WHERE THE DEAD NEVER REST
Social Cleansing In The Irish Republic: A Buried History
It’s not all green beer and penny whistles
The cemetery is nearly deserted on this weekday afternoon. Liam grips my hand as we search for the grave marker I’ve brought him to see. Distant echoes tell us that a storm is approaching; the sky is overcast and the breeze carries whiffs of the Autumn chill soon to come. The trees have a stillness about them which I imagine to foreshadow the Fall. They’re in repose from their Summer growth, gathering strength for the spectacle of colour they’ll soon put on, it seems to me. But they’re more than mute; their silence is active, radiant, dampening. They absorb sound; they impose quiet.
We’re visiting Mount Jerome Cemetery in south Dublin: a fading Victorian relic crowded with elaborate, and now crumbling, monuments to Protestant Ireland’s most influential figures. The rich, the great, and the vain rest here amid 19th Century decadence and decay. Mt. Jerome has been called a miniature Père Lachaise, but I can’t make that leap. The ground has swelled up to expel hundreds of grave markers; head stones teeter menacingly; slabs lie splintered; marble shrapnel is scattered everywhere. The French would never neglect a cemetery this badly. I warn Liam to be careful as he makes his way over the shards of rubble, encountering the public emblems of our mortality for the first time. He insists that he’s “becarefulling.” He’s quiet although I sense that he has much to say. He seems unsure, but not afraid. I gather that he’s keen to be unafraid.
We turn down a lane bordered by mature English yews. They form a canopy that reminds me of a cathedral’s fan-vault ceiling. I explain to Liam that the yew is a special tree, deeply connected to European church yards and cemeteries, as common as marble and limestone. Since pagan times, it’s been entwined with ideas of the magical, even the sacred. It symbolises death, for it’s among Europe’s most toxic plants; a scant mouthful of leaves will kill a horse. It’s a friend of death, too: Chaucer called it the “shooter” because its wood made, and still makes, the most powerful longbows. Spenser wrote of the “builder oak,” the “sailing pine,” and the “shooter yew.” Shakespeare wrote of the “dismal yew.” The oldest wooden artefact I know of is a yew spear point found in Essex, made during the lower Paleolithic period, estimated to be nearly a half million years old.
Yet the yew is an emblem of life and rebirth, for it’s also the longest lived organism in Europe. This has been common knowledge for millennia: the Book of Lismore reckons the entire life span of the Earth as three times that of the yew. For centuries, church altars have been piled with yew branches on Easter Sunday, an unmistakable symbol of resurrection, even immortality. In Beowulf, yew wood forms a shield, not a weapon.
The duality has lasted a long time. Pagan Europe built cemeteries and places of worship around the yew. Christians took over the sites and kept the trees, along with their rich, contradictory symbolism. The Beowulf poet, John of Gaunt, Chaucer, Spenser, Webster, Shakespeare, Gray, Tennyson, Keats, Shaw, Eliot — they all wrote of it, as did many others in different languages. The yew is embedded in our literature and poetry; in myths and religion; in warfare and conquest; in useful arts. Since our kind first occupied Europe, it has inspired artists, craftsmen, poets, warriors, priests, and magicians.
Liam and I pace slowly along the lane but we can’t find the marker that brings us here. There are a few individual graves, but the area looks barely used; it’s mostly patches of sparse grass with a scattering of leaf litter. It’s not what we expected. Minutes later, a groundsman passes. “Pardon,” I say, “but this is Yew Walk, is it not?” The man assures us that it is. “So this is the place. But where is the Bethany monument,” I ask. “There was talk of one a good few years ago — I read in the papers.”
“Oh, there’s been talk of one,” he snorts, and carries on.
When he passes out of earshot, Liam asks the question that’s been percolating in him since we arrived. It’s a courageous one.
“Papa, will your skeleton think about me always after you die?” My little man has just turned six and his curiosity about the natural world is irrepressible. He knows that I will die and not “pass away,” much less “go to the Lord,” and he knows that when the dead are laid in the ground, after a while nothing is left but their bones. He loves dinosaurs. When he was four I gave him his first trowel and brush, and he spent hours digging up rocks, picking at them carefully, brushing them clean, pretending they were fossils. “This is a Pachyrhinosaurus horn core; this is an Albertosaurus jaw fragment; this is a Troodon tooth…”
His understanding of death is strictly biological. I know what he meant to ask: whether my presence, in some form, will remain with him after I die. He doesn’t think metaphysically yet; he’s still very, very empirical.
I kneel beside him and comb his hair with my fingers. He turns and our noses almost touch; our foreheads collide gently, but solidly, every few seconds. We often bang heads “like Pachycephalosauruses,” as he would say. It’s a familiar gesture of intimacy between us, since he was three. “Yes, Son,” I answer softly. “My skeleton will think about you always.”
Liam knows that there are many skeletons in the ground beneath our feet. I wonder if I should tell him the true number, for we’re standing beside a mass grave populated with the discarded remains of over two hundred neglected infants and children, most of them younger than my boy. Mt. Jerome was the preferred dumping ground of the nearby Bethany Mother and Child Home, a charity run by Anglicans for sixty years until its closing in 1972. Within its walls, girls were confined for such crimes as being pregnant without a suitable explanation. They were sentenced without trial, worked without pay, and their healthy children were forcibly, and illegally, taken from them and adopted by “proper” families, often overseas.
Thanks to the Maternity Act of 1934, which finally required charities to report child mortality and mandated regular inspections by the local health authority, we know that more than 40 children died at Bethany between March 1935 and December 1936, while the home kept an average of nineteen babies in residence per month. That comes to roughly two dead babies per month out of around twenty. Thus Bethany’s infant mortality rate was ten per cent, or three times higher than the rate for black children in rural South Africa during the 1980s, when apartheid ruled.
I’m stunned by this. According to research by Prof. Cyril Wyndham published in the South African Medical Journal in 1986, an African black child living in a remote village, enduring racial hatred and lacking in public sanitation, potable water, a balanced diet, access to transportation, vaccines, hospitals, and modern communications, enjoyed a three times greater chance of seeing his or her first birthday than an Irish child living in Dublin under the care of a Christian charity.
Rural Ireland experienced an infant mortality rate of seven per cent, itself an embarrassing figure, but good by Irish standards of the day. The Catholic mother and baby homes were more dangerous than rural hospitals, but they were safer than urban hospitals: incredibly, the overall infant mortality rate for greater Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s was fourteen per cent.
Ireland is no third-world country and Dublin is hardly the African outback. How can I account for such appalling rates of infant mortality in the capital of a European state? Infectious disease claimed the majority of victims, as it did everywhere in those days. Modern antibiotics would not become widely available until the 1950s, although sulpha had been in use from the mid 1930s and it proved effective against many infections.
Drugs notwithstanding, common-sense sanitary practices and inexpensive nutritional and educational programmes would have prevented many thousands of infant deaths each year: Irish babies died primarily of gastroenteritis and diarrhoea — both easily, and cheaply, preventable with wholesome food and basic hygiene. We only needed to treat poor women like human beings — teach them the basics of nutrition, hygiene, and nursing an infant. But we did not. The Dublin theocracy couldn’t bear the thought of Irish women and girls learning about sex and reproduction and their own bodies from clinicians who might neglect to tell them how shameful and disgusting it all was.
Broad external conditions such as Dublin’s notoriously poor housing and sanitation infrastructure, its clouds of coal soot, and its overcrowding are often cited for blame, but they don’t account for these deaths. Britain endured similar conditions during that time, and its rate was six per cent and falling fast; it would reach 2.5 per cent by 1950.
Ireland’s overall national rate was climbing; it rose to eight per cent over the decade between 1935 and 1945. Virtually every state in western Europe reduced infant mortality by fifty per cent or more between 1940 and 1950, in defiance of World War II and its wretched aftermath. This was true equally of Protestant- and Catholic-influenced states. Malta, perhaps the most conspicuously Catholic nation in Europe at the time, was laid siege by the Axis and suffered tremendous violence during the Second World War, becoming one of Europe’s most intensely bombed areas. In 1945, its infant mortality rate was an unbearable 35 per cent. By 1955, it had been cut to four per cent.
Only the Irish, who stayed out of the war, permitted it to worsen. Ireland was relatively poor among European states, but it had been spared the trauma of industrialised violence and mass dislocation that had laid waste to much of the Continent. Ireland had the resources: it had doctors, nurses, hospitals, and drugs. It chose not to make them available. For this number of infants to have died in 20th Century Ireland, there had to be a consensus: society overall, and the nation’s core institutions, had to be comfortable with massive loss of life among young women and small children: specifically, poor ones.
The distant thunder has grown louder and the wind has gained strength. While I contemplate the scale of Bethany’s neglect, and struggle to formulate some way of explaining it to a six-year-old, the storm materialises around us. Liam and I are greeted by dense thunderheads of black and no fewer than four shades of grey, here coifed in Pompadour swells, there cleft and cleanly striated, floating barely above the ground like weightless mountains, erupting silently and slowly as diaphanous wisps of white vapour drift up from shoulder-high hedgerows to entangle them. The hills were veiled; the sky was gone; the air smelt of grass and wet stone. A seductive mist enveloped us, caressed us, welcomed us to the land of The Quiet Man. For the moment, John Ford’s Ireland presented herself and I could not but genuflect to her superficial beauty.
But beneath her fair skin, such sins fester. Our history is one of continual bloodshed, massacres, cruelty, and callousness. Look past the “Emerald Isle” propaganda, and you’ll see centuries of oppression by a ruthless national plutocracy: at first Protestant, later Catholic, and now largely corporate and American.
Look back and you’ll see child neglect and exploitation on an Olympian scale. You’ll see misfits swept by the thousands into what can only be called a gulag system. And you’ll see the bulk of Irish commerce, from the simple merchant or tradesman to the largest corporation, practicing the basest forms of money grubbing and price gouging — indifferent souls who
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the half-pence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone
As Yeats wrote so memorably.
Such sins. The evidence of two hundred and twenty unconscionable ones lies buried at our feet this day. I want to tell Liam that this is a unique case. I want to tell him that a small group of truly abnormal people allowed this to happen. I want to tell him that there are not a hundred more such sites. I want to tell him that he doesn’t belong to a tribe who exploit or scapegoat the vulnerable, the embarrassing, and the inconvenient, work them and neglect them and rob them of dignity, and finally discard them like so much rubbish. But I can’t. There are too many little skeletons buried all over this island: Protestant skeletons; Catholic skeletons; tiny, defenceless skeletons; nameless, voiceless, forgotten skeletons, in their hundreds of thousands. The people who caused this were in no way odd. They were ordinary Irish people — my neighbours, friends, and colleagues. The core institutions of Irish society reinforced their callousness. This was no isolated incident.
The rain is soft and fine, as it often is. Liam clutches my arm tightly as we share an umbrella, and says, “Oooh, Papa” softly, as he will. I love the way he does that. I feel pain knowing how much I adore him and imagining how easily he could have become one of the tiny, discarded skeletons beneath us. If I had run afoul of the State; if I’d been less educated, less clever, less assertive; if I’d been desperately poor, my Liam could easily have been born only to suffer, only to die young and bewildered and end up an anonymous jumble of toddler’s bones, nameless and forgotten along with so many other Irish children.
A pair of magpies frolics nearby. Their shimmering tail feathers barely show in the mist but their white under-feathers flash brightly when they spread their wings. Liam is absorbed by their antics for a moment. I’m thinking of the old magpie rhyme I taught him and I wonder if he is too.
One for sorrow, two for joy;
Three for a girl, four for a boy;
Five for silver, six for gold;
Seven for a secret never to be told
He looks away, staring into a void somewhere between the grave site and us. Then he asks another question.
“Papa, are the little skeletons still thinking of their Mums and Dads?” He’s not going to make this easy.
I reach down and comb his hair with my fingers again. How do I explain that most died so young, they never knew they had parents? Or that those who survived weren’t permitted to see their mothers after weaning? Or that most never once saw, or were ever seen by, their fathers?
Let me attempt the hard answer.
Part 2
Wherever one travels on this island, a history of violence and suffering intrudes, sometimes directly, more often subliminally, and it never retreats. I know it well: my entire neighborhood is quite literally a cemetery. Every day as I go about my errands, I tread upon the bones of four thousand Irish and English Royalists whose blood was shed by other men.
But that’s not unusual. Indifference to suffering is more than a historical motif in Ireland; it’s inscribed in the island’s rocks and hills, in its clouds, in its soil; it’s part of the very terroir. The skeletons get to you wherever you go.
In 1649, Republican soldiers loyal to Oliver Cromwell conducted a gruesome massacre in view of my doorstep. The famous Bloody Fields of the battle of Rathmines greet me every morning as I leave the house. The area is unrecognizable as a battlefield today, but I notice a subliminal presence, a peripheral awareness of the souls lost during one excruciatingly violent day. It’s what people call a thin place, at least for me.
Occasionally, the skeletons rise to accuse us. In 1975, two children playing at the decommissioned St Mary’s Home for Unmarried Mothers in Tuam, Galway, operated by the Bon Secours Sisters, fell into an underground structure and discovered infant skeletons. There would be no headlines, no television documentaries, no warbling politicians, only whispers. Local residents erected a small grotto on the site and the matter was largely forgotten, in keeping with our custom of never knowing what we know.
St Mary’s Home became news only in 2014, when local historian Catherine Corless sought records kept by the former Catholic orphanage. She found 794 death certificates but only two burial records and no baptismal certificates.
Further research, including test excavations, uncovered what everyone knew was there: nearly 800 little skeletons that the good sisters had, for the better part of a century, been dumping into a septic tank. Unbaptized babies were not recognized as human beings, so their remains could be treated as common biological refuse, like the nuns’ bodily waste. They weren’t baptized because a proper Christian burial costs money, and the Irish Church had better things to spend it on.
Naturally, we’re all shocked. Galway Archbishop Michael Neary claimed to be “deeply shocked and horrified” at the time.
When former Taoiseach Enda Kenny was asked if he, too, was shocked, he answered, “Absolutely … and to think you pass by the location on so many occasions over the years.”
The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation wrote in its press release that it, too, was “shocked by this discovery.” Even today, after all that’s been revealed, we’re shocked. Yet there’s abundant proof that the government was intimately involved throughout the entire fiasco of post-independence child abuse and neglect. It was routine. It was policy. No one is shocked. Just embarrassed.
Secrets That Keep Themselves
The skeletons rose again to indict us in 1993, this time in a different community, when the good Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold a tract of land in High Park, Dublin, belonging to a Magdalene asylum that they had operated. When the new owner began renovating the property, workers discovered a mass grave containing the remains of 155 women, children, and infants, of whom 22 still can’t be identified. Only 74 of the deaths had been registered.
The skeletons were exhumed, cremated, and buried in a proper cemetery, again anonymously in a mass grave. A ledger found at the site listed several of the nuns’ clients. We had our first tangible proof that the State was deeply involved despite its repeated denials.
For most of the 20th Century, the girls held there had been washing laundry for the President of Ireland’s official residence, the Ministries of Justice, Agriculture, and Fisheries, and the Irish Bus and Rail companies [1].
But the press said little, the government said nothing, and the good people of Ireland went about their business as if nothing had happened. No one would say openly that these discoveries signify a pervasive culture of crime and neglect, although everyone knows it. We absolve ourselves, and each other, of sins we’ll never admit to having committed. The most durable lies are ‘the secrets that keep themselves’, because when everyone is guilty, everyone is invested in keeping them, as Shaw slyly noted [2].
Later, a government board of inquiry called the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), better known as the Ryan Commission, would confirm that the Department of Education had facilitated abuse and neglect in the industrial schools. Numerous other government departments knowingly availed of services provided by forced child labor [3]. Worse, girls held in the industrial schools were routinely transferred directly to Magdalene asylums to perform unpaid labor when they turned sixteen. Both the courts and the Department of Social Protection delivered thousands of children to the residential schools and laundries without due process of law [4].
Still, we feign ignorance and surprise, like dogs cocking their heads. It’s always so very shocking. We insist that we can’t be the sort of people who would commit such crimes or even tolerate them. And so the skeletons emerge only occasionally, by accident. Catholic orders eager to cash in on Ireland’s property bubble earned €667 million in tax-free deals between 1999 and 2009 by selling land. Inevitably, more graves were found, more little skeletons unearthed, and more ledgers discovered, exposing the criminal theocracy that ruled the Free State and Republic from Independence through the 1990s.
Our Own Worst Enemy
As the 20th Century dawned, approximately 14,000 Irish children could be found in residential institutions at any moment [5]. With a population of 600,000 youngsters aged fourteen and under, that amounts to 2.33 per cent of all children [6]. By combining that information with the national infant mortality rate of the day, we can estimate that a baby born in Ireland stood, on average, a ten per cent chance of either dying before their first birthday or being confined in an industrial school or orphanage before reaching their middle teens [7]. But ‘on average’ is misleading: the child of a worker was seventeen times more likely to be caught up in an institution than the child of a professional [8].
Death statistics follow the same pattern: the infant and child mortality rate among professionals was below five per cent, but among unskilled workers and the poor it was 34.7 per cent [9]. That’s a seven-to-one ratio, and it can’t be explained except as an accomplishment. Among 20–40 year-olds, the death rate for professionals was 9.5 percent but for workers it was 16.4 per cent, due largely to the epidemics of tuberculosis that swept through the slums, about which the State did nothing and would do nothing for decades to come.
If we draw out and then combine the mortality and incarceration rates for children of the working classes and the poor, we approach an unthinkable number: fifty per cent. Therefore, it’s wrong to say that Ireland sought to maximize infant and child mortality. Upper caste citizens would never have tolerated watching a third of their babies die in their first year, and another fifteen or twenty per cent marched off to residential facilities. Rather, it’s correct to say that the Irish optimized infant mortality to be rid of an unwelcome population. The effect was calibrated.
In addition to the roughly 14,000 young people trapped in the orphanages, industrial schools, and Magdalene asylums, a steady population of around 20,000 adults languished in psychiatric hospitals, most of them committed involuntarily. The goal was to impound older residents who would not, or could not, conform — to keep them tightly regulated behind high walls lest they breed and multiply and thus undermine the Celtic-Catholic utopia conceived by the nation’s revolutionary leaders.
The stereotype of a sexually-repressed Irish populace is overly broad; restraining erotic activity overall was never a goal: the Church and the State encouraged early marriage and reproduction as expressions of patriotism and piety. As Bishop Cornelius Lucey of Cork said in 1954, “Those who remain single through selfishness, or through over-anxiety about the future, or for any other such reason — for instance, the woman who does not want to give up her independence or her job, or the man who does not want the burden of supporting a home — are failing in their duty to God, to themselves, and to the [Irish] race.”
With its vast residential care network, 20th Century Ireland achieved the second-highest rate of extrajudicial confinement in Europe, behind only Germany. The Irish detention complex outpaced even the Soviet gulag system, which reached its maximum capacity briefly in 1950 when it held 2.49 million inmates [10]. The population was 182 million at the time, which yields a brief, peak incarceration rate of 1.37 per cent for the Soviets [11]. The Irish Republic confined at least 1.89 per cent of its population from 1920 until 1970, taking silver to the USSR’s bronze.
This wasn’t done to the Irish; it was done by the Irish. And it certainly was no accident; a society doesn’t accidentally confine two per cent of its entire population inside an extrajudicial network of internment facilities. It doesn’t accidentally achieve the highest rate of infant mortality in Western Europe and cling to that disgraceful distinction for six decades. It doesn’t accidentally kill or imprison nearly half of all children born among the poor. Those were choices, and there must have been a coherent purpose behind them. There has got to be a hard kernel of truth that we can uncover. What, exactly, are we looking at?
Unauthorized breeding among undesirable castes was the menace. Ireland’s industrial schools, orphanages, Magdalene asylums, and psychiatric hospitals, and its public health polices hostile to poor women and their infants, were, quite simply, the essential mechanisms of a national eugenics programme.
There is no other rational explanation. There is no other way to account for the facts. The craving for ideological conformity and ethnic purity among those who conceived and led the Free State and the Republic is our monster. Celebrated patriots like Pádraig Pearse, Eoin MacNeill, Michael Collins, and Éamon de Valera, and their many followers and enablers, believed in a distinct Irish race, which, predictably, modern research has shown to be fictitious. The several “tribes” of the British Isles — Picts, Britons, Gaels, Normans, Anglo Saxons — are barely distinguishable. We’re all essentially mongrels [12].
Modern Ireland encouraged extravagant rates of infant mortality among the underclass as a laissez-faire form of euthanasia, and sequestered undesirable adults as a soft means of sterilization, all in quest of Gaelic-Catholic purity. The Church performed the State’s dirty work: it operated the nation’s schools, health-care facilities, and asylums through which it would cleanse the breeding pool of unmarried mothers, juvenile delinquents, cripples, paupers, petty criminals, eccentrics, nonconformists, and political nay-sayers. Dublin Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and Fianna Fáil leader Éamon de Valera, working together as co-sovereigns for half a century, conceived a deadly ethno-fascist theocracy.
The Children’s Act of 1942, co-written by then Education Minister de Valera and Archbishop McQuaid, expanded the industrial school system by increasing the budget and further relaxing admissions criteria: it eliminated the minimum age for inmates, which had been six years, permitting vulnerable, young families to be dissolved and very small children, even toddlers, to be removed and institutionalized. This sadistic piece of legislation also made it illegal for single fathers to care for their children regardless of their income or fitness to do so, a cynical provision meant to further increase the inmate pool. No married mother at home meant, automatically, that no family existed, and the so-called ‘cruelty men’ would leap into action.
And yet, this vast network of crime and abuse was effectively hidden from outside scrutiny by a deluge of Emerald-Isle hogwash — of penny whistles and Aran jumpers and rivers of green beer, especially in America. Battalions of clergy, entertainers, authors, and teachers would infiltrate local parish houses, convents, monasteries, Catholic schools, and Catholic fraternal organizations, plus university lecture halls, bookshops, and bars, serving as cultural ambassadors and green-jersey evangelists preaching the Holy Gospel of Irish identity to the world. The story of a devoutly religious folk demanding autonomy and a cultural revival — their dignity in a word — proved so seductive that no one thought to question its human costs.
There’s been no thorough, systematic survey of Church grounds and there won’t be. We don’t go digging at the mother and baby homes, the Magdalene asylums, the industrial schools, the reformatories, or the psychiatric hospitals because we know what we’ll find: tens of thousands of skeletons, many of them very small and delicate, that can’t be explained without reference to widespread crimes against humanity of a magnitude that would get us added to a list alongside Russia, China, Israel, and Germany, among others.
Ireland’s many religious communities established and managed a vast, and vastly abusive, confinement infrastructure within which tens of thousands of social outcasts were imprisoned and damaged. But they were not the sole architects; this was a collective choice.
The Church is a native institution. Irish priests and Irish monks worked boys without pay in the industrial schools, and beat them, and raped them, and sent them into the world with no marketable skills. Irish nuns snatched newborns from incarcerated single mothers and arranged their adoptions, and worked young women in the Magdalene laundries without pay, and denied them education, and fed them porridge, and procured them for heterosexual priests. Irish mothers and Irish fathers surrendered their delinquent boys and promiscuous girls to the Church’s grim reformatories and farms. Irish families used the Lunacy and Mental Health Acts to dispose of their elderly parents, disagreeable spouses, or rival siblings in inheritance disputes. Irish social workers swept thousands of destitute people and unsanctioned families into the system. Irish police officers and Irish judges collaborated to incarcerate people guilty of nothing, covered up or ignored evidence of institutional crime and neglect, destroyed records, and suppressed criminal complaints. Irish doctors and Irish nurses withheld life-saving treatment from poor infants and their uneducated mothers. Irish bishops and Irish politicians joined forces to establish and maintain a vast institutional network of intimidation and control devoted to social cleansing in service of a theocratic, ethno-nationalist dream.
Again, no one did this to us. The Irish Church was us, not a bunch of scheming foreigners from Vatican City who forced our hands. The horror we’ve all got to confront, however uncomfortably, is the Irishness of it all.
_________________
[1] Little Museum of Dublin, permanent collection
[2] George Bernard Shaw: “The Thing Happens, A.D. 2170;” Back to Methuselah; London, 1921
[3] Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) Investigation Committee Report, Vol. IV, Ch. 1
[4] Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to Establish the Facts of State Involvement with the Magdalene Laundries, Part III, Chs. 10, 11
[5] Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) Investigation Committee Report, Vol. I
[6] Ireland Central Statistics Office; Census, 1901
[7] Eoin O’Sullivan and Ian O’Donnell: Coercive Confinement in Post-Independence Ireland: Patients, Prisoners, and Penitents; Manchester, 2012
[8] Ireland: Society and Economy 1870–1914; University College, Cork
[9] Cormac Ó Gráda: “Infant and Child Mortality in Dublin a Century Ago;” University College Dublin, 2002
[10] David Hosford, et al.: Gulag: Soviet Prison Camps and Their Legacy; Cambridge, 2006
[11] Galena Selegen: Report on the Recent Population Census in the Soviet Union; Population Investigation Committee; London, 1960
[12] Bryan Sykes; Blood of the Isles, London, 2007
