The Asylum Workshop 2023

Playwright Colin Murphy was commissioned to write a play about Ireland’s largest psychiatric institution, St Brendan’s Hospital, Grangegorman. It was then staged on the grounds where the asylum once stood.

Ireland's psychiatric network confined more people than all other carceral institutions combined, with a 1966 government commission noting that the state's number of psychiatric beds per capita 'appears to be the highest in the world' (qtd in Kelly, 2023: 136).

Graph from Damien Brennan, Irish Insanity: 1800–2000 (Routledge, 2015), courtesy of the author.

St Brendan's Hospital, Grangegorman was the largest such institution in the state.

2011 photograph of St Brendan's Hospital by FiachraByrne (https://w.wiki/EhVM); aerial shot courtesy of the Grangegorman Development Agency.

By the time it closed in 2013, St Brendan's was a monument to Ireland's 'systematic disempowerment of the mentally ill' (Kelly, 2023: 148). Operating since 1815, it holds a substantial archive which includes patient records and their personal belongings.

Video courtesy of Alan Counihan.

In this 2013 video, artist Alan Counihan discusses his project Personal Effects, which drew on
the patient archive in Grangegorman.      

In 2023, playwright Colin Murphy collaborated with faculty and final-year drama students at TU Dublin to create The Asylum Workshop, a play that draws on the Grangegorman archive, including the case files and correspondence of former inmates of the hospital.

In this scene, characters debate the ethics of telling an inmate's story through the archive (played by the TU Conservatoire final-year BA drama students).

Video courtesy of TU Dublin Conservatoire and Grangegorman Histories.

In this interview, Colin Murphy discusses the challenges involved in composing and creating a documentary drama based on patient records from Grangegorman.

Just take them for what they are. 
Fragments. Read them. Talk about them. But don't pretend we can know who these people were.

Student actress, The Asylum Workshop

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Echoes from the Dormitories 2025

Writer Susan Connolly has recently published an autobiography reflecting her childhood experiences of coercive confinement in Goldenbridge Industrial School. The artwork illustrating this panel is also hers. 
Next

Asylum Archive 2007–2022

Artist Vukašin Nedeljković has documented Ireland’s system of direct provision centres in images. The resulting photographic archive provides a visual record lacking for Ireland’s earlier carceral institutions. 
Created by the Museum of Literature in Ireland in collaboration with Dr James Little
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Screening Coercive Confinement A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton (1971) Our Boys (1981) States of Fear (1999) Echoes from the Dormitories (2025) The Asylum Workshop (2023) Asylum Archive (2007–2022) Podcast Credits More Exhibitions Visit MoLI