Remembering Ireland's architecture of containment: "telling" stories in The Butcher Boy and States of Fear.

PATRICK MCCABE's third novel, The Butcher Boy (1992), describes the eventful life of Francie Brady, a traumatized schoolboy in a small town in late 1950s and early 1960s Ireland. (1) Irish society deems Francie mad and resorts to confining his deviant behavior at a variety of different institutions--an industrial school, a mental hospital, and a prison. Hidden away, out of sight and out of mind, McCabe's protagonist evokes the many real-life victims of Ireland's architecture of containment. (2) In its concrete form, this architecture encompassed an array of interdependent institutions--schools, hospitals, mother-and-baby homes, adoption agencies, and Magdalen laundries--that obscured the less desirable elements attached to a number of interrelated social phenomena, including poverty, illegitimacy, and infanticide. (3) In its more abstract form, this architecture comprised both the legislation that inscribed these issues as well as the numerous official and public discourses that resisted admitting the existence and function of their affiliated institutions. What remains incontrovertible, however, is that this bureaucratic apparatus and the discourses surrounding it served the nation-state: its function, to confine and render invisible segments of the population whose very existence threatened Ireland's national imaginary, the vision of Ireland enshrined in President Eamon de Valera's 1937 constitution. (4) As a result, among those incarcerated were unmarried mothers, illegitimate and abandoned children, orphans, the sexually promiscuous, the socially transgressive, and, often, those merely guilty of "being in the way." (5) The Butcher Boy participates in the formation of a narrative that excavates the elided history of Ireland's architecture of containment.

In 1999, only seven years after the publication of The Butcher Boy, Mary Raftery's three-part documentary States of Fear, examining the history of Ireland's residential child care practices, aired on the national broadcasting network. (6) It remains, to date, the most significant representation of the nation's containment infrastructure. The first episode concentrated on Ireland's industrial and reformatory schools prior to 1970, when the recommendations of the Kennedy Report indicted the whole system and resulted in the closure of many larger institutions. (7) Thirty years later, seven witnesses challenged Irish television audiences with memories of neglect and abuse. (8) John Prior revealed that he was "sadistically sexually abused" on the day he made his First Holy Communion. Barney O'Connell told how the Christian Brother in charge of the nationally revered Artane Boys Band ordered him to strip naked before "grossly molesting" him. Mary Phil Drennan described a punishment ritual in which adult supervisors encouraged students to strike half-naked peers crawling on all fours between them. Mannix Flynn remembered seeing captured escapees beaten senseless until they were "reduced to simpletons." Confronted by these accounts of institutional experience, the nation's television audience acknowledged the fear and hurt, yet unabated, among these survivors. Like McCabe's novel, Raftery's documentaries excavate Ireland's architecture of containment by focusing on the very people the structure was erected to deny.

In examining the social and historical contexts for The Butcher Boy and States of Fear, this essay underscores the regulatory function of an institutional system that supported the State's postcolonial nativist morality. In other words, the existence of such sites of confinement functioned as a constant reminder of the social morals deemed appropriate in post-independence Catholic Ireland and of the consequences awaiting transgressors of that morality. (9) de Valera's 1943 St. Patrick's Day address famously expresses the nation's nativist aspirations: an idealized society "bright with cosy homesteads, ... joyous ... with the romping of sturdy children, ... and the laughter of comely maidens." (10) However, the Taoiseach carefully elides any mention of domestic realities, for example the tragic fire at St. Joseph's Industrial School in Cavan on 23 February 1943--some three weeks earlier. (11) de Valera's silence regarding the thirty-five young girls who lost their lives--all committed to care through the courts-reflects the pervasive social response to institutionalized children held hostage to a State-authored nativist ideal.

TELLING STORIES IN THE 1990s

Presenting a somber view of provincial life in post-independence Ireland, The Butcher Boy and States of Fear reflect the ambivalent status of children residing in Ireland's industrial and reformatory schools. As representative depictions of institutional life, both narratives indict a protracted process of decolonization dominating Irish society well into the 1980s. Both emerged in a decade that witnessed a distinct shift in Ireland's willingness to confront its past. Although traditionally silent when confronted with controversial social problems, Ireland began to "speak out" in the 1990s with a new openness most evident in media-generated controversies--particularly in those focusing attention on the suffering of children and other marginalized citizens. (12) The 1990 election of Mary Robinson was pivotal to this transformation, for the new President symbolized a hunger for change and an attendant renegotiation of Irish identity. (13) During her term, a newly confident Irish society transformed its relationship with established cultural traditions. In her inaugural address, Robinson invoked an open and pluralistic notion of national identity, claiming that

 
   [t]he Ireland that I will be representing is a new Ireland, open, tolerant, 
   inclusive.... This, I believe, is a significant signal of change, a sign, 
   however modest, that we have already passed the threshold of a new 
   pluralist Ireland.... I want Aras an Uachtarain to be a place where people 
   can tell diverse stories--in the knowledge that there is someone there to 
   listen. I want this presidency to promote the telling of stories--stories 
   of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and social 
   justice. (14) 

President Robinson's emphasis on the role of "stories" in realizing the goal of a newly "open, tolerant, inclusive" Ireland suggests a radical break with tradition--a reimagining of Ireland's foundational narratives that Richard Kearney advocates in Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy. (15) Kearney argues for deconstructing the "Official Story" of the nation-state "into the open plurality of stories that make it up." For Kearney, this plurality of stories indicates a "political or ethical community where identity is part of a permanent process of narrative retelling," and where "every citizen's story is related" and thus exists in a state of dependency with others. (16) In linking the concepts of "narrative retelling" and "dependency," Kearney's description of postnational Ireland invites a re-evaluation of stories of institutional abuse emerging in recent years. Simultaneously, it reinscribes those victimized by Ireland's official story--adoptees, single mothers, illegitimate children, and former residents of industrial and reformatory schools--into a new national narrative. Their stories invoke a history Irish society prefers not to acknowledge and excavate the nation's architecture of containment.