Said to be Dead is a commentary by Doireann Ní Ghríofa – a lost voice from the Irish defense | History books

COrk Mental Hospital, also known as Our Lady’s, was Ireland’s tallest building: a 19th-century monster, much extended before it closed in the 1990s, that looks out from the north bank to the River Lee and the city beyond. In recent years, many problems have been transformed, of course, into rooms. A developer site now they are inviting you to “Be at ease, be at ease, be with us”.

This, of course, is a clear invitation: the difficulty for “us” not to agree, in the middle of the beautiful interior, the scary shadows of the not-so-good – and the unwilling. When Doireann Ní Ghríofa – a famous poet and fiction writer Spirit in Heaven – he started looking at the abandoned place a few years ago, he immediately recognized it as a place where he could create himself, but due to past luck, he was unable to. Said to be Dead is a well-researched and thoughtful study of lives (mostly women) that have lived and often completes the first 70 years of clinical practice.

The history of the book is a matter forbidden by the government. When he goes to the archives, especially in the big green books of the hospital, Ní Ghríofa has to stop reading for a century: anything recent can break the secret. As a result, the Victorian and Edwardian voices he has been hearing are silenced in the early years of independent Ireland.

Regardless, his writings contain the names, characters, events and tragedies of the patients. Bridget, a very hopeful, who immigrates to America but is deported and sent home by her brother when he finds out about her condition. Anna Martha, an artist, “strange in her actions”, who pulled a gun on the judges who wanted to put her in custody. Sixteen-year-old Dora, who “want to die”: an avid reader of novels, overwhelmed by her parents. Muriel, whose husband was Terence MacSwiney: Republican mayor of Cork, soon died of starvation in Brixton prison.

There are names that quickly disappear from the written word, others that persist in the pages of the hard-kept, mysterious or interesting. Behind these stories of lives lost and sometimes recovered, there are doctors who helped women. In the museum, their voices come to the fore at the time of acceptance, capturing fear and deception. “He says that the shows mess up his nerves. . . . He said he had changed into many forms since I last saw him. He said he would be burned soon, and people are predicting.” Touches and intelligence are mentioned: “nonsense”, “annoying”, “stupid”, “intelligent”. Most of the time, these stories begin to repeat themselves carelessly: “There is no change.”

But in 1896, Lucia Strangman arrived at this institution, the first woman qualified as a psychologist in the British Isles. She is Ní Ghríofa’s double in Said the Dead, a reader of faces and bodies and letters, listening to voices on the brink of extinction. On the evidence here, Lucia appears to have been a sympathetic, questioning end to 20th century mental illness.

Reading is Ní Ghríofa’s form of doing justice in these lives, but reading is two-sided, a kind of love and a kind of analysis. At the beginning, his presence on the page is different: he is there as if he is searching for “I”, but he calls himself at one point as “Reader” who leads even Lucia and her staff, who takes authority and responsibility for all these dead, visible souls. Ní Ghríofa’s support for patients and their remaining records is second to none. Like Freud and other famous cases, he will use names only. But the Reader is also busy and passionate: he is the one who follows the dead, impossibly, from the written books to their hopes and complaints, dreams and extravagant desires. This is what gives this book its extraordinary power and familiarity.