as Bruton also regularly pointed out, does the Belfast Agreement offer any consideration of the public finance and taxation implications of Irish unity.
Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has suggested that a border poll could
take place in 2028 on the 30th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement.9 Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has predicted that referendums will be held in both jurisdictions by 2030.10 Bruton predicted problems in reducing a complex issue to a simple Yes/No question and suggested that such a binary choice would exclude creativity and compromise over any future constitutional arrangements. He was fundamentally opposed to putting a date on when a referendum might be held. ‘Setting targets for a referendum, before any details have been worked out, is reckless. As the Brexit experience in 2016 has shown, it can also lead to the oppression of minority viewpoints, lasting division, and unforeseen consequences.’
Writing in 2022, Bruton referenced an opinion poll in which a large majority (67%) in the South said they would support a united Ireland. But alongside that figure, only 41% said they would be prepared to pay higher taxes to accommodate Irish unity, and even fewer again said they would be willing to change the national flag or the national anthem to accommodate the British identity of the unionist community. For those who quoted survey data in making the case for majorities supporting Irish unity, Bruton offered the sharp analysis of a seasoned politician who had had his own experience of opinion polls: ‘Of course, answers to hypothetical poll questions about remote future possibilities are not reliable.’
In an interesting analysis, he challenged those who champion the border poll pledge in the Belfast Agreement to instead return to the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993. Published by Albert Reynolds and John Major, the Declaration affirmed the right of the people on the island of Ireland to self-determination and enshrined the principle of contest in how that selfdetermination might be enacted. In many ways a prelude, or a stepping-stone document, towards the Belfast Agreement, the Declaration is more expansive on how Irish unity might be achieved than the border poll commitment in the 1998 peace deal. Section 7 of the Declaration states, ‘Both governments accept that Irish unity would be achieved only by those who favour this outcome persuading those who do not, peacefully and without coercion or violence, and that, if in the future a majority of the people of Northern Ireland are so persuaded, both governments will support and give legislative effect to their wish.’ The key wording is where the Declaration says that Irish unity should be achieved ‘by those who favour it, persuading those who do not, peacefully and without coercion or violence’. As such, a border poll carried by even a small margin would legally achieve the requirement in the Belfast
Agreement for Irish unity, but it is a moot point whether such a result would meet the political criteria in the Downing Street Declaration.
Bruton was taoiseach in February 1995 when his government, and John Major’s in London, jointly published the Framework Documents to progress the peace process. The idea of self-determination and the principle of consent were also at the core of this 1995 document. Paragraph 10 says that ‘the consent of the governed is an essential ingredient for stability in any political arrangement’. Writing in Studies in 2022, he argued that having a disgruntled minority in what was previously Northern Ireland would be a ‘huge problem that the newly created thirty-two county state would have to resolve’.
Bruton’s writings on a border poll are salient. The history of Northern Ireland through the last hundred years demonstrates the danger of attempting to impose, by a simple majority, a constitutional settlement on a minority who feel they have been overruled. Facing up to the reality that a significant minority in Northern Ireland might refuse allegiance to the outcome of a border poll is a real risk and would essentially repeat the errors of the 1920s. As Bruton observed: ‘This losing minority would be geographically concentrated in parts of the province where they might constitute a local majority. Experience suggest[s] that policing such areas could become difficult for the united Ireland government.’
Rather than fixating on the territorial sovereignty with a border poll, John Bruton proposed that there was a focus on allowing the aspirations in the Belfast Agreement to yield their full potential and more work towards reconciliation within Northern Ireland. Interestingly, he made the case that reconciliation within Northern Ireland – and achieving tolerance and mutual respect for all the people in the North – should be seen as an end in itself, and not as a preparation for either a united Ireland or a continuance of the Union. Bruton had established himself as a sane voice in the nascent discussion about a border poll. His involvement in the debate and any future campaign will be sorely missed. His thinking on a border poll – published in Studies –are a fitting contribution to public life that should not be overlooked.11
In the days after his passing in February 2024, one of the more heartwarming assessments of the former taoiseach was published in the letters page of the Irish Times. 12 Bob Barry, from Ashbourne in County Meath, wrote about being Bruton’s company in the early 1990s. Barry was among a group who, after finishing a céili, had adjourned in a local pub on a dark winter’s evening. Bruton was holding a constituency clinic upstairs in the building
John Bruton: An Appreciation
and arrived into the bar when his work was done. He did not know Bob Barry and his friends but still joined their company. ‘He was affable and friendly and on spying a squeezebox beside Ray, our man of music, he suggested a few tunes, and before long we were all in full voice’, Barry wrote. A song relevant to each county in Ireland, North and South, was duly played, and the music was interspersed with Bruton telling stories about his visits to the different parts of the island. As Bob Barry recalled, ‘It was remarkable to see this senior politician blend in so well and demonstrate his folk knowledge of our country. May he rest in peace.’
Kevin Rafter is Full Professor of Political Communication at Dublin City University. He has published extensively on Irish politics, including most recently Taoisigh and the Arts (2022). This article was written when he was a Fulbright Scholar at Boston College earlier in 2024.
Notes
1 John Bruton, email correspondence with Kevin Rafter, 11 January 2016.
2 Mark Brennock, ‘Coalition would win election according to poll’, Irish Times, 26 January 2001.
3 Jim Mitchell, ‘John Bruton like a weak currency which can no longer be propped up’, Irish Times, 29 January 2001.
4 Quotes from Proinsias De Rossa, Pat Rabbitte and John Bruton taken from Kevin Rafter, Democratic Left: The Life and Death of an Irish Political Party (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
5 Kevin Rafter, The Road to Power: How Fine Gael Made History (Dublin: New Island, 2011).
6 John Bruton, email correspondence with Kevin Rafter, 1 June 2011.
7 John Bruton, ‘The Redmond Family in Parliamentary Politics’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 107:426 (2018), 176–184.
8 John Bruton (2019), ‘The 1918 Election and its Relevance to Modern Irish Politics’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 108:429, 93–103.
9 ‘Border poll should be held in 2028, says Bertie Ahern’, Irish Times, 1 February 2021.
10 David Young, ‘Irish unity border poll will be held before 2030 Mary Lou McDonald predicts’, Independent, 8 February 2024.
11 John Bruton, ‘Careful Thought Needed on Border Polls’ Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 110:439 (2021), 309–314; John Bruton (2022), ‘Partition: Are There Two Nations on the Island of Ireland, and Could They Be Fused into One?’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 111:444, 418–426.
12 ‘Letters to the Editor’, Irish Times, 9 February 2024.
Four Poems
James Harpur
The Glance (After Ronsard, Sonnets for Helen, 1.9)
The other day I saw you in Merrion Square –
Just walking through – you glanced
Towards my window – I was standing there
And felt as if a magnifying glass
Had concentrated sapphire light and lanced me,
Burnt my soul, printing you in my heart:
It was a flash – a lightning jag that fractures
Clouds and turns the world from dark to dazzle –
Enough to shiver me, as if I had a fever.
My saving grace lay in your moon-white hand –I saw it move (though I was blinded, frazzled),
A flicker – a token of affection
Saving me from the dance of pain and joy
That you inflicted with your solar eye.
Fewer (After Ronsard, ‘Le Printemps n’a point tant de fleurs’)
Spring has fewer blossoms of blackthorn
Autumn fewer forests aching into gold
Summer fewer skies of high white clouds
Winter fewer days of rain, sleet and cold
The Corrib has fewer silver salmon
And Kerry rolls out fewer hills and lakes
And Gougane Barra fewer steps of pilgrims
And Roaring Water Bay fewer creeks
And Cape Clear fewer stars in the night
And Achill fewer bushes of fuschia
Than pangs of sadness I carry in my heart
For you, my dearest love, for you.
Tryst
The clocks are striking eight around the town. I stare along O’Connell bridge, Willing her silhouette to get here soon … I mutter my lines – like Jacques’ lover
‘Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrows’. A shiver Creeps in my scarf and down my jumper
Each minute till eight-thirty, forty-five, and nine.
But I have visualised our brief encounter So intensely – that when I cross the bridge
To go back to my rooms, resigned, I pass our doppelgängers as they watch The Liffey, and quiver at my fleeting ghost
To whom they owe their moment of existence.
Amour Fou (After Ronsard, ‘Je suis si ardent amoureux’)
I’m head over heels
In love completely crazy Spinning cartwheels
Giddy, cut up, hazy –All through the night all through
The day I rant and rave Tormented by The stings of love –Yet dare not weaponise
My mind to rout this foe –For every mortal strike
Just makes me glow!
James Harpur has published eight poetry collections, including The Examined Life (2021) and The White Silhouette (2018). His work has won many awards and has appeared in publications such as The Irish Times, The Spectator, The Guardian, and The Independent. He is a member of Aosdána and lives in West Cork.
The Rise of the Far-Right, Part II: Towards a New Politics
Peadar Kirby
When Fr Maurizio Patriciello, parish priest of Caivano, described Caivano as ‘a desolate, crime-ridden town on the outskirts of Naples’, controlled by the mafia, risking again the wrath of the crime bosses, he took the unusual step of writing to Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, of the far-right Brothers of Italy party. ‘Her quick response left me really stunned’, the priest told the Guardian. ‘I had met Matteo Renzi and Giuseppe Conte, but the difference with Meloni is that she really took the situation in hand.’ Renzi had been leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, while Conte was an independent who joined the Five Star Movement after leaving office, both had served as prime ministers. Unlike them, Meloni visited within days, mounted a massive police operation against drug dealers, unlocked €30 million in funding and appointed three safety commissioners to oversee the district’s rehabilitation. While still critical of the inadequate nature of social services, Fr Patriciello is hopeful, ‘Caivano has become a symbol. But it could also now be a guiding light for all marginalised societies in Italy’, he said. 1
Meloni, who cut her political teeth with the Italian Social Movement, inheritors of Mussolini’s fascist politics, founded the far-right Brothers of Italy party, bringing it from the margins to leading a government in a few short years. Since taking power, she has defied expectations, showing a pragmatic approach to enhancing Italy’s power within the EU and working with Ursula von der Leyen on restrictions to immigration, but holding strongly to conservative views on the family, gay rights, and abortion, and centralising power in her own hands. ‘Giorgia Meloni is western Europe’s most ruthless tactical operator – a new kind of nationalist populist who defies the easy categories’, wrote journalist Anne McElvoy.2
The example of Giorgia Meloni reminds us of the self-defeating futility of isolating the far-right in the hope that this is the way of ensuring they don’t get support. After decades, it must be clear that this strategy isn’t working and that a more serious attempt to understand what this growing phenomenon represents and why voters are flocking to support the far-right
is urgently needed. Meloni’s response to Fr Patriciello’s plea is one hint. This second part of the article on the rise of the far-right places it in the wider context of the decay of mainstream politics over recent decades and how to begin to address this. ‘A better kind of politics’, which Pope Francis called for in the quote with which the first part of this article concluded, requires focusing on the social grounding of all political power, namely civil society and the many ways in which an individualistic atomisation has eroded the collectivities, and indeed the inherent democratic culture, on which political society depends if it is to flourish.
Reconstituting collectivities
The late Irish political scientist, Peter Mair, identified the roots of the fundamental transformation of politics over recent decades. In the ‘golden age’ of European politics, voters had a sense of belonging to their parties, and the act of voting was seen not as a calculated choice based on economic self-interest but rather ‘as an expression of identity and commitment’. Parties were built on a foundation of social communities ‘in which large collectivities of citizens shared distinct social experiences, whether these were defined in terms of occupation, working and living conditions, [or] religious practices’. Crucially, however, such social collectivities were ‘in their turn cemented by the existence of vibrant and effective social institutions, including trades union, churches, social clubs and so on’. In this way, the success of parties lay in their ability to channel a cohesive social identity in a way that strengthened the bonds of belonging.
None of this happened automatically. It required the conscious intervention of parties ‘actively mobilising citizens into a set of collective political identities’. Their success rested on cementing ‘the loyalties of their voters by building strong organisational networks on the basis of shared social experiences’ and reinforcing these through distinct policy programmes, which would be implemented once their party won power. As a result, voters felt represented, government by the people and for the people. This model of representative politics, of aligning identity and interests, has been undermined for two main reasons. One is the fragmentation of the cohesive social networks on which such parties were based, as workplace practices grow more and more segmented, trade union, social and church networks contract and weaken, and an ethic of individual self-realisation becomes more predominant. However, the other side of the equation is the ‘inexorable
withdrawal of the parties from the realm of civil society towards the realm of government and the state’, thereby weakening their links to society and their representative functions.3
What Mair’s analysis alerts us to is the crucial connection between civil society and political society. The former is the place where new common projects are incubated, be they forms of social economy, sustainable ecocommunities, radical forms of problem-posing education, creative protest actions, and many, many more. But what is crucial to their transformative potential is the link to political society, and that is where the major weakness lies in today’s society, as so much of politics has fallen victim to the corrupting inroads of strong economic interests within a broadly neoliberal conception of the role of the state. Pope Francis addresses the need to find ways of allowing the creative forces of civil society break through into political society: What is needed is a model of social, political and economic participation ‘that can include popular movements and invigorate local, national and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny’, while also ensuring that ‘these experiences of solidarity which grow up from below, from the subsoil of the planet – can come together, be more coordinated, keep on meeting one another’.4
Sundering the bonds of community
Pope Francis is pointing to the urgent need to again incubate a politics rooted in strong collective projects of social transformation. However, the very atomised nature of much of civil society is today allowing a toxic version of this link between civil and political society to emerge. It is, indeed, at the root of the politics of the far-right. The burning in mid-December last year of the Ross Lake House Hotel in Rosscahill, near Oughterard which was to be used to house seventyt asylum seekers, illustrates well the processes at work. Protesters blockading the hotel before the fire included members of the far-right National Party, while comments were made by two local Fianna Fáil councillors that appeared to echo anti-immigration sentiments, comments which were widely condemned. This is another example of the ways in which an issue emerging within civil society, amplified by farright voices, is now making its way into mainstream political society, thus creating a dangerous culture that can be seen to legitimise anti-immigration
protest actions. Another example was the motion put forward by the Rural Independents’ group in Dáil Éireann in early December, urging an immediate cap ‘on the influx of asylum seekers’ and asking ‘why unvetted single males, many from safe countries, are being accommodated’. Again, the content and tone of the motion echoed sentiments being promoted by the far-right. In these ways, we can trace how anti-immigration tropes move from fringe groups in civil society and, through being echoed within political society, gradually become mainstreamed. It is the trajectory through which far-right parties in many European countries emerged into parliament, and it may now be happening in Ireland. Just how fast this can happen was shown in March’s general election in Portugal, in which the far-right Chega party increased its seat numbers from 12 to 50 in the country’s 230-seat parliament. However, for Pope Francis, what is required is a participative model that draws the excluded into the building of a common destiny. A report by the Hope and Courage Collective published last September gives practical guidance as to how – at this moment when far-right activists are seeking to exploit local grievances to divide and poison communities – to strengthen local community bonds, commitment, and solidarity. The report examines five recent cases of far-right activity in Ireland – Oughterard, Ballymun, Newbridge, Westport, and Fermoy. They distil the lessons learnt. Most important is to de-escalate rather than ignite, bringing down the temperature through not engaging in heated exchanges or mounting counter protests. Instead, the report recommends reaching out to local people, recognising their legitimate grievances and strengthening unity through organising events that celebrate diversity and the contribution of immigrants. ‘Recognising local expertise and putting it to good use worked very well for communities’, the report states, so that linking up these local networks and community groups, and drawing in organisations that may not be active on these issues (trades union are mentioned), ‘facilitate local integration and add strength and numbers in combating hate and disinformation’.5
When the tide goes out, looking at the pebbles left behind is important. There is always a fallout: communities are left managing after the far-right infiltrates. Relationships are strained, even fractured and a process of rebuilding is needed. The far-right is actively recruiting, and inoculating against their hate is a long process.6
Strengthening the bonds of community at a local level is therefore a
vital first step towards incubating a new politics. But the Hope and Courage Collective also recognises the vital link between civil society and political society, when they recognise that local politicians, with a few notable exceptions, ‘were often absent, unavailable, or unwilling to address what was happening publicly … Some community leaders felt their representatives were ill-equipped and should have responded collectively, i.e. a council motion or statement.’7 This weak response from political society is an illustration of Mair’s point about the inexorable withdrawal of parties from civil society and illustrates very well the urgent need for a new generation of political leadership to emerge from civil society struggles. A first step in this direction would be to see far more candidates for local government emerging from local community groups.
‘The ordinary virtues’
This, then, is politics from the ground up, from the local to the national and the global. For most people the world over, it is the experiences and relationships of the local that most fundamentally shape their values and outlook, as Canadian academic and writer Michael Ignatieff found, when he teamed up with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs to undertake a global study of ethics in action.8 Some of the findings were to be expected: the voices of the rich and propertied, the voice of money, have far greater weight that those of the poor. But they also found that what matters is not the abstract discourse of rights but rather the virtues that make sense of life’s harsh struggles and bind people to their communities: national pride, local tradition, religious vernacular. These are their defence against the globalising forces of money and power that can destroy communities, and it is very urgent that local communities mobilise and are supported to ensure that such virtues are not weaponised by the far-right.
Ignatieff’s inspired examination of ‘the ordinary virtues’ around the world offers a unique window on the challenge to politics today. For it identifies that even though we live in a globalised world in which moral values are converging, how these moral values are understood and how they are rooted can be very different. His conclusion is of immense importance: We were struck, everywhere we went, by the primacy of the local. Even in a globalised world, local sources of moral life – our parents and siblings, our home, our place of worship, the local school, if there is one – are bound to be the primary shaping forces
of our ordinary virtues.
Ignatieff concludes that ‘democratic sovereignty and the moral universalism of human rights are on a collision course everywhere’, as universalist claims such as the right to asylum or nationality are rejected in the name of a democratic defence of local values.9 What is being argued here, however, is that this collision course can be avoided if values of hospitality, diversity, universal concern are rooted in the local sources of virtue rather than in abstract formulations of universal values. To do this shifts the focus from defending liberalism to examining the ethical bonds that hold communities together at local level and ensuring these are not weaponised to divide and sow hatred but fostered to humanise and build solidarity. The crucial variable is institutions. These make all the difference. If they treat people with a basic decency, an evident equality, a tolerable efficiency, then they will tend to reinforce sociability and the bonds of community. However, ordinary virtues cannot flourish if honest, non-collusive, and responsive institutions are lacking, and liberal democracy is no guarantee against elite capture, corruption, and inequality.10 These findings raise major questions about how ‘liberal freedom’ supports and enhances or, alternatively, undermines and weakens, local virtue. However, such questions are far too often sidelined in the dismissive responses to the rise of the far-right and the failure to examine critically the local impacts of the dominant neoliberal development model. Meloni’s response to Fr Patriciello shows at least a sensitivity to such questions, which he didn’t find from those of her predecessors whom he had contacted.
It may not be surprising therefore that Meloni’s favourite philosopher, whom she describes as having the greatest influence on her party, is the English conservative Roger Scruton. Mathias Karlsson, the intellectual force behind the rise of the Swedish Democrats, says that ‘Scruton has been my inspiration’. 11 In Scruton’s massive intellectual output, spanning some fifty books and hundreds of articles, far-right leaders find deep echoes of their concerns about the loss of a love of home, what Scruton called oikophilia. His oeuvre deals centrally with the sidelining of virtue, including piety, in the cosmopolitan multiculturalism that he sees now dominates European culture and which he describes as oikophobia, a rejection of family and local culture. Many of the key concerns of the far-right come straight from Scruton’s thought. He decries liberalism as reducing all obligations to those ‘created by individual choices’12 and identifies transnational institutions, especially the
European Union, as imposing laws on nation states by unelected bureaucrats. Immigration, laws on gay rights or abortion, and action for social justice or equality of opportunity, he criticises for undermining the attachment to a local community with families at their heart. The centrality of local citizens, living according to local customs, leads him to argue that ‘the real purpose of democratic government is less to impose laws than to prevent them’. ‘Parliament is constantly inventing new forms of regulation, new crimes, and new ways of controlling us, with seemingly no awareness of the fact that people are best regulated when they regulate themselves.’13 At the heart of Scruton’s work is the conviction that ‘civic order begins with the affections of local life, and transnational political institutions can only erode the capacity to develop them’, as Smith writes, adding that ‘his response is essentially an aristocratic one … and seems to assume a cultured elite might help guide our politics back’.14
As important as the themes the far-right derives from Scruton’s thought are, the sweeping tone of angry dismissal that characterises so much of it. So, for example, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said, ‘My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment … a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don’t.’ And he quickly added that this applies not just to the left but to the environmental movement also.15 Of certain left-wing intellectuals, he writes, ‘This essentially antipolitical impulse to silence their opponents leads the enemies of true cultural education to assert power over reality through language, inventing words and phrases that cloak their true meaning with obscurity while bathing them with moral authority.’16 This finds echoes in the scornful discourse of many on the far-right and may help to understand the deep attachment that some of them have to leaders who adopt such a tone. As Irish Times journalist Keith Duggan wrote, at the time of the Iowa primary in early 2024, quoting a local website founder Pat Rynard about why people support Donal Trump, ‘It is not about policies or issues or even realities. A lot of Iowans are very frustrated with the world. And the way things are. And they see Trump as someone who is also angry and wants to tear down the system.’ Duggan adds that the essential problem for the Democrats is that throughout the interior of the United States people think of them as ‘a political faith wedded to the interests of the elite’; this has never been more pronounced, he adds, ‘and is not without foundation’.17 So we badly need a more inclusive, more sustainable, and more humane response to the one
Scruton’s work has helped inspire.
‘A healthy politics’
The late Fr Fergal O’Connor OP taught generations of politics students in UCD that the essence of politics is creating community. This points in a totally different direction to that of Roger Scruton, ‘a better kind of politics’18 as articulated by Pope Francis, which, ‘by its very nature calls for growth in openness and the ability to accept others as part of a continuing adventure that makes every periphery converge in a greater sense of mutual belonging’.19 This is the ‘exercise of political love’ that Pope Francis develops in Fratelli Tutti, ‘a healthy politics … capable of reforming and coordinating institutions, promoting best practices and overcoming undue pressure and bureaucratic inertia’.20 Pope Francis too is concerned with questions of virtue and home, but these lead him to point in a very different political direction to Scruton. On virtue, he warns that ‘if the acts of the various moral virtues are to be rightly directed, one needs to take into account the extent to which they foster openness and union with others’,21 while he affirms that ‘love enables us to create one great family, where all of us can feel at home’.22 Unlike Scruton, who sees institutions as undermining local community bonds, Pope Francis echoes the findings of Ignatieff’s survey recognising, ‘What we need in fact are states and civil institutions that are present and active, that look beyond the free and efficient working of certain economic, political, or ideological systems, and are primarily concerned with individuals and the common good’.23
It can be easy to dismiss the language of love when it comes to political struggle. But Pope Francis isn’t alone. The Hope and Courage Collective, quoted above, writes that, ‘Centring love, care and resilience in the community and more generally reinforcing our values is key in undermining the far-right agenda.’24 And, as a new book on Hannah Arendt highlights, ‘The most effective antidote to totalitarian thought, she came to believe, is to love the diverse reality of the world so much as to summon the courage to defend it.’25 We in Ireland have had inspiring examples of such a politics of love in the ways in which the referenda on marriage equality and repealing the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution were conducted, not by treating everything at the level of abstract principles and values but by creating space for conversations that allowed voters to grasp the lived realities of those personally affected by the issues involved. There are many lessons in this
kind of relational politics for combatting the inroads of the far-right. It is significant therefore that the topic of relational policy-making is emerging, and it deserves to be given far greater attention. Action Research for Transformation (ART) has been developed in the US by Irish researcher Hilary Bradbury, who sees the first step in all research as requiring the involvement of as many stakeholders as possible. She writes, ‘We can say that in formal education contexts, students are stakeholders; in healthcare, patients. What is interesting … is how often social science forgets to include these core stakeholders in producing reports on how to make their system better.’26 So, when asked to report on reducing pollution in Los Angeles port, the ART team began by gathering all stakeholders together – shippers, manufacturers, truckers, retailers, waste haulers, the port executive but also the local communities living near the port. The first step in the research project therefore is the relational step, getting the stakeholders to engage with one another, give time to overcome fears and develop an understanding of one another’s interests and experiences. This transformation begins in fostering relationships. What a difference such a policy-making process would make to current standoffs with, for example, farmers throughout Europe and beyond.
Mark Garavan applies ‘the dialogic solution’ to the Irish healthcare system, where managerial practices inspired by neoliberal emphases on individualism, on value for money, on time management, and on the commodification of care have become dominant. The challenge becomes to develop a system that fosters the relational potential of care: What is important to recognise is that the logic of neoliberal care culminates in an array of performance indicator metrics, overseen by a managerial cadre. The attainment of these pre-determined indicators purports to offer a simulacrum of ‘market discipline’ by judging the competitive success of care providers (indeed even individual care workers within organisations) with the achievement of these indicators. Can we imagine a care system where if we must have them, the metrics of care are set by care receivers themselves? 27
He outlines how this could be done through creating an ongoing dialogue between users of services and care professionals, so that the users have a key role in what outcomes they want. Garavan describes how this has been implemented in Finland and imagines that many service users may focus on a secure home or adequate heat rather than on a regime of medication or a
place on a training programme.
Garavan adds, ‘Dialogue, genuinely manifested, is profoundly democratic.’ 28 Here we have the seeds of an adequate response to the deep disquiet that motivates the followers of the far-right, based on constant experiences of disempowerment, exclusion, and abuse by institutions of state and market. All we have to remember are the experiences of the Post Office sub-postmistresses and postmasters or of the Windrush generation in the UK recently. To counter this, we need a genuine realisation of democracy throughout society rather than the semblance of democracy, which is all our system increasingly offers many citizens. And, though motivated by the challenges of climate change, the words of Pope Francis in his recent Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum, outlining ‘a new procedure for decision-making’ apply this approach in a global context: In this framework, there would necessarily be required spaces for conversation, consultation, arbitration, conflict resolution and supervision, and, in the end, a sort of increased ‘democratisation’ in the global context, so that the various situations can be expressed and included. It is no longer helpful for us to support institutions in order to preserve the rights of the more powerful without caring for those of all.29
New stories
Writing about the ‘revolutionary spring’ of 1848–49, historian Christopher Clark states that ‘the “Social Question” that preoccupied mid-nineteenthcentury Europeans was a constellation of real-world problems, but it was also a way of seeing’.30 There is much about the present moment in global politics, but especially in Europe, that reminds one of the pre-revolutionary fears before the upheavals of 1789 in France, of 1848 throughout Europe, and of 1917 in Russia. The barbarians are at the gates, and the elites quake in their shoes. But, as Clark reminds us, much depends on the stories we tell, on the ways we see the situation.
The far-right is gaining strength in large part because they are turbocharging very real sources of deep discontent with the current globalised, financialised, and technologised order, in which growing numbers feel they lack voice, find their grievances unheeded, face greater marginalisation, and are angered by wasteful displays of wealth by elites. The multiple symptoms of system breakdown, reinforced by the alarming changes to climate and
ecosystems, can accurately be described as a pre-revolutionary moment. But if the message of the far-right causes alarm among many social sectors, it must be recognised that the alternative story on offer is, for many, simply a defence of the dominant order couched in abstract and individualistic principles that lack the charge and impact that the far-right can muster. The revolutionary urge to tear down the system is, by and large, being captured by them. As the title of Argentine journalist and historian Pablo Stefanoni’s book asks, ‘Has rebellion turned right-wing?’31
For generations the alternative story of revolutionary transformation was carried by versions of Marxism, but the greatest sign that this period is well and truly over is that many social sectors that voted solidly left in previous eras are now supporting the far-right. It may be that the traditional left-wing emphasis on the state as being the carrier of a transformative project is no longer credible nor desirable for many, or that the left is uneasy with the vocabulary of virtue, home, and belonging. Journalist Jack Shenker encounters again and again in his visits to broken communities around today’s Britain, abandoned both by state and by market, how ‘place matters far more than the high priests of globalism have reckoned for in recent years’; yet ‘attempts to rescue the notion of “community” from political purgatory need not depend on the construction of imaginary white idylls, as many nationalists would have us believe’.32
The left needs an alternative vision of a radically new social order that takes seriously the need for a sense of secure belonging in local communities. Such a vision is on offer in the work of Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), a socialist thinker who focused his attention on the revolutionary potential of community, not as romantic nostalgia, as is often what the far-right offers, but as the site from which the foundations can be laid for a new global system that offers real possibilities of belonging and flourishing. Polanyi warns that ‘community for community’s sake is a poisonous beverage’, since it fails to acknowledge that the reality of community is impeded by our present market system, which ‘acts like an invisible boundary isolating all individuals in their day-today activities’. Achieving community, therefore, requires ‘a transformation of society through a change in the economic system’ by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production so that responsibility for the flourishing of society lies with the people as a whole rather than private owners.33 This echoes the emergence of a co-operative economy in Ireland and elsewhere in the early twentieth century. Kate Raworth’s proposals for
a doughnut economics34 or Mary Murphy’s for an ecosocial welfare future35 are examples that point in this direction.
The present moment can also be seen as a time of hope and immense opportunity, if we can elaborate a story that captures its full potential. The realities of climate change and biodiversity loss are highlighting the immensely destructive nature of our current socio-economic system and focusing attention back on the potential of localisation, developing its own resources to help community flourish, and fashioning radically transformed social institutions to allow us live in healthy balance with the ecosystems on which we all depend. The far-right are similarly focusing attention on the local but as a place to preserve traditions against the inroads of foreigners and of the state. Thus we have two stories pointing us in very different directions and with diametrically opposed potentials. As in all revolutionary moments, the future awaits to be constructed and no outcome is predetermined. It all depends on the stories we tell one another and where they lead us.
Peadar Kirby is Professor Emeritus of International Politics and Public Policy, University of Limerick. His most recent book is Karl Polanyi and the Contemporary Political Crisis: Transforming Market Society in the Era of Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Notes
1 Angela Giuffrida, ‘Meloni’s response left me stunned: the Italian priest taking on the mafia’, Guardian, 6 January 2024.
2 Anne McElvoy, ‘Ruthless, clever, pragmatic: why Giorgia Meloni is so dangerous to Italy – and Europe’, Guardian, 14 November 2023.
3 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 75–89.
4 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti (Vatican: The Holy See, 2020), 169.
5 Hope and Courage Collective, Greater Than Fear: A community based response to tackling hate and extremism (Dublin: Hope and Courage Collective, 2023), p. 43.
6 Hope and Courage Collective, Greater than Fear, p. 49.
7 Hope and Courage Collective, Greater than Fear, p. 46.
8 Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2017).
9 Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues, p. 207.
10 Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues, p. 220.
11 John Lloyd, ‘Can Roger Scruton save the European Right?’, UnHerd, 14 April 2023.
12 Quoted in Daniel Cullen, ‘The Personal and the Political in Roger Scruton’s Conservatism’, Perspectives in Political Science, 45:4 (2016), 261–71, at 264.
13 Roger Scruton, ‘Tyranny of the majority’, Spectator, 288:9067, 18 May 2002, 16–18.
14 Brian Smith, ‘Roger Scruton and the Conservation of Culture’, Society, 45 (2008), 557–61, pp. 559–560.
15 Raymond Zhong, ‘Roger Scruton: Want to Save the Planet? Turn Right’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 April 2012.
16 Brian Smith, ‘Roger Scruton and the Conservation of Culture’, Society, 45 (2008), 557 – 61, p. 560.
17 Keith Duggan, ‘Triumphant Trump’, Irish Times Weekend Review, 20 January 2024, p 1.
18 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 154.
19 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 95.
20 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 177, quoting Laudato Si’
21 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 62.
22 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 91.
23 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 108.
24 Hope and Courage Collective, Greater than Fear, p. 45.
25 Ian Hughes, ‘The never ending fight against empty ideologies’, Irish Times Ticket Review, 3 February 2024.
26 Hilary Bradbury, How to Do Action Research for Transformations at a Time of Eco-Social Crisis (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2022), p. 53.
27 Mark Garavan, Care (Cork: Cork University Press, 2024), p. 36.
28 Garavan, Care, p. 97.
29 Pope Francis, Laudate Deum (Vatican: The Holy See, 2023), 43.
30 Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848–1849 (London: Allen Lane, 2023), p. 15.
31 Pablo Stefanoni, ¿La rebeldía se volvió de derecha? (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2021).
32 Jack Shenker, Now We Have Your Attention: The New Politics of the People (London: The Bodley Head, 2019), p. 65.
33 Peadar Kirby, Karl Polanyi and the Contemporary Political Crisis: Transforming Market Society in the Era of Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 153–54.
34 Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: RH Business Books, 2017).
35 Mary P. Murphy, Creating an Ecosocial Welfare Future (Bristol: Policy Press, 2023).
Friends of the National Collections of Ireland: A Century of Gifts
John Turpin
Public collections of fine and decorative art, and other historic public collections, are a great cultural and educational resource in Ireland, North and South. Gifts of works of art to public institutions from private individuals have enabled these collections to grow since the foundation of the state. The Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (FNCI) has been central to this growth, especially at times when there was little funding from the state for the galleries and museums of the country. This was never more important than in 1924, when, on 14 February, at a meeting at the Royal Irish Academy convened by the eminent painter Sarah Purser, the FNCI was founded. This was a brave initiative in difficult economic and political circumstances, as Ireland emerged from the War of Independence and Civil War. It was an appeal to art lovers among the public to come to the support of the galleries. She had in mind comparable organisations abroad.
Sarah Purser (1848–1943) had established her reputation as a leading portrait painter in the late nineteenth century and had founded An Túr Gloine, the stained-glass studio, in 1903; she was a dynamic activist promoting the visual arts. She and other art lovers had been strong supporters of Sir Hugh Lane in his efforts to establish a gallery of modern art in Dublin. They were powerful advocates for the return of Lane’s thirty-nine continental paintings, which had gone to London in a disputed will after his untimely death in the war-time sinking of the Lusitania. She and her friends wanted to continue Lane’s work of adding to the collection at the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (now the Hugh Lane Gallery), whose foundation was the direct result of Hugh Lane’s initiatives. She also wanted to find a permanent home for the collection, then temporarily lodged in Clonmel House, Harcourt Street. Through Sarah Purser’s pressure this was finally opened in Charlemont House Parnell Square in 1933.
She knew that following the establishment of the Irish Free State, now separated from the UK, Irish public galleries and museums could not expect
John Turpin
any support from sources like the National Art Collections Fund of the UK (now the Art Fund) or the central government in London. The inaugural meeting in the Royal Irish Academy announced that the aims of the new society were ‘to secure works of art and objects of historic interest or importance for the national or public collections of Ireland by purchase, gift or bequest and to further their interest in other analogous or incidental ways’. The Friends was to be a patriotic society aiming to enrich the cultural patrimony of the country open to all. In pursuit of her aims, she was careful to reach out to lovers of art across a broad range of political, social, and religious loyalties. The first president was the Earl of Granard, and Sir John Leslie was on the council. It was Sarah Purser as a vice-president and secretary who was the driving force from 1924 to 1938. The Dublin Municipal Gallery was the main beneficiary of the Friends’ gifts in the early years, as it had no buying funds from the Corporation until 1970. The gallery was the FNCI’s official address from its foundation up to the 1960s. It was there that the society held its council meetings and other events including exhibitions.
The Friends grew slowly in the 1920s. However, from its foundation it had leading Irish cultural figures on its governing council, including the painters Dermod O’Brien, George Russell, and the art historian Walter Strickland. Other early members included W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, O. St John Gogarty, and Thomas Bodkin. By the 1930s and 1940s, it included among its members the painters May Guinness, Eva Hamilton, and Mainie Jellett; the art historian George Furlong; Director of the National Gallery Francoise Henry; C. P. Curran and Ada Leask. Later distinguished members were Thomas MacGreevy and Constantia Maxwell. It drew its support from collectors, artists, scholars, and art lovers in general.
From the start, it was focused mainly on acquiring modern continental art, following in Lane’s footsteps. During the 1920s and 1930s, it concentrated its support on the Dublin Municipal Gallery, which was the special interest of Sarah Purser. However, the National Gallery was also a major beneficiary and later the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork – an indication of the desire of the Friends to assist the regional galleries too. With the establishment of the Haverty Bequest in 1930, specifically designated to acquiring and presenting Irish art to galleries, the Friends, true to the spirit of Hugh Lane, reiterated its focus on continental modernism at the Hugh Lane Gallery but continued to be supportive of collecting and presenting Irish modern art to
the public galleries.
In addition to subscriptions from members, bequests of art or of cash were a vital source of support. Sarah Purser and Mainie Jellett bequeathed work; Con Curran made a major gift of drawings of the stuccodore Michael Stapleton, and in subsequent years many bequests of varying dimensions were received. Bequests of money helped the Friends to respond to requests from galleries for more costly purchases. Individuals wishing to bequeath funds intended for art could rely on the expertise of the Friends to make wise decisions on spending and on presenting works of art to a gallery.
While the acquisition and presentation of works of art and objects of historic importance has been the prime aim, visits by members to art collections and country houses in Ireland and abroad has also been an important feature. The first outing was in 1935, to an exhibition at Daniel Egan’s art gallery in Dublin. These visits, often to country houses with collections, proved popular with art lovers and brought in many new members. At a time when other museum friends organisations did not yet exist, these visits were a unique attraction of the FNCI. The society has always had a social dimension, providing occasions when members, who shared an interest in the fine and decorative arts, could meet. From the 1930s, the society began to hold annual receptions in the Hugh Lane Gallery – enjoyable sociable occasions for the members – and occasional garden parties. The Irish art world was a much smaller one up to the 1960s, and there were fewer occasions when like-minded people could meet. In recent years, the annual festive dinner or luncheon before Christmas has become a regular and enjoyable occasion.
The Friends also organised lectures on art by distinguished speakers such as Eric Newton, Kenneth Clark, John Rothenstein, and Thomas Bodkin, all based in England. Lectures were often held after the Annual General Meeting, but they were also held independently, often in the United Arts Club. Regarding the club, it is worth recalling that the following artist members of the club were also members of the Friends: Sarah Purser, Dermod O’Brien, Alicia Boyle, Grace Henry, Paul Henry, Estella Solomons, Sean Keating, Charles Lamb, Jack B. Yeats, Thomas Ryan, and Marie Louise Martin.
In default of any systematic curatorial policy in the existing public galleries of the state to promote modern continental art, the Friends organised a loan exhibition in 1935 of contemporary painters, including French modernists. They organised another exhibition of contemporary art
John Turpin
in 1944, at the gallery of the National College of Art (normally used by the RHA and the Living Art for their annual shows), and another such exhibition in the Hugh Lane in 1947. The FNCI was also keen to show the quality of the old masters in private collections, perhaps consciously recalling the seminal old master Winter exhibition by Hugh Lane at the RHA Academy House in 1902–03. James White and a committee of the Friends organised an exhibition of paintings from Irish collections in 1957 in the Hugh Lane. These exhibitions indicate the high level of activity in the 1940s and 1950s.
The most controversial event in the history of the Friends was the row over the painting Christ and the Soldier by Georges Rouault, the modernist French painter. The Friends offered this to the Dublin Municipal Gallery in 1942, but it was rejected by the Art Advisory Committee dominated by Sean Keating, who was a dogmatic opponent of modernism in painting. By contrast, fellow academician Dermod O’Brien, president of the Friends and chairman of the gallery’s Art Advisory Committee, advocated the acceptance of the Rouault, as did other members of the Friends – Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, George Furlong and Louis Le Brocquy. Instead, the Friends offered the work to Maynooth College, where the Catholic Church authorities gratefully received it, until it was eventually accepted by the Municipal Gallery. The incident put the Friends into the spotlight as a leading Irish cultural body promoting modern art during the war years. The conservative attitude of the Hugh Lane Gallery in the 1940s was a contradiction of the founding ideas of Hugh Lane, which Sarah Purser had sought to promote through the Friends. The gallery’s antagonism to modern art was manifest again in the 1950s, when the Friends gift of a Henry Moore sculpture was also rejected by the Art Advisory Committee. During the 1940s and 1950s, the conflict over modernism was a live one in cultural circles in the country. The Friends, although not all of its members, were on the side of the moderns.
After the Second World War, the government commissioned a report on the arts by Thomas Bodkin, published in 1949, which set the visual art scene for the future. It led to the establishment of the Irish Arts Council in 1951, which ushered in a new era in art patronage, with a funding scheme to assist local authorities in collecting art; this was an important stimulus for the development of the regional galleries in the decades following. The gifts of the Friends from the 1960s were to form part of this support for the growth of the regional galleries. Four of the members of the new Arts Council were members of the Friends, notably James White and R. R.
‘Bob’ Figgis, formerly secretary of the society. The Friends obtained further official endorsement when Sean T. O’Kelly, President of Ireland, agreed to become Patron of the Friends in 1954–55, and his successors, up to Michael D. Higgins, have also been patrons.
The 1950s and 1960s marked a high point in the history of the Friends, with James White as secretary from 1956 to 1969 and as president subsequently. He gave powerful leadership to the Friends in the 1950s and 1960s. With his background in commercial public relations, as well as art criticism for the press, he was able to promote the aims of the Friends among his many influential contacts. He was in a pivotal position in the Irish art world, as he was Director of the Hugh Lane Gallery from 1960 to 1964 and then Director of the National Gallery from 1964 to 1980. Through him the FNCI was thus closely linked to the two main public art collections in Ireland. He was a highly sociable man, comparable to Sarah Purser in his importance for the history of the Friends. The council was particularly strong and included Norah McGuinness, C. P. Curran, Terence de Vere White, Derek Hill, Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, Sir Basil Goulding, Lord Killanin, Denis Gwynn, Erskine Childers (then a Fianna Fail minister), Sir Alfred Beit, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, and Carmencita Hederman. Both Childers and Ó Dálaigh later became presidents of Ireland. The foundation of the Contemporary Irish Art Society in 1963, led by connoisseurs like Sir Basil Gouldin, with its focus on recently produced work by Irish artists, led to the FNCI deciding to concentrate its acquisition policy mainly on work by deceased artists.
From the 1960s, major economic developments took place throughout the country. New educational possibilities opened up with the establishment of degrees in history of art in UCD and TCD, and the growth of the art departments of the regional technical colleges. The local authorities in the regional centres began to develop their local art galleries and museums. The Friends became involved in helping them to build up their collections, mainly of Irish art, which was their main focus. The principal beneficiaries were the Crawford Art Gallery Cork, the Limerick City Art Gallery, the Model and Niland Gallery in Sligo, the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, the Waterford Art Gallery, the Waterford Treasures Museum, the Drogheda Gallery (The Highlanes), and the Tipperary gallery in Clonmel. Many other institutions received gifts of work. The Friends were also interested in preserving the built architectural heritage of Dublin and protested against its destruction in the face of the commercial building boom of the 1960s.
John Turpin
James White was the organiser of an exhibition in 1964 at the Hugh Lane Gallery, marking the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the Friends. The fiftieth anniversary, in 1974, was marked by an exhibition of selected work presented by the Friends to the Hugh Lane and other galleries. On the sixtieth anniversary, in 1984, a plaque was unveiled on Clonmel House, the Hugh Lane Gallery’s original home, which had been central to Sarah Purser in founding the FNCI. A line drawing of Clonmel House by the graphic designer Michael Craig was adopted as an emblem of the Friends and used on notepaper. The seventy-fifth anniversary, in 1999, was marked by a major exhibition in the RHA and Hugh Lane jointly of selected work presented by the Friends to Irish public collections, North and South; it was opened by Mary MacAleese, President of Ireland and Patron of the Friends. The elaborate illustrated catalogue, mainly compiled by Aidan O’Flanagan, listed all the work acquired and presented by the Friends since its foundation. It carried an article on the history of the Friends by Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe and articles by curators in some of the other galleries that had benefited by its gifts. President MacAleese received the Council of the Friends at Aras an Uachtarain in 2003, and President Michael D. Higgins did so again in 2014 to mark its ninetieth anniversary.
The centenary of the FNCI, in 2024, is being marked by a series of exhibitions and other displays in the national and regional museums, featuring gifts that they had received from the Friends. The exact date of the centenary was marked by the opening of a centenary exhibition at the Waterford Art Gallery on 14 February 2024, followed next day by one at the Limerick City Art Gallery, which included a large number of paintings from the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork – all gifts from the FNCI.
Since the late twentieth century, the Friends has held its council meetings no longer at the Hugh Lane Gallery but at the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) in Merrion Square, which it has assisted in acquiring architectural drawings, models, and other items. The IAA opened an exhibition of these gifts to mark the centenary on 7 April 2024. Files of correspondence and minutes of meetings, accumulated since the foundation of the Friends, were stored originally in the Hugh Lane Gallery but were moved to the IAA in 1996. They were moved finally in 2001 to the National Irish Visual Art Library (NIVAL), which is part of the library of the National College of Art and Design in Thomas Street. NIVAL holds a comprehensive archive of documents relating to Irish art of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.
The records of the FNCI are available to the public for research within NIVAL’s ‘Special Collections’.
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the FNCI continued to provide lectures for the members, usually in the United Arts Club, Fitzwilliam Street and also after the AGMs, which were held in a variety of locations. Invited speakers have included Anne Crookshank, John Hunt, Derek Hill, Ciaran MacGonigal, Lord Norwich, Brian Coyle, Patrick Murphy (of Rosc), Denise Ferran, S. B. Kennedy, Patricia Butler, Edward McParland, and Eamonn MacEneaney. From Dresden came Count Stolberg, and from England, Charles Sumarez-Smith, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Fintan Cullen, and Christopher Frayling. A series of lectures on collecting was organised by Arthur Duff in the Royal Irish Academy. Visits to Irish country houses continued. Trips abroad were arranged for interested members to Buxton in 2005, Wiltshire in 2027, where members were received by the Countess of Iveagh, one of the vice-presidents, and to Dresden in 2010. The Friends in 2008 arranged a meeting, courtesy of the late senator Edward Haughey, in his house in Fitzwilliam Square, with a visiting group from the Art Fund (UK), a body with aims similar to those of the FNCI.
To communicate better to members on acquisitions and gifts, visits and other activities, a newsletter was edited and produced by Aidan O’Flanagan from time to time from 1997. To develop communications further, he arranged the setting up of a website, which began to function in 2007 and in time replaced the newsletter. The provision of a new website is a centenary project.
Since 1924, the following have served as presidents of the Friends: The Earl of Granard, Dermod O’Brien RHA; the Earl of Rosse, James White; Lady Dunsany, Judge Brian Walsh, John Ross, Harold Clarke, Carmencita Hederman, Brian O’Connor, Hilary Pyle, John Gilmartin, Arthur Duff, Thomas Ryan RHA, and John Turpin. Up to the 1960s the presidents served for long periods, especially in the case of the Earls of Granard and Rosse, but since the 1960s the tenure of presidents has been shorter.
In surveying the institutions to which the Friends presented work in the course of a century, the position of the Hugh Lane Gallery was unique. It was the prime focus of Sarah Purser in the early decades and, in total, it received 157 items, by far the highest number of gifts received by any institution. The relationship to the Friends to the gallery was close up to the 1960s, as its meetings were held there, and James White linked both in the 1960s.
John Turpin
Modern art by continental and British artists was what the Friends sought to acquire and present to the gallery, such as work by Morisot, Bonnard, Legros, Utrillo, Vlaminck, Segonzac, Picasso, Lhote, Rouault, Lurcat, Meninski, Albers, and Guttuso. The Friends also presented sculpture by Epstein, Frinck, Moore, and painting by the British artists, A. John, D. Grant, J. Nash, Nevinson, Condor, J. Piper and Ivon Hitchins. Irish modern art of the twentieth century was also presented in quantity and built up the Hugh Lane as the place in which to see what modern Irish artists had achieved. In its first four decades, modern continental and British art was the main focus of FNCI gifts centred on the Hugh Lane, but thereafter its focus shifted to modern Irish art of the twentieth century. In purely pragmatic terms, the resources of the Friends could generally not stretch to modern continental art by established artists, whereas Irish art was affordable. Equally, the regional galleries were primarily interested in collecting modern Irish art. In 1925 the Friends made its first presentation to the National Gallery, which was the second most important beneficiary, receiving 112 works, mainly of paintings and drawings by Irish artists since the eighteenth century, thus helping to build up the gallery as the place in which to see a survey of earlier Irish art. Since its foundation, the Friends also aimed to help the other national institutions. From 1926, it began to assist the National Museum of Ireland to which it gave an extremely diverse range of items, such as miniatures, stained-glass cartoons, ivories, Korean and Japanese items, textiles, seals and tokens, bog oak ornament, china, a fan, and a uniform. From 1929, the National Library of Ireland received manuscripts, drawings and early books. The Friends always had an all-Ireland view of culture and, from 1928, it presented paintings of Irish and British modern art to the Ulster Museum.
It was only after the Second World War that the smaller regional galleries began to receive attention. The one that benefited most was the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, which was the third highest beneficiary, receiving 58 works since 1954. Other beneficiaries included Limerick City Art Gallery, which got 16 works since 1948; Wexford Arts Centre got 12 since 1958, Waterford Art Gallery got 10 since 1960, and Drogheda got 16 since 1948. The Model and Niland Gallery in Sligo, where Norah Niland built up a splendid local authority collection, benefited strongly by receiving 29 items since 1961. The Butler Gallery in Kilkenny got 16 items since 1973.
Towards the end of the twentieth century and into the following century,
new patterns of support by the Friends emerged. From 1986, the Irish Museum of Modern Art received 12 items. The Irish Architectural Archive was a major beneficiary since 1981, with 25 items, mainly architectural plans and views. Waterford Treasures museums, developed under Eamonn MacEneaney, received 13 portraits and items of furnishing since 2000, including a chandelier, a mirror, and a map cabinet. The National Self-Portrait Collection at the University of Limerick received 5 portraits since 2000. The Office of Public Works got items for its historic houses at Castletown and Doneraile Court; the Tipperary Museum in Clonmel got 7 items. Other institutions also benefited such as those in Boyle, Donegal, Down, Derry, Galway and Monaghan.
Throughout the century, apart from the presentations to the Hugh Lane Gallery, the items given were overwhelmingly by Irish artists and artisans, or documents of Irish interest. In this way the Friends became a major supporter of the conservation and diffusion of Irish heritage in the fine and decorative arts. The national and regional galleries and the historic houses owned by the state provide vital centres throughout the country for the enjoyment and understanding of Irish visual culture. They are centres of public education in the history of the visual arts throughout the country, which the FNCI continues to assist.
The functions of the FNCI are no longer unique in the country, as many Irish galleries and museums, like the National Gallery, have set up their own friends organisations for supporters. Many cultural organisations now provide meetings with lectures, publications, and visits to places of artistic and historic interest. This is an indication of how successfully an interest in visual culture has been diffused throughout the country, but it has also inevitably diminished the uniqueness of the FNCI. Yet the society remains unique in one important way. It seeks to help all the public galleries and museums of the country, North and South; it is not restricted to any specific gallery as other friends organisations are. It also has maintained an important all-island dimension. It welcomes as members anyone who has an interest in supporting the art galleries of the country. It welcomes applications from galleries looking for support for the acquisition of items that complement and strengthen their existing collections.
For further information, see the catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art: 75 Years of giving The Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, Dublin: FNCI
John Turpin
August 1994. See also Hilary Pyle, ‘An Artist’s Vision’, Irish Arts Review, 41:1 (Spring, 2024).
John Turpin is a former Professor of Art History at the National College of Art and Design and was Director of NCAD from 1989 to 1994. He is currently president of the FNCI.
Poem
Peter
Sirr
from Hear
Who wouldn’t want it, the voices leaping, the delighted notes hallelujahing such praised air, such vaunted stone such a gathering up and heaping as the deep waters are lodged in their safe caverns that whatever in us hears can’t sit, can’t stay, moves out walks down the cool flags and listens to the stars begin the shining earth spoken to our own breath utter there it all is as the octave changes and the chant quickens wanting only to be so considered, held by a cool gaze in its own place our help, our shield still, listening.
*
I have come into the deep waters and the current sweeps me out.
I call for help but no one answers no one reaches down.
A stranger in my own house I have more enemies than hairs on my head.
I spent all my time on you, swapping fashion for sackcloth and ashes
the toast of drunkards and ignoramuses. I looked for sympathy and got instead
a mouthful of gall. I looked for comfort but didn’t find it: may they sup
from a table of poison; darken their eyes and empty their apartments, let them feast
on oblivion, but raise me up and set me down in sweet remembrance, in the steadfast town.
* For how long now not a single sign nothing … Did you know when you were gone they burned the temple?
Burned books and instruments howled all night from the altar.
I miss you when you’re gone. How are we supposed to carry on?
All those big things you did where are they now?
Smashing heads on waters repelling monsters
We could do with feeding again on Leviathan.
Yours the day and yours the night remember?
And the light and the sun and the summer and the winter
Now the snow is falling on the empty bargain and the boundaries are all broken now love lies sleeping and the dove wakes up in armour. You who divided the sea and led us through how long how long will you be gone?
(Psalms)
Peter Sirr is a poet, writer and translator. His most recent book of poetry, The Swerve (2023), is the eleventh collection he has published with The Gallery Press. He is a member of Aosdána.
The Seven Pillars of Jesuit Wisdom: What Characterises
Jesuit Education?
Gerald O’Collins SJ
This article will deal with Jesuit education – that is to say, with education provided by Jesuits in high schools, colleges, universities, and elsewhere. It is Jesuit education that I have mostly experienced during a lifetime of study and teaching. I do not claim that Jesuit education has proved a truly unique tradition, that is, strictly speaking, the only one of its kind. But I do believe that at least seven distinct characteristics have converged to characterise Jesuit pedagogy and make it effective in the field of human and Catholic education.
Seven ideals of Jesuit education
I spent five years of secondary schooling at a Jesuit high school in Melbourne (Australia) and thirty-three years teaching theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Many further experiences of Jesuit education at the primary, secondary, and tertiary level have contributed to my view of its effectiveness. I have cherished lifetime links with the Jesuit-run Newman College within the University of Melbourne.
Participating in other institutions has provided privileged insights into educational ideals, methods, and goals. I studied at the University of Melbourne (where I received an MA 1st hons. in ancient Greek philosophy) and the University of Cambridge (where I received a PhD in divinity). I also studied in Germany at the University of Tübingen, and for five years taught students from Harvard University.
Lecturing around the world has also given me valuable experiences of Jesuit and non-Jesuit education in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America – in countries like Colombia, India, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States.
I would argue that Jesuit education is built on seven sources of wisdom: (1) Such education effectively encourages thinking for oneself or questioning for oneself, (2) tackling the history of ideas, (3) as found in classical as well as
modern literature, (4) learning through drama in its various forms (including participating in sport), (5) doing all this in an international environment, and (6) always growing in faith and (7) the desire to promote justice.
Seven components, you might call them seven pillars of human and Christian wisdom, make up that description of the educational ministry Jesuits have developed since their foundation in the sixteenth century: thinking for oneself, the history of ideas, classical and modern literature, dramatic activity, learning in an international setting, growth in Christian faith, and the promotion of justice for everyone.1
Jesuit alumni
When describing some movement or development in human history, I have persistently followed the policy of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He believed that the best examples and products of human activity and culture could illuminate most successfully what something was about. We can more readily understand the nature of great tragedy by taking up the acclaimed works of Aeschylus or Shakespeare, rather than by studying second-rate pieces of drama. Political constitutions that have proved themselves splendidly in practice throw much more light on happier and more moral arrangements for government than constitutions that administer banana republics. You could add many other examples to verify Aristotle’s principle. Healthy Buddhist practice, for example, rather than decadent forms of Buddhism, explain and interpret much more successfully the values and essence of Buddhism.
Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity, a 400-page book that I co-authored with Mario Farrugia, firmly endorsed the view of Aristotle. Look for the best examples, if you want to know what something is about.
An Aristotelian frame of mind likewise encourages us to focus on particular human lives that emerge as the shining results of some cultural or educational system. In Catholicism we argued that saints are the best Christian products and tell us most clearly what the essence of Catholicism is.
When I asked friends about famous Jesuit alumni, one instantly named two Europeans and one American: Voltaire, James Joyce, and Bill Clinton. Back in the eighteenth century, Voltaire helped to prepare the way for the French revolution and the coming of democratic forms of government. The Irish novelist James Joyce changed the course of world literature by developing a ‘flow of consciousness’ technique. With his landmark book Ulysses of 1922, Joyce left us what is arguably the greatest English novel of the twentieth
century. And Bill Clinton? He was also affected by the Jesuits; he studied at the Jesuit Georgetown University before becoming US president. I remain grateful to Clinton for having done his best to broker peace in Northern Ireland. All power to Voltaire, James Joyce, and Bill Clinton. But we might want to look elsewhere for shining examples of Jesuit alumni.
We would more readily identify the kind of alumnus that Jesuit education aspires to produce, if we studied the history of Matteo Ricci (d. 1610), Friedrich von Spee (d. 1635), and Baron Pierre de Coubertin (d. 1937).
Voltaire, Joyce, and Clinton certainly learned to think for themselves; they were internationals, and, in different ways, they practised drama. But there was and is more to Jesuit education than thinking for yourself, being international and intercultural, and being schooled by drama.
Think of Matteo Ricci. Jesuit humanism had blessed him with a radical respect for Chinese culture that shaped classically his choices and activity as a Catholic priest in Beijing, where he is buried. A fierce desire for truth and justice drove Friedrich von Spee to resist courageously the awful system that allowed Catholic and Protestant rulers to torture and execute so-called witches. The Spanish Inquisition, by the way, had little or nothing to do with the persecution of witches. Characteristically its members did not believe in the existence of witches and refused to hear supposed cases of witchcraft. The hunt for alleged witches flourished in Germany, the ‘epicentre’ of this horrendous phobia, where von Spee made his effective stand and helped eliminate the persecution of witches.
Pierre de Coubertin, a French nobleman, was predisposed by his Jesuit education at St Ignatius College, Paris, to revive the Olympic Games in 1896. The ideals of ‘citius, altius, fortius’ (faster, higher, stronger) were proposed in 1894 by de Coubertin and accepted by the committee who had joined him in preparing the 1896 Games in Athens. A Jesuit classical master at St Ignatius College in Paris, Jules Carron, had encouraged de Coubertin and other students to appropriate the best from classical antiquity and dream about uniting their conflicted world.
As an alumnus of Xavier College, Melbourne, I hear the language of citius, altius, fortius echoing the ideals of my high school, founded in 1872, which drew from liturgical sources its motto, sursum corda (lift up [your] hearts). It would be absurd to claim any direct link between the school motto sursum corda and the Olympic ideals, but both betray a similar mindset, part of a Jesuit approach to education: you can always run faster, leap higher, and
prove stronger.
Like the Olympic ideals of citius, altius, fortius, Sursum corda enjoys its own particular thrust and challenge. It differs from the mottos of similar church schools in Victoria (Australia). Melbourne Grammar School drew on Benedictine sources for ora et labora (pray and work). Scotch College, also in Melbourne, has a longer motto, Deo, patriae, litteris, which could be paraphrased as ‘to the glory of God, for the good of one’s country, and for the advancement of learning’. Geelong Grammar School took its motto from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Christus nobis factus sapientia (Christ has become for us wisdom). All these mottos are admirable, but they differ from the dynamic Olympic ideals of citius, altius, fortius and from the ideal of sursum corda, which some nineteenth-century Irish Jesuits in Australia wanted to encourage.
De Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, died before the Second World War began. Can we risk naming later, exemplary Jesuit alumni who embodied the key values of Jesuit education we have proposed?
We might think of such modern Jesuit alumni as Georges Lemaître (Belgian, d. 1966), Henri Nouwen (Dutch, d. 1996), Bing Crosby (American, d. 1977), Luis Buñuel (Spanish, d. 1983), and Alfred Hitchcock (English, d. 1980). A world-renowned astronomer, Lemaître predicted the expanding universe, and argued for what came to be known as the Big Bang theory for the origin of the cosmos. Through his writing and lecturing, Nouwen responded remarkably to the spiritual needs of his generation. A very popular singer and actor, Crosby charmed his world. The Jesuit values of drama and theatre were more richly reflected in the cinema work of Hitchcock and, even more, in that of Buñuel, who has proved arguably the most distinguished and influential film maker of all time.
Another tempting way of evaluating the products of Jesuit education concentrates on a specific Jesuit university or other institution. You could, for example, make a choice that tips everything in my favour, the Gregorian University in Rome, founded in 1551 and continuing today. What can we say about the Gregorian’s alumni? It has produced, for example, sixteen popes down to John Paul I, the so-called ‘smiling pope’, who died unexpectedly after thirty-three days as pope in 1978. He was beatified in September 2022. To be sure, a pope is not a typical product of Jesuit education. We have done better at encouraging saints.
The high school I attended in Melbourne enjoyed, among its older staff,
an Irish priest, Fr William Hackett. I treasured his wisdom, sometimes expressed in language he took over from classic sayings of long-dead writers. He assured the boys that ‘in the evening of life there is no greater joy than to have loved Jesus Christ’. Fr Hackett summed up his ideals as those of becoming ‘a scholar, a gentleman, and a saint’.
By the standard of encouraging saints, the Gregorian University has excelled. Its alumni include at least twenty-five officially canonised saints and over fifty who have been officially declared blessed. One of its modern saints is the martyred St Oscar Romero of San Salvador. He studied at the Gregorian from 1938 to 1943. In life and in death, he became the voice of people who were being tortured and killed en masse.2
The alumni of the Gregorian continue to show up repeatedly among the ranks of modern martyrs. I think of St Titus Brandsma, who was murdered in the concentration camp at Dachau, and Maria Luz Treviño, martyred in Mexico. I would also recall Patrick Gahazi and Innocent Rutagambwa (two young Jesuit priests), who died at their centre for reconciliation on the first day of the 1994 genocidal massacres in Rwanda, and others like Paolo Dall’Oglio. He did wonderful work of reconciliation at a centre for Christians and Muslims in Syria before being kidnapped and apparently killed by ISIS in 2013.
Sir James Gobbo
Having been the teacher of future martyrs was an extraordinary personal blessing. It convinced me of the heroism that Jesuit education could produce and sustain. I have reached the same conclusion about someone who first became a friend back in 1944 and died in November 2022, Sir James Gobbo. Jim Gobbo’s life puts flesh and blood on the ideals for Jesuit education. He more than deserves being singled out in the second half of this article.3
Jim’s parents migrated to Australia, and he was born in Melbourne on 22 March 1931. The Gobbo family returned to Italy, and from the age of three he spent his early childhood living in the Veneto region of northern Italy. A year before the Second World War began in 1939, his family returned to Australia and lived opposite the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. Part of their income came from using the first espresso coffee machine in Melbourne. Even before Jim became a boarder at Xavier College in 1944, he was under the influence of Jesuit education.
As a small boy during the Second World War, Jim attended illustrated
lectures on Dante that a Jesuit provided in Melbourne for younger and older Italians. Jim never neglected The Divine Comedy and its lessons about letting past things go and climbing beyond evil to the glory of God, who ‘moves the sun and the other stars’ (final words of the Comedy). I never asked Jim a question that sometimes popped into my mind, ‘Was Shirley, your wife of well over sixty years, your Beatrice, who led you from purgatory and sent you on to the vision of God in paradise?’ There is a case for drawing on Dante for understanding Jim’s life, and his long life together with Shirley.
At Xavier College, with its overwhelmingly Irish-Australian enrolment, Jim Gobbo joined the small group of boys who educated the rest of us by embodying an international character – above all, a few English, Italians, Jews, and one or two Americans or Canadians caught in Australia by the Second World War. On their side, that small minority experienced intensely international influences by absorbing different historical and cultural influences from Ireland and Australia.
Towards the end of his five years at Xavier, Jim noticed that the (Irishborn) Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr Daniel Mannix, awarded each year a substantial prize in Irish history. Research in that branch of history allowed Jim to write the required essay and win. Dr Mannix was astonished to find himself handing out a prize in Irish history to someone named Gobbo.
As an exemplary product of Jesuit education, Jim could think and decide for himself. By our final year at Xavier, Jim and I had, through studying the classical languages and literature, gained a considerable knowledge of ancient Roman history. But as such, the subject was not taught at the school.
‘Why don’t we sit for the leaving honours examination in Roman history?’, Jim asked me. He received first-class honours, and I received a high second.
We learned and practised Jesuit values by assiduously making up the teams for inhouse debates and debates with other schools. Learning to marshal arguments and use language effectively prepared the way for Jim to become eventually a leading barrister and a supreme court judge in the State of Victoria. He was to turn down an invitation to join the High Court of Australia and move to Canberra, the national capital. That work would have disrupted the education of his five children and put too much of a burden on his dear wife.
The senior boys at Xavier College contributed to the St Vincent de Paul Society through their own small branch. The members themselves visited the sick and dying at Caritas Christi hospice for the terminally ill, as well as playing with dozens of emotionally starved, little boys who lived in a
nearby orphanage. After the Second World War ended, the Xavier boys in the ‘Vinnies’ gathered (mainly canned) food for hungry and starving people, stitched up parcels, and sent them to Europe. Years later, above all as a knight of Malta, Jim gave dedicated service to the old and sick at Caritas Christi (situated in Kew, Victoria) and to the homeless, in particular through a program for distributing to them at night wonderfully warm coats.
I am not arguing that the child was simply father to the man and that what Jim received and practised as a schoolboy grew seamlessly into his adult practice. But small beginnings at a Jesuit school prepared the way for what was to come later in his life. His education and experience at Xavier College helped prompt him into co-founding the Immigration Reform Group in 1959. It advocated the abolition of the White Australia Policy. In 1975, he was appointed to the Federal Immigration and Population Council, through which he worked to overcome public prejudice against boat people arriving from Asia. From 1982, he chaired the Multicultural Task Force. In 1987, he set up the Australian Bicentennial Multicultural Foundation, which he continued to remain head. International learning and experiences at high school flowered into a strong commitment to multiculturalism throughout his adult life.
Jim Gobbo’s five years at Xavier College finished in glory, as he rowed in the winning crew of eight in what was called the head of the river. It was Xavier’s first win at the head of the river after the Second World War. Along with his scholastic achievements, the rowing success of 1948 led on to a stellar career at the University of Melbourne. In 1951, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and left to study law at the University of Oxford. He rowed in the Oxford crew that beat Cambridge in the legendary 100th boat race of 1954.
Home in Melbourne, he enjoyed an extraordinary career. It was crowned when Jim served as Governor of the State of Victoria (1997–2001). But through all this, one never heard from Jim any boasting or sense of personal entitlement. What came through constantly was gratitude for chances he had been given and thanks to all the people who had helped him over the years. Along with this, Jim had a host of amusing stories that presented life as a divine comedy to be received with thanks and not taken too seriously.
Like so many others, a wise Jesuit teacher was astonished at this humility. After Jim’s death, this teacher wrote to me, ‘Jim Gobbo was an inspirational figure in many ways, most impressively [in] the power of his humility.’
When I returned to live full time in Australia in 2009, I found one of
the daily papers in Melbourne had triggered two independent enquiries (one by a police fraud squad and the other by a charities commission) into the financial affairs of an Italian welfare agency that Jim had founded. Over and over again, the paper hinted at the misuse of funds. Then both investigations independently reported that there was simply no case to be answered. The newspaper that set off the two inquiries, unless I missed some minor report, declined to report the outcome.
‘Jim,’ I urged, ‘why don’t you bring a case for defamation?’ But Jim shrugged his shoulders and moved on to another topic. He was more interested in spending his energies for clothing the homeless, visiting the old and the sick, providing palliative care for those suffering from cancer, and comforting the dying. I wrote up the story of this unpleasant case of defamation in volume three of my autobiography, From Rome to Royal Park.
This article has proposed seven leading values endorsed by Jesuit education – values which, taken one by one, are not unique to that view of education but taken together are distinctive to that brand of education. Through their schools, colleges, universities, Jesuits aim at communicating and encouraging these seven values. To show how this might successfully happen, I have cited examples, down to Sir James Gobbo, former Governor of the State of Victoria. As well as anyone, he revealed much about the excellence of Jesuit education.
Many other recent alumni of Jesuit schools, colleges, and universities could have been chosen for close examination: for instance, Harry Crock (1929–2019), an internationally acclaimed spinal surgeon; Tim Fischer (1946–2019), Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Australian ambassador to the Vatican; Sir Peter Norris (1934–2022), Nuffield Professor of Surgery at the University of Oxford and President of the Royal College of Surgeons; and David Sassoli (1956–2022), President of the European Parliament and advocate for refugees.
This article might have been expanded to include the contribution that has come from women religious closely associated with the Society of Jesus. Many of their alumnae have also been conspicuous in living out the seven values proposed above.
Emeritus Professor Gerald O’Collins SJ taught theology at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1973 to 2006. He has published over eighty books. His most recent publications are Illuminating the New Testament (Mahwah,
NJ: Paulist Press, 2022); and Letters from the Pandemic (Cleveland, AU: Connor Court Publishing, 2022).
Notes
1 Five of these characteristics of education are found in the program for foundation studies developed at Trinity College, University of Melbourne, under the leadership of Denis White; see Denis White, The University Dream: Creating Trinity Foundation Studies (Melbourne: Trinity College, 2021). Few readers will know his name, but most will recognise the Australian prime minister whom White served for years as speech writer and office chief, Malcolm Fraser (prime minister, 1975–83). White has also published Fraser in Office (Brisbane, Australia: Connor Court Publishing, 2022).
2 On the impact of Romero’s martyrdom, see G. O’Collins, On the Left Bank of the Tiber (Brisbane, Australia: Connor Court Publishing, 2013), pp. 159–60.
3 Jim published an autobiography, Something to Declare (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2010).
Book Reviews
David Jameson, The Tilson Case: Church and State in the 1950s’ Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2023), 288 pages.
The dusty volumes of The Irish Reports are generally thought to be the preserve of lawyers. Yet they represent a treasure trove of social history and are a ready source of important, detailed information concerning otherwise forgotten important events. Perhaps insufficient use has been made to date by historians of law reports and court decisions generally. If so, Dr Jameson has made amends with this sparkling and informative account of the Tilson case, the now-forgotten cause célébre of the 1950s.
Actually, as it happens, Tilson was already a case which proved an exception to the rule, because it was one of the few supreme court decisions from this era that has been the subject of extensive commentary by social historians and other non-lawyers. The decision has generally been cited – often uncritically – as a prominent example of where the state readily accommodated itself to Catholic social thinking. So what exactly did the Supreme Court decide?
At its simplest the Tilson case concerned the enforceability of a prenuptial agreement that Ernest Tilson, a member of the Church of Ireland, had given on the occasion of his marriage to Mary Tilson, a Roman Catholic, in 1941, to the effect that the children of the marriage would be raised as Catholics. Unhappy differences having arisen between the couple, Ernest Tilson elected to take the three elder children (all boys then aged between six and eight years) and to deposit them with a Protestant institution, the Bird’s Nest in Dún Laoghaire. The mother then applied to the High Court for habeas corpus. The then President of the High Court (Mr Justice Gavan Duffy) duly granted the order and this decision was upheld by a majority of the Supreme Court, with the single dissent coming from its sole Protestant member, Mr Justice William Black.
The reason why ante-nuptial agreements of this kind were previously
considered to be unenforceable was by reason of the principle of paternal supremacy, i.e., that the father had the sole right to make decisions about the education and welfare of the children. This was the position at common law, but both the High Court and the Supreme Court found that this rule was unconstitutional, as being contrary to Article 42.1 of the Constitution. As Article 42.1 provides that ‘Parents shall be free to provide this education in their homes or in [schools]’, it was really all but impossible to see how a rule which give this power to fathers but not to mothers could have survived constitutional challenge. Article 42.1 speaks, after all, of ‘parents’ and not ‘fathers’.
It is true that the author quotes (at page 211) no less a figure than Professor J. M. Kelly in support of the argument that because the Constitution did not expressly provide for such a radical change in the law, it should be deemed not have done so. For my part, however, I think that the Supreme Court was absolutely correct in its conclusion on this point, as the common law was squarely at variance with what the words of the Constitution actually said. In any event, it is quite clear that a discriminatory common law rule of this kind could not have survived a constitutional challenge on equality grounds, as any number of Supreme Court decisions from the 1980s onwards duly attest. If this is what the Supreme Court actually decided, why, then, has the decision been severely criticised and seized upon by later historians, such as J. H. Whyte, who regarded it as a ‘prime example for those who wish to argue that Ireland is a clerically dominated state’?1 As appears from this book, several answers can be given to this question.
First, the abandonment of the common law rule had the de facto effect of endorsing the then policy of the Catholic Church, which would not then sanction ‘mixed marriages’ of this kind unless the non-Catholic partner gave an undertaking of this kind. This raised the prospect of the further decline in the Protestant populations of this state, so that the consequences for Church–state relations were in practice very significant. Second, in the High Court the then President of that Court, Mr. Justice Gavan Duffy, invoked the then extant ‘special position’ clause in Article 44.1.20 as justification for the invalidation of the rule. (This provision was repealed in 1972.) Even though this clause had simply recognised the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church in its capacity as ‘guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’, Gavan Duffy’s comments gave rise to (legitimate) concerns lest other laws and rules might have to be brought into line with Catholic
teaching. The Supreme Court judgment did nothing to dispel these fears, as the judgment of the Court simply stated that the Court did not have to decide the point. This raised the question as to how neutral and impartial the judicial arm of the state might prove to be in such matters. These suspicions were not dispelled by the fact that the sole Protestant member of the Supreme Court at the time – Mr Justice Black – dissented. Finally, the legal issues at stake in the case may not have been fully grasped – either then or now – by non-lawyers unfamiliar with constitutional law doctrine, and it was easy to present a rather one-sided version of this decision.
In this authoritative account, Dr Jameson has provided us with an indepth account and analysis of both the general background to the Tilson case, the court decisions, and their general aftermath. He has, for example, found fascinating correspondence from the parties and their extra-judicial supporters and his account also draws on the extensive newspaper coverage from that period. It is probably fair to say that no single decision of the Supreme Court has ever been the subject of such an in-depth analysis. The book is accordingly a major contribution to social and legal history of Ireland of this period.
One intriguing question raised by Dr Jameson is the extent to which Gavan Duffy in particular may have been influenced by his zealous advocacy of Catholic teaching. He also raises the question of whether Archbishop McQuaid may have intervened behind the scenes, drawing attention (at pp. 212–213) to a letter from McQuaid to an Italian Cardinal in which the former hints he may have had some role in effectively changing the British law ‘in favour of the prescriptions of the Church’, and he recounts that he had consulted ‘for long with two members of the judiciary whom he could trust’.
Gavan Duffy was a highly principled person. He had, after all, resigned as Minister for External Affairs in July 1922 on the ground that the Dáil courts had been abolished just as they were about to hear a Civil War habeas corpus case. He also protested in the Dáil at the summary execution by the government of four prominent Anti-Treaty figures in December 1922 in response to the murder of Sean Hales TD. He was also a conspicuously innovative judge who was one of the first members of the judiciary to recognise the significance of the (then new) Constitution of 1937.
While Gavan Duffy’s religious zeal almost certainly swayed some of his judicial pronouncements in the Tilson case, more evidence would, I think, be required before the suggestion that McQuaid may somehow have successfully
intervened in the case could be accepted. Gavan Duffy’s principles extended to a keen sense of judicial independence, and I am personally doubtful if he would have spoken to any outsider about a then pending case. Perhaps we shall never know.
In his recent judgment in the O’Meara social welfare case (O’Meara v. Minister for Social Welfare [2024] IESC 1) where the interpretation of Article 41 and Article 42 of the Constitution was much discussed, Chief Justice O’Donnell observed:
The past, particularly in relation to these matters, is indeed a different country, but that is no reason not to learn its language, understand its culture, acknowledge in how many ways it is different from today, and recognise how it influenced the provisions of the Constitution which are still applicable today.
Perhaps the finest tribute one can pay to David Jameson’s definitive and highly readable account is that he has thereby enabled us to enter the very different world of the early 1950s. He has helped us to learn that different language and to understand its culture.
Mr Justice Gerard Hogan was appointed to the Irish Supreme Court in October 2021. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Notes
1 J. H. Whyte Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–1979 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980), p. 171.
Aidan Mathews, Pure Filth (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2023), 152 pages.
Aidan Mathews’ first book of poems was published by Dolmen in 1977, and I can remember being dazzled by the stylish fluency and wit of the poems. Then of course Dolmen went out of business, Minding Ruth appeared from Gallery in 1983, followed by According to the Small Hours fifteen years later from Cape, and then a twenty-year gap before Strictly No Poetry from Lilliput in 2018, and now we have, for the first time from the same publisher, the welcome arrival of Pure Filth. It’s as if Mathews had read that wellknown manual How Not to Follow the Conventional Path to Success for an Irish Poet.
There has always been the other work, of course: the brilliant stories, the most recent collection of which, Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone, Lilliput published in 2015; the notable novels, the plays for stage and radio, the quiet work as RTÉ producer of plays and religious programmes. Nor is that all that other work somehow ancillary – it’s all part of the creative continuum. Asked in what form he felt most at ease working and how they complemented each other, Mathews answered, ‘The sex of the child is always a mystery until the moment of writing. After conception, it never doubts its gender.’
But through it all, and despite the seeming gaps and unpredictable trajectory, Mathews has remained a dedicated and quietly devastating poet, whose work has been marked by unusual adventurousness and risk taking, and the books have always been substantial, many faceted, with densely imagined, elaborately wrought poems.
When I reviewed, According to the Small Hours, I said there was a preoccupation with personal history, with remembrance and elegy, a keen sense of the physical presence of the body, especially of the body in decay or disease, as there was also with the accoutrements of domestic life. Those elements are all very much there in Pure Filth, as indeed they were in Strictly No Poetry. I mentioned too what I thought of as the religious cast of Aidan’s sensibility, and I meant that with a small ‘r’, not just that he’s interested in both the sacred and the profane but that his imagination is processional, sacramental almost. Whatever the subject the poem is a liturgical occasion.
That’s true, I think, of the opening poems of this collection: the book opens with a great celebratory flourish, with poems that are a hymn to new
life. There are also poems of memory and elegy: the beloved housekeeper in her ‘enormous dormer room/Forty carpet-rods from the letterbox’ (p. 22), the Petrarchan ‘Laurel for a Lady’ with its remarkable opening:
She who was Ann has now become another
Whose real absence is more present still. (p. 24)
Or ‘Keening Cillian’ with its moving rewriting of the famous Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? as ‘What shall we do without the wry woodsman?’
These are indeed poems of great presence and keenly felt absence. I’m thinking for instance of a poem like ‘Uncle Jack’, which restores to memory a lost toddler:
All I know is that your wooden train carriage
Of a whole hundred Easters since this foolish April
Rose that same Christmas as my father’s fire-engine
With new rungs painted like a barber’s pole
On a ladder all blood and bandages. (p. 43)
Wry poems of aging and survival, equally wry reflections on the imperfections of the flesh, on the experience of pandemic, with a question I confess I often asked myself:
How does a man self-isolate
Who has done so since his earliest childhood? (p. 64)
Inevitably and necessarily Covid makes its presence felt in a world where, ‘Even the sterile are untouchable, even the dean unclean’, but that same poem, ‘Bulleted’, is a testament to the all-encompassing hospitality of the Mathews imagination. Nothing is denied, nothing excluded: the Syrian Rentokil operative, mass killings, the news bulletins’ ceasefires announced and broken, Yahweh and Yahoo, Padre Pio and prosecco, Monty Python and The Holy Grail, even the president’s prematurely dead red setter. It can be a dizzying as well as an exhilarating ride.
These are poems of the personal life interrogated with irony and relish. They’re intimate, confiding, uncomfortable because often unflinching, poems that talk to us with a lapel-grabbing, buttonholing insistence, and poems that, as the epigraph from Diderot has it, speak to the living as if they were dead and to the dead as if they were living. There’s a gleeful relishing of awkward intimacies – ‘The last time I stripped in front of a woman,/ She was a skin specialist. Mine crawled on all fours. (‘In Praise of Older Men’, p. 53); ‘They are close shaving my pubis. You will be embalmed’ (‘Doors Opening, Doors
Closing’, p. 55) – but it’s in the service of unflinching honesty in the face of the inevitable comedy of mortality. If the poems are full of death, they’re also full of time, time lost, recovered or irrecoverable, like the procession of ancestors and events at Donnybrook bridge, the snows of yesteryear becoming the lost Polaroids of one era, the vanished hats of another, the brass tackle and bridle leather of the one before that, to quote some lines from that poem, ‘Water under the Bridge’:
When the river flooded my grandmother’s kitchen
It smelled like the Venice of her golden wedding
As much as any morgue; and when her hunchbacked husband
Lifted his bride of half a hundred years
Over the children’s pool of the hotel reception
He was saying we build on sand not stone. (p. 148)
One of poetry’s ambitions, maybe, is to convert sand into stone, and in moments like these the effort succeeds. What’s welcome throughout the book, and it has always been true of Aidan Mathews’ work, is the wit and humanity, the ability to be in multiple imaginative loci and psychic states simultaneously where purity and filth are interchangeable, both signs of a kind of rapt blessedness:
I call to the world of my own five sensei: Dearest, I shall be with you tonight. Do not wash. (p. 150)
Peter Sirr is a poet, writer and translator. His most recent book of poetry, The Swerve (2023), is the eleventh collection he has published with The Gallery Press. He is a member of Aosdána.
William Kingston, Interrogating Irish Policies (New Edition, Oxford: Peter Lang Group AG, 2021), 349 pages.
More than a decade before this book was published, Dublin University Press published a collection of William Kingston’s writings on Irish topics. The earlier publication was intended only for a local readership. This new edition contains the chapters in the earlier edition and articles published since then, this time being specifically international in focus. It is not clear though which are the new chapters and which chapters have been published before, nor is it made clear where these articles were previously published.
Much of the time intervening between the two editions was devoted to the research and writing of Kingston’s book, How Capitalism Destroyed Itself, a book inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s famous tome, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The objective of the book was to explain how capitalism destroyed itself and how this happened, summed up the author argues in its sub-title, Technology Displaced by Financial Innovation.
The author argues in the preface to this book that Covid 19 was the worldwide proof of the accuracy of Schumpeter’s predictions. Creative energy and brainpower that could have contributed to preventing Covid had been increasingly attracted away, from technologies, including pharmaceutical, into finance and software. He argues in fact that the Irish experience reflects the whole process of capitalist growth and decline, although such growth and decline is never documented. The main reason for this (unproven) decline, as argued throughout this book, was the progressive replacement of individual initiatives with actions by the state. In fact, the overriding argument of the book is that if a country does not get property matters right, intervention will not work. To the extent that we can get them right, state intervention is unnecessary.
Another related point made in the preface is that violent revolution results in states that are inherently biased towards socialism, because such revolutions which bring them into being are reacting to the established property rights system. Again, it is not documented anywhere convincingly in the book that this situation applied in Ireland. Nonetheless, the book takes this view as fact but argues that it was strongly tempered, in the early decades of an independent Ireland, by the Catholic Church, for which private property was an ‘article of dogma’.
He argues, however, that in the case of Ireland direct intervention in the economy greatly increased over time, with Covid-19 giving a major opportunity to those who wanted to boost the growth of the state. Again, what is absent is any convincing evidence/data to illustrate the accuracy or otherwise of this assertion, even though there are several articles/books documenting the Irish experience over time that could have been drawn on.
The plan of the book is as follows. There are five main sections and twentyfour chapters. Section 1 is devoted to ‘Democracy and Governance’, Section 2 to ‘Business and the Economy’, with chapter titles here such as, ‘Why Ireland Failed to Keep Up’, ‘Nice Rents if You Can Get Them’, and ‘Need the Irish Experiment Fail’. As the movement from capitalism to socialism inevitably, he argues, increases the importance of a country’s bureaucracy, Section 3 deals with the public service/bureaucracy. On the principle that a writer should not complain, without making proposals for improvement, this is the topic of Section 4. The final section, a stand-alone one, is on history, and includes articles on aspects of Ireland that are little known it is argued.
The author acknowledges that in the case of many of the earlier articles the evidence has been overtaken by events but argues that the trajectory of Irish policy has remained consistent enough to render the earlier evaluations relevant. I am not convinced of this. It is also acknowledged that there is a good deal of repetition in the book, but the author argues that this is acceptable on the grounds that what is repeated is generally the most important point that was sought to be made.
Much of the book is a running commentary on public policy events over the years, and the level of repetition in fact is very extensive and hence off putting. Most of the articles are in effect opinion pieces, with confident argument but little compelling evidence or proof, or the informed rebuttal of counter arguments. It is interesting though to see a discussion, from the author’s perspective, on events that happened many decades ago. In several chapters the recurring argument relates to the absence of scrutiny of the public sector.
Chapter 1 deals with Brexit as a means of ‘understanding democracy’. Given this, the chapter seems out of place, although it does provide a broad sweep of the issues seen over time with the operation of democracy. Most of the chapter though has little to do with Brexit but covers an eclectic group of unrelated topics, granted interesting to read.
Chapter 2 is a personal view in effect of the electoral system in Ireland,
with proportional representation placed as one of its main faults, with no discussion of its advantages or the drawbacks of other electoral systems. Chapter 3 builds on this, with a lot of repetition of the material in Chapter 2. As with all the chapters, there is no introduction or real structure to Chapter 3. There are also many statements made here which are hard to leave unchallenged. For example, it is stated that no economic activity has been so much subjected to market forces as agriculture. The opposite in fact is the reality, with most calls in the last decades at EU level complaining about too much state intervention in the sector. The rest of the chapter rails against ‘inadequate ministers’ and argues that ‘government involvement in the economy has been intensified to the point that the end of democracy is now clearly in sight’.
This type of argument is continued in Chapter 4, with a very selective personal use of evidence. Chapter 5 is very short. One of his main proposals in this chapter is to establish in each government department an elite group whose duty would be solely dealing with legal issues with a view to using the law instead of state intervention, when possible, to address an issue. Another proposal is that of a Citizen’s Income to cut down on the bureaucracy associated with the multiplicity of social welfare payments, but no detail is provided.
Section 2 contains chapters on business and the economy, with a scattergun of topics covered in each chapter. Much of the focus is on the author’s main theme, the over-bloated state bureaucracy, and the need to focus much more on property rights. Section 3, on bureaucracy, with six short chapters, covers a wide and often disconnected array of issues, and have titles such as, ‘What Can We Do about the Civil Service’, ‘Systemic Failure of Public Administration’, ‘Why Was There no Whistleblower in the HSE’, ‘Why Did Ireland Spend $1 Million Preventing Research into Lusitania’, and ‘Innovation: New Property Rights Are Better than State Involvement’.
Section 4 on ‘Reform Proposals’ has chapter titles such as, ‘Industrial Policy: Responding to Covid-19’, ‘A Patent System to Suit Ireland’, and ‘An Alternative Agenda for Public Sector Reform’.
Section 5, entitled ‘History’, contains some interesting material, although again the chapters tend to have multiple short sections and are not necessarily related. The titles of the three chapters are, ‘The Evolution of Limited Liability from Its Dublin Origin’, ‘Gladstone’s Irish Lesson for the EU’, and ‘Chance, Genes and Antibiotics: Irish Involvement in Two Scientific Revolutions’. The
Book Reviews: Summer 2024
last is of particular interest, as it covers the well-known scientist, associated with Ireland and Trinity College, the Nobel Prize Winner, Erwin Schrödinger. This book is the output of an academic colleague over forty years or more whose interests are far reaching and who enjoys academic discourse and argument to an extraordinary extent. The fact that the book, and indeed chapters in it, lack structure, and often cover a range of unrelated topics, and are repetitive, does not disguise the keen academic interest and in particular the influence of Schumpeter on his thinking over many decades. Many of the arguments provided an interesting counterpoint to the accepted wisdoms of the day. The book is clearly a critique of the state sector, and in particular the civil service and the electoral system. It could have benefitted however from major editing and restructuring, as at present it is essentially a loose amalgam of opinion pieces written over several decades, many of which no doubt challenged and greatly interested his students to engage in debate at the time. A little more however is expected from an academic treatise such as a book.
John O’Hagan is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Trinity College Dublin. Among his publications is The Economy of Ireland: Policy-Making in a Global Context, the standard text on the subject for nearly fifty years. It is now in its 14th edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Camilla Russell, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 271 pages.
A fascinating group portrait of a numerically significant Jesuit cohort of the first hundred years of the Society of Jesus (1540–1640) emerges in this book. The group comprises members of the Italian provinces – these five provinces comprised the Italian assistancy (that is, under the direction of one of Father General’s assistants); the assistancies of Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and Italy made up the early modern global administration of the Society of Jesus.
Regarding some individual Jesuits – Matteo Ricci, scientist and China expert, Christopher Clavius the mathematician, and Robert Bellarmine theologian, to name but a few – their contributions have received scholarly attention. However the corporate self-understanding of the group, shared by the individual members, and underpinning the Society’s way of doing things, has until recently featured less in historical studies on the Society. This lacuna has been creatively addressed in the present study.
The aim is to give an overview of a series of key stages in the life of an individual man: being accepted into the Society, making a request to be sent on the Society’s overseas missions, chiefly to Asia; the life of the individual men in Asia, death as a Jesuit, together with departure from the Society. These life transitions provide the book’s chapters.
The Society’s Italian assistancy in the first hundred years affords three advantages to the historian, fully explored by the author: there were many Jesuits, many were prominently and fruitfully involved in the Asian mission, and the surviving internal documentation series are considerable.
The approach is clear-cut: to present the personal experience of the individual Jesuit, for a number of life stages common to many, drawing on what the men wrote of themselves, or what other confreres wrote about them. A further concern, sustained throughout the book, is to frame this individual lens with reference to the Society’s spiritual worldview, as articulated in two foundational documents, namely, the Spiritual Exercises, and the Constitutions. Thus the stages of Jesuit life, and the internal correspondence thus generated, are linked to key experiences and insights present in these spiritual texts.
The first chapter features entry into the Society. Procedures are explained by reference to the Jesuit Constitutions – if the Society’s aim is God’s service, then the most appropriate human means are warranted; hence clear and demanding entrance criteria were proposed. The Constitutions propose a two-way guide to assist candidate and examiner. The author’s approach –here as throughout the book – is explicitly archival. In this regard the Roman novitiate (Sant’Andrea al Quirinale) is especially well-endowed. There is the series Ingressi (from 1556) containing basic details for several thousand down to 1676 – a cosmopolitan group, including a quarter who were not Italians. Further, there is the series Vocationes, interviews based on about twentytwo brief questions and answers – there are 180 of these covering entrants in the years 1636–44. About 40% contained a personal statement from the entrant. A rounded picture of entrance to the Society emerges, integrating the Society’s criteria and procedures, and the dynamics between individual and collective worlds. The approach includes attention both to spiritual vision and statistics. In line with the emphasis within the Spiritual Exercises on the unique individual relationship with God, the candidate’s documentation aimed to discover the potential entrant’s unique path.
Many young Jesuits availed of the possibility of writing a personal letter to Father General, expressing their desire to be sent on the Society’s overseas missions. About 60% of the extant letters (16,000 before 1773) are from Italian Jesuits, a corpus which underpins the second chapter. In Asia, after the Portuguese, the Italians were the largest group among Jesuits there. Selecting and sending men to Asia were complex and contested. The author contextualises this desire of individual Jesuits to serve outside Europe, reinforcing the missionary identity of the Society. Only a fraction of those who petitioned were accepted. The author deftly presents how the individual with his dreams and desires interfaced with the Society’s missionary calling, and the concrete needs of specific missions. Drawing also on Father General’s replies, together with assessments by provincials and others with closer acquaintance of the men, the author locates Jesuit obedience within a network of correspondence, in several directions. Replies of the Father General show his fatherly concern for younger Jesuits. Obedience emerges not as blind, rather as relational, dialogic, and involving input from several participants. The focus on the individual and his vocation emerges as a central, if not exclusive value, reiterating once again a core insight of the Spiritual Exercises. The prospect of martyrdom attracted many. Of the few
who were selected, all had asked. In the period 1590–1615, more than 600 had made a request for the mission, but only 92 Italians were sent to the East. Once again the author sees that it was attractive for individuals to participate in realising their potential.
The author explains why Italians were favoured for the Asia mission – the Indies – where these represented about one-quarter of all Jesuits down to the universal suppression (1773). The author gives us a meticulous reconstruction of the procedure – involving candidates, Father General, provincials, and the mission procurators, who recruited men while visiting Europe. A synthesis of the selection criteria emerges, interspersed, as always, with lively personal detail: health, maturity, and experience; a family situation which was stable financially, so that the men would not be called on to help; relevant manual kills (among Jesuit brothers). The author concludes that the overseas missions were ‘the most defining, sought after and high profile Jesuit apostolate’ (p. 84).
Continuing the exploration of the Jesuit lifestyle, the author turns to individual life in the Indies (Asia). Starting with the pioneers Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, Italian Jesuits in Asia from c. 1580 – c.1640 comprised a generation who made an enormous and most creative contribution to missionary work and to the cultural encounter between East and West. Numbers were relatively small: from 1582 to 1615, fifteen Italians went to China. None returned to Europe. Collectively they produced many books emerging from a Christian engagement with Chinese culture. In managing this enterprise, personal relationships emerge as crucial. Three significant players had been novices together: Claudio Acquavia (Father General, 1581–1615); Alessandro Valignano, visitor (or special envoy on behalf of the general) in Asia; and Fabio De Fabii (Naples provincial), from whose province came many missionaries. These leaders co-operated in recruiting the men who were eventually sent. On the long sea journey east (four months from Lisbon just to Mozambique) the men worked on the new languages required and ministered to passengers and crew. The author explores the spiritual vision animating these men, as reflected in their letters. Following the Spiritual Exercises, a positive, interactive view of the world emerges, and engagement with people, culture, and science. This outlook was underpinned by the conviction that the divine was to be found already present there. A fascinating micro-study of the desire for martyrdom is presented, based on the letters of a young Neapolitan on his slow voyage east in the 1640s. The prospect of martyrdom
was a motivation for many in their choice of a missionary role. Letter-writing was a new and distinctive feature of the Jesuit missionary enterprise. This was based on the value of uniting the dispersed members of the Society with each other, and with their head, in Rome – a concern articulated in Part VIII of the Jesuit Constitutions. The author observes that this correspondence was ‘dialogic, factual, and edifying’. The motive was fundamentally spiritual, in sharing news of the spread of God’s kingdom through their missionary efforts. As Camilla Russell notes, observations on Chinese culture – in the pioneering and comprehensive accounts by Matteo Ricci, for example – were secondary to the spiritual meaning of what they were doing. These letters –in both directions, whether read in Rome, or at the court in Beijing – were deeply treasured, as mutual encouragement and support in living a shared mission in divine service.
However, the vast majority of Italian Jesuits remained in Italy. The author offers reflections on internal Jesuit mobility based on a comprehensive and insightful presentation of the documentation generated in the service of the mission within Italy: several thousand letters for the years 1555–1600 –mostly to Rome, with brief summaries of replies sent by the Father General. A further strand were letters sent directly to the Father General, which only he could read, and his replies, offering fatherly advice and encouragement. There is an account of the annual personnel lists (called Catalogues), embracing both factual information on individuals, and more confidential assessments by superiors. This documentation served to find suitable men to occupy the roles necessary for the service provided by the Society.
A final chapter considers deaths and departures from the Society –estimates from various provinces and timeframes indicate that between a quarter and one third of members left the Society. Among reasons indicated, the poverty of individuals’ families, and the consequent need to support them, was very common. Many departures were not amicable. The need to proclaim the unhappy end of those who left generated a distinctive literary form – the Tristes Annuae, for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By contrast, edifying lives, and deaths, of individuals were recorded in the series Vitae.
To conclude, the author gives a comprehensive and sober account of the key moments of the individual life-cycle – from entry, to death or departure –within the corporate structure of the Society of Jesus. There is a well-defined chronological and geographical framework, within which the normal or
typical procedures may be presented. The book is a celebration of the Roman Jesuit Archives for the Old Society – the wealth of materials contained therein and the logical organisation. The author again and again meticulously explains a comprehensive range of archival series, and indicates consistency and finding aids. In this way these sources are opened up for use by future researchers. Without losing sight of the big picture, procedures and trends are illustrated by apt and vivid personal examples. Without straying from the sources, there is due engagement with the spiritual horizon that animated these men both collectively and individually. The author links key Jesuit insights codified in the Spiritual Exercises and the Jesuit Constitutions. This further enhances the presentation of these men’s self-understanding, which is among the author’s stated aims. The text is replete with various insights on a Jesuit life – including the impact of poverty in a man’s family, a gendered reading of obedience and mission, the discussion between the individual and the Society’s designated leaders, inherent in an assignment, and the centrality of the individual in a Jesuit vocation and mission.
The style is markedly lucid, engaging, and accessible, with succinct conclusions to each chapter. The book succeeds in elucidating how these men understood their lives and service. As a work of historical scholarship the book serves as a model in drawing on archival series to contextualise the procedures used in integrating individual men within the Society’s goals.
Brian Mac Cuarta SJ is Fellow in Early Modern History at Campion Hall, University of Oxford. He was director of Archivium Romanum Societatis Iesu (Jesuit Archives, Rome) from 2010 to 2021.
Julian Stannard, Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of My Brother (Sheffield: Salt Publishing, 2023), 102 pages.
Julian Stannard is an Irish writer educated by the Jesuits in England. He is also a Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Winchester (UK) and as an academic he has written on many writers, including the poets Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Esther Morgan, and Basil Bunting. His own poetry and literary journalism have appeared in a number of publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and the Spectator, and his work has been nominated for a number of awards, including the Pushcart Prize for Poetry (USA) and the Forward Prize (UK). He is the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of My Brother, appeared in 2023, published by Salt Publishing.
The forty-four poems that make up the collection are varied in style and theme, but what they have in common is the ability to catch the reader by surprise, while at the same time opening up what William Blake referred to as ‘doors of perception’, challenging our limited awareness of reality and leading (as with Huxley) to insights at times surreal and revelatory.
The subjectivity of the poems is underlined by the dominant use of the lyric ‘I’. Technically, this creates a sense of externalised personal expression, a feeling of intimacy with the reader – and this is perhaps one of the most striking aspects of these poems: their intense sense of the private made public, challenging the reader to delve into the psyche of the imagined narrator and discover what exactly it is he wants to tell us.
In Stannard’s poems, however, there is another dimension to this that gives us a key to understanding, and that is the sense of the narrator as picaroon. There is a definite feel of the picaresque with the roguish ‘eye’ (pun intended) of the protagonist focusing on vagaries of modern life, living by his wit(s) and his ability to navigate the almost hallucinatory world around him. The poetry reflects this world in a way that is both humorous and thought provoking.
Within this outer narrative framework, the poetry itself is in turn reflective, conversational and contemporary (his sequence of covid poems is a good example of this), and Stannard employs a jazz-like rhythm in the flow of ideas, riffing of one another in free association, each seemingly taken up like an improvised solo before moving on to the next in an unyielding
sense of the absurd and the surreal. This last is important: Stannard is acutely observational in his depiction of the irrational side of existence, but with an edge to it that keeps the reader alert if sometimes slightly disconcerted.
Stannard’s poetry, however, is to be enjoyed for precisely its humour and its anarchic view of life, at times comic and at times tantalisingly enigmatic. It holds up to us the irrationality of our existence, sometimes disjointed –often with short, one-line staccato sentences and non-linear narrative form. They are in effect Dadaistic takes on the human condition, ‘Oh DADA is back. they say / Did DADA ever go away?’, we read in the poem, ‘A Gash in Your Head’. Humour and irony abound, creating a sense of absurdity, which, as Eliot once said, is a way of saying something serious, or as Camus put it, ‘The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.’ This is, perhaps, Stannard’s central message in the poems in this volume.
Through stream of consciousness, the narrator throws himself into the collective insanity of life using a language that is both allegorical and informal and which owes much to the dictates of the early modernists, particularly Ezra Pound, who championed the use of free verse and innovative rhythms and the use of language that reflected common speech. It might be interesting to know whether Stannard has also been influenced by his fellow Jesuit poet, Hopkins, who wrote that the ‘poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened’. Be that as it may, the language of the poems is refreshingly poetic and imagistic, not mere prose disguised as verse, with form and technique carefully crafted using sound devices, rhythm, syntax, and diction to create unified composition.
Many of the poems in Stannard’s collection are linked thematically, dealing with, among other topics, family, the city, Italy, and death; one sequence, the cicada poems, is an excursion into madness and eventual contentment, with beautiful imagery:
Eat these, he said, the olives of salvation as if a green god were caressing my spleen with the wing of a butterfly
Another longer sequence is the ‘Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost ….’ poems, a discordant depiction of European and world conflict and culture, eventually ending in the eponymous poem of the collection with the conciliatory lines: My brother has slipped from view. I bet you he’s taken a big breath kicked his legs and plunged down deep.
The horses stand under a tree. My brother’s horse is whinnying. – leaving the reader with images of escape and contentment.
Humour, as mentioned, is to be found throughout the collection, as in the poem ‘Zoom Time’, a wonderful satire on the voyeuristic obsession we all developed with background mise-en-scene (our own and others’) in Zoom calls, both public and private.
Artfully arranged bookshelves frame the background of every zoomer, the libraries of the baby boomer –Sometimes I catch the titles on the spines: Proudhon, The 120 Days of Sodom, Plato’s critique of humour’
There are moments of epiphany, too, as in ‘Miracle in Lorsica’
I am agog –although I haven’t been to church for years I see these angels.
Trainee angels, a touch piquant.
I guess they’d just been given their wings. Having the time of their lives, not much theological focus.
I’m not some crazed poet on bennies.
I saw those angels …
Stannard has placed an epigraph at the beginning of his collection from Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, ‘I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. My goal is absolute rest. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep and then to sleep more.’ This sense of ennui is developed dramatically in the collection, summing up the condition of modern life and our search for meaning. Ironically, however, it is the reader who has to put in the work, but the effort (and good poetry requires effort) is more than rewarded.
Dr William Adamson is the former Head of the English Department at Ulm University, Germany, and is still teaching at a number of institutions, including for the English Department at Bamberg University, Germany.
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