The Big House and the “Big” House

In Ireland, the landlord class, broadly referred to as the Anglo-Irish, began in the seventeenth

century to construct conspicuous domiciles from which their power over their large

landholdings emanated; as Terence Dooley tells us, the project of the impressive structures that

became broadly known as the “Big House”, reached a peak in the period between 1820 and

1845. Starting around the same period but with their construction accelerating sharply in the

years after the famine, around twenty- two district asylums (and one branch asylum) were

constructed in with an architectural style and geographical preference that was profoundly

reminiscent of these Big House. The similarity is given away by the identical colloquial

signifiers by which these institutions came to be known: The Big House, and the Big House. A

local asylum was as likely to be referred to as a Big House as any landlord’s estate. In the

period encompassing and immediately following the country’s struggle for independence

however, the Anglo-Irish country mansions began to buckle under their own weight, with

countless numbers experiencing abandonment, sale, and demolition.

Asylums on the other hand, renamed to District Mental Hospitals by the Free State Government

in 1925 — what Patrick Quinlan calls ‘the institutional equivalent of applying green paint on

a red letterbox’ —, would continue to grow and expand. These thirty or so relics of British

administration in Ireland former the bedrock of a network of psychiatric institutions that

defined the nation’s approach to mental illness. Since the 1980s there have been improvements.

Nonetheless it has proven extremely difficult for the state to shake off these sites entirely –

more difficult still for them to do so in a humane way. Despite stagnation in the growth of the

general population, the number of people contained within the walls of psychiatric institutions

grew throughout the middle part of Ireland’s twentieth century, peaking in 1958 at 21,075 —

making Ireland’s institutionalised population per capita the highest in the world.
This is an essay about land and power, deference and control, prestige and humiliation. I want

to bring together the stories of two kinds of institutions that had an immense effect on the social

and physical landscape of Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first is the story

of the decline, sale and abandonment of the Big House. The second is the story of what defined

the terms for the development and eventual sclerosis of institutions for psychiatric care — or,

as it may be, psychiatric confinement — in Ireland’s nineteenth and twentieth century.

It is hoped that by interweaving these two stories we can gain an insight into both the ways in

which the Big House was remembered and preserved (or not) in Ireland’s post-independence

period and the ways in which the geographical, institutional, and metaphysical legacy of the

Big House, in a minor way in certain contexts and a major one in others, percolated downwards

to define the experience of a class of people very rarely associated with the luxury and power

of the country mansion. The initial inspiration for this research was an intentionally provocative

attempt to draw parallels between historical phenomena that most would regard as definitely

casually distinct. Yet as it progressed, my understanding was clarified: the course of Irish

history saw sites of power transformed into theatres for the humiliation; when the humiliated

force of Irish nationalism sought to enact embarrassment on the landlord class, it contorted the

sites and symbols of the oppressor into a form that was commensurate with the reclamation of

dignity. In doing so, new theatres of humiliation were constructed — some of which were

located in the very same physical structures and landscapes once dominated by the Anglo-Irish,

only barely altered — which entailed an institutional power that itself oppressed another class

of people. Although Elizabeth Bowen was referring to the passage of ancestors of different

outlooks and temperaments though her own family estate of Bowen’s Court and not the

alternative use of Big Houses in the twentieth century, she captured the dynamic well when she
suggested: ‘In raising a family house one is raising a theatre: one knows the existing players,

guesses at their successors, but cannot tell what plays may be acceded there.’

These places could not rid themselves entirely of the past which created them; their geography,

the architecture of the structures left behind and the collective memory of what these places

continue to taunt our understanding of the characters and events which took to the stage in

these theatres.

To draw out this thesis, this essay examines the legacy of the Big House on psychiatric hospitals

in three parts. Firstly, the direct influence that Victorian sensibilities of gentility had on the

construction of the district asylums that sprung up around Ireland in the nineteenth century is

drawn out. The impact this had on the nature of psychiatric care as Ireland’s hospitalised

mentally ill population grew swollen in the first four decades of independence is then analysed

in respect of geographic location and the eminence of the architecture. Secondly, the parallel

relationship that the country mansions of eminent landlords and large-scale psychiatric

institutions shared with the vast swathes of land around them is discussed. Certain similarities

between the scale of and activities occurring on landed estates and psychiatric institutions

created deeper parallels in the patterns of deference and onset of decline for these institutions.

While a variety of institutions will be referred to in the course of these first two parts, Portrane

District Mental Hospital — later known as St. Ita’s — is the emblematic example for the

arguments advanced. Thirdly, it is argued that the nascent Irish nationalism of the 1920s, 30s

and 40s, faced a characteristically post-colonial crisis in respect of its contradictory needs to

humiliate the colonial oppressor and victoriously claim the prizes of national struggle.

Examination of the transformation of Hazelwood House in Sligo shows how Big House

adaptation by the State, although rare for a variety of reasons in the period, could act as an

outlet for the inherent tension involved in the receipt of colonial legacies.
Gentility, Isolation and Intimidation

While it is important to remember Finola O’Kane’s remark that ‘landscape, estate and social

design however, varied by necessity from one geographical location to another,’ three abiding

features of the Irish country house can be said to have percolated into the design of nineteenth

century asylums. Firstly, following widely rejected experimentation with the Bethlehem

Asylum in London and the widespread publicity received — thanks in large part to the writings

of Samuel Tuke — for the York retreat, asylums tended to be rural and therefore relatively

isolated by virtue of their location alone. At least partially, this was rooted in the resurgence of

ideas in the second half of the eighteenth century which suggested that the rural environment

was one that was more moral in character. Privacy was another reason that many Irish landlords

preferred to isolate their domiciles as much as possible from the wider community. Much as

these values would induce the gentry to construct their domiciles amidst isolated countryside,

nineteenth century psychiatric practice, which was characterised by a desire to reform the

morality of patients, meant that Asylums tended to be built in relatively rural areas.

In the instance of Portrane, the last and most expensive asylum built under British

administration in Ireland, the institution occupied land sold by the Evans family at a slightly

earlier date, which included their residence Portrane House and what was initially 461 hundred

acres of heavily wooded demesne — features that had once put the occupiers of Portrane out

of sight of the urban centre of Dublin. The consequence of the acquisition of this land was, as

Quilan puts it, ‘the governors could hardly have identified a site anywhere within a similar

radius of the capital that conveyed a greater sense of physical and psychological isolation from

the wider world.’

Beyond geographic isolation, these institutions featured superficially similar architectural

features to the Big Houses with which the Irish population would have been familiar, especially

in respect of the design of their facades. Many of these institutions were reminiscent of the

hodgepodge of Palladian, neo-classical and gothic designs that were popular amongst country

house architects in the previous period. The image of the asylum as a more or less genteel

place, replete with aesthetically pleasing approaches and wide, expansive gardens ensconsed

behind a neat wall, was sufficiently abiding such that Portrane, built at the end of the nineteenth

century, as well as the Castlerea auxiliary hospital built in the Free State, both exhibit these

tendencies in their architectural stylings. The irony here is that whereas the Big House was the

domicile of the powerful landlord class, asylums were originally constructed as a means to

remove the ‘lunatic poor’ from sight. The other options – leaving them on the street as vagrants,

sending them to filthy utilitarian workhouses, or exporting them to the colonies-- were

distasteful. If someone could be declared mad, the asylum could seem like a good option for

those who did not fit appropriately into the mechanic solidarity that inhered within the social

life or Victorian Ireland. Despite some good intentions at the start of the asylum building

project, interest in the welfare of patients more-or-less began and ended with improving the

view from their windows – if they were lucky enough to have a room with a window, that is.

In some respects, at least, the problem is and was built into the project of mass residential

psychiatric care itself. If you place enough forgotten people far away from where anyone can

see them, rot becomes inevitable.

The sense of the asylum or mental hospital as a place for the unwanted in society emerged from

the nineteenth century into the twentieth under a cover of a thick layer of denial and ignorance.

Regarding his experience working in Grangegorman, Portrane and Mullingar mental hospitals
in the late 1950s and early 1960s Prof. Ivor Browne, Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health

Board from 1968, wrote that:

‘Mental hospitals are not places where those suffering from mental illness come to be treated
and returned well again to the community. They are simply places where all those for whom
society has no place are dumped to get them out of sight - the aged, the mentally retarded, the
epilectic, the disturbed, and all those who lack the competence and wherewithal to gain a
foothold in society.’

The visual similarity between country mansions and district asylums provided a source of satire

on a number of occasions in Irish popular discourse. In 1914, the Kerry News, related the

humorous story of a ‘mill worker who went out of his mind and was removed to an asylum’.

When asked by a passing co-worker whether he would soon be returning home, the man replied

‘“Wot!”… “Leave a big house an’ a garden like this an’ cum back to wark? Do yo think ah’m

wrong in my heid?”[sic].’ A satirical character-based column printed in the Connacht Tribune

in 1932 played the image of the Big house against the notorious district mental hospital in

Ballinasloe: when one man asks after another man’s love interest, ‘It was a big house the

women that took a fancy to you lived in, wasn’t it[?}’, a bystander suggests ‘She lived in

Ballinasloe Lunatic asylum.’

The irony in these examples belies the broader sense in which the architecture of both Big

Houses and asylums embodied and therefore wielded power architecturally in the same way

that law wields power linguistically. That is to suggest that buildings in each category, as well

as those which elide the two, have the twin qualities of both reproducing and relying upon a

historically transmitted grammar whose structures were largely built in order to legitimate

power seized at an earlier stage by force. The qualified doctors that worked in these institutions,

especially those who were most senior, were perhaps so easily accorded the deference that they

were because of the extent to which inmates and the families of those who committed them

were made to feel small and unimportant. How could they not have, entering surroundings that,

for many of those Irish people who encountered them in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries at least, could have reminded them of nothing more than the residencies of the

landlords who presided capriciously over their surrounding communities. There is some blame

to be laid at the feet of Irish men and women for whom it was far more convenient to dump a

problem relative into an asylum and forget about them than to meaningfully keep tabs on their

treatment, but in any such calculation it is vital to remember that a learned kind of silence, was

essential when it came to ensuring that the insight of outsiders into the functioning of these

institutions. Until 1978 at least, that understand, beyond perhaps the erroneous assumption that

extensive landscaping and grand architecture were representative of conditions for inmates on

the inside, was essentially null.

Finally, perhaps the most striking shared feature of asylums and the estates of the landlord class

were the surrounding demesnes and the high walls which bounded them. Before the gradual

onset of governance by medical authority and the middle-class rate payers on local Mental

Hospital Committees, the governors of these new institutions were drawn from the same

Anglo-Irish ruling class that was so enamoured with extensive landscaping on their own estates

— at least when they could afford it. Consequently, the idealistic notions that accompanied that

initial stage of asylum building saw psychiatric hospitals with well-maintained gardens and

picturesque approaches that were highly reminiscent of the most gentile of the Big Houses.

Although some patients did enjoy the benefits of these landscapes, the most disturbed lacked

such privileges and their access to the areas outside their dormitories was confined to airing

yards which were, largely because of the desire to maintain the air of pleasantry that would

have been undermined by the presence of actual patients, almost never placed in the front of

the asylums and were rather enclosed within courtyards surrounded by buildings and enclosure

walls. As Quinlan puts it:

‘The imperative to compose a set piece of an architecturally distinguished facade within a

genteel parkland setting clearly took precedence over the daily experience of patients,
 particularly disadvantaged were the more acutely disturbed for whom the airing court offered
their only release from the indoor regimen.’

The walls themselves are worthy of discussion. Whereas Irish landlords built walls for both

aesthetic and isolationist reasons, psychiatric institutions employed walls to (1) protect ‘the

insane from the taunts and cruelties of an intolerant world outside’ and (2) protect the outside

world from ‘the insane securely contained within’. When the walls were brought down in the

1960s, a phenomenon which ironically the effect of leading to more patient containment within

wards, generations had grown ‘up regarding those who dwelt behind asylum walls as

potentially dangerous “others.”’ This was not dissimilar to the effect of the walls on the social

isolation of the Anglo-Irish class, which they began to feel painfully as a consequence of their

political isolation after independence. The image of the ‘leading British loyalist, secure and

affluent in his many acres, enclosed by high demesne walls’ was one which continued to inspire

resentment in Irish nationalists.

All of this is to suggest that, in much the same way that Anglo-Irish landlords and their families

created a profound psychological distance between themselves and the ordinary Irish people

who lived around them — in part ‘by locating their houses amidst hundreds of acres of parkland

and gardens, by building high demise walls,’ — so too did the legacies of the big house on

psychiatric institutions affect a deep physical, social and psychological isolation of Irish

psychiatric patients from the mainstream of society. Bowen might as well have been speaking

of asylums as of her own family’s country mansion when she wrote:

‘’Each of these houses, with its intense, centripetal life, is isolated by something very much
more lasting than the physical fact of space: the isolation is innate; it is an affair of origin….
Each of these family homes… is an island — and, like an island, a world.’

Yet whereas Irish society saw no need to maintain the estates of the landholding class when

their declining economic and political fortunes saw the abandonment, sale and demolition of

their historic domiciles, a post-independence Catholic society that was increasingly intolerant
of the errant behaviour of those on the margins of society and lacked the capacity to cater in

any alternative manner to the large asylum population it had inherited from the British

administration required the maintenance and expansion of what were now called District

Mental Hospitals.

The 1927 Report Of the Commission on The Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor Including

The Insane Poor, recommended the scaling down of these institutions to numbers of no more

than one hundred patients per hospital, as well as drawing attention to the fact that many

hospitals were already overcrowded, exhibiting a tendency to hold onto patients for many years

at a time, and managed by RMSs who were overwhelmed in terms of both administrative and

medical responsibility. None of this was to change however, and in many respects, it was to

grow a great deal worse. Damien Brennan attributes this to a kind of ‘institutional momentum’

created by the employment provided by these employment to local communities, the obstinacy

and power of medical authorities and sheer lack of other financially viable options for the care

of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled.

Overcrowding was consistently identified in the reports provided to the government by the

Inspector of Mental Hospitals in reports supplied to the government between 1929 and 1958.

Ballinasloe, Mullingar, Sligo, Portrane and Grangegorman among others were consistently

identified as overcrowded, a state which the reports themselves note led to high and avoidable

rates of patient death from illness induced by squalor – tuberculosis was one of the worst killers

on the ward. Moreover, overcrowding impacted on the psychiatric wellbeing of mental patients.

The lack of separate wards for the care of the intellectually disabled was a further problem.

Beyond overcrowding, inadequate bathing facilities and nutrition were consistently noted by

the Inspector. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the special report taken of Clonmel

District Mental Hospital in 1958, where patients in one ward shared one bath between 58
patients, were fed blackened potatoes prepared in kitchens equipped with garden tools, and for

whom ‘an occasional walk to the farmyard in the Summer’ was their only ‘glimpse of the

outside world.’ Patients who should have been treated and cared for in a period of days spent

years lost in the immense psychiatric complexes of Grangegorman, their needs and dignity

forgotten about by a society that had no interest in their welfare. It is worth quoting Browne at

length, who worked in Grangegorman in 1958:

‘At that time there were approximately 2,000 patients in Grangegorman … I had no way of
knowing it at the time, but the reason for the chaotic state of the hospital and the terrible
overcrowding was that although disturbed patients were constantly arriving in the admission
units, relatively few were being discharged… people simply got lost. Young disturbed men
and women, who nowadays would either be held in the assessment unit overnight and then
discharged or be admitted for a matter of days or weeks, were allowed to sink into despair in
one of the chronic wards, where they then remained for years.’

In 1981, one of the first visiting committees to Portrane described ‘broken floor tiles, blocked

or overflowing toilets and excrement smeared walls.’

Throughout this period, the mounting crisis in psychiatric care was ignored by wider society.

When newspapers did report on the goings-on in psychiatric care, it was in respect of the

meetings of District Hospital Committees, staffed by ratepayers – mostly relatively well-off

farmers -- who in some cases benefited from the free labour of the hospital's patients in the

form of unpaid “occupational therapy.” In other cases, members of these committees had

reportedly never even visited the hospitals they were supposed to be administering. When

newspapers did discuss the facilities in mental hospitals before the 1980s, as when the Irish

Independent reported that ‘at Portrane there were only four doctors to care for 1800 patients

and 500 residents of the hospital estate,’ these claims were downplayed by noting that ‘The

doctors were working under pressure, but they had to be reasonable… The treatment, on the

whole, was well abreast of treatment elsewhere.’ When the aforementioned 1958 report came

to light, it was deliberately suppressed for fear that information about the welfare of patients

would cause ‘undue stress to their relatives.’ Following this, the informative, if understated
reports of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals on each District Hospital, private institution and

institution for the care of the intellectually disabled were replaced by a high-level commentary

that gave little away about the horror that was enclosed within their walls. This was a wilful

ignorance, to be sure, but it was one made all the more possible by the way that these hospitals

were designed to stand outside the realm of dignified Ireland.

This essay argues that as well as these factors, the capacity of Irish society and politics to ignore

the declining state of psychiatric care until at least the 1980s was enhanced by an isolation

whose comprehension can be made more fulsome by an incorporation of the symbological,

geographic and architectural legacy of the Big House.

Labour, Land, Power and Control

The stories of Big Houses and psychiatric institutions intertwine once again in respect of land

and labour. The survival and flourishing of the grandest of the country mansions and the

expensive landscaping projects that surrounded them has been argued to have been contingent

on the rents from huge swathes of land in the possession of their residents. Emer Crooke, for

example, argues that ‘for these mansions to be in any way self-sustaining, many more than 100

or 200 acres were needed.’ When, starting in the period after the famine but accelerating from

the 1880s onwards, a number of factors including declining profits from the sale of agricultural

produce, the withholding of rents due to agrarian unrest, the unsustainability of debts and the

failure of the landholding class to adapt to the commercial imperatives of an increasingly

capitalist economy, the lifestyle and luxury embodied by these houses began to unravel. This

was accelerated by the passing of the 1923, 1932, and 1933 land acts, which entailed the

compulsory purchase of much of the land which was sustaining estates.

From an early stage, the agricultural labour of patients in asylums was seen as particularly

suitable to the Irish character, with asylums like Mullingar coming with over 100 acres of

surrounding farmland. The idea that manual labour was an effective element in the treatment

regime for the mentally ill persisted into the twentieth century, with the Inspector for Mental

Hospitals writing ‘In 1950, the area under cultivation in the farms associated with District and

Auxiliary Mental Hospitals was 2,190 acres … Apart from the obvious advantage of having a

farm attached to a large institution these farms offer a most valuable opportunity for providing

a suitable form of occupational therapy for the patients, particularly in this country where so

many are engaged in agricultural pursuits in ordinary life.’ The second function, that of making

the hospitals more self-sufficient, is suggested here. During the Emergency, when supplies

were extremely tight, Quinlan attributes effective deployment of psychiatric populations in

agricultural and other manufacturing work to the survival of the populations within these

institutions. However, it is worth noting that the profound growth of these institutions,

especially in respect of the acquiescence of ratepayers to that growth, may have facilitated the

mitigation of cost and supply issues associated with this kind of “occupational therapy.” While

acknowledging Damien Brennan’s argument that profits 'profits generated were artificial when

set against the overall cost of the system’, that costs did not ever reach a crisis point where the

institutional momentum might have stopped in its tracks may have something to do with the

reduction of costs through these means. The capacity for the level of agricultural expansion, as

I will now demonstrate, had much to do with the sale of landed estates.

With the onset of independence, the acreage and level of farming activity was to increase

rapidly in Irish District Mental Hospitals, especially after 1933. The direct connection here is

that it is likely that this acquisition of land by District Mental Hospitals was enabled by the

purchase of lands from the aforementioned landed estates through the Land Commission. This

remains an inference, as access to Land Commission records is still not extant. There are good
reasons to think that this was the case in Portrane and Ballinasloe at least, where the expansion

of the mental hospital’s demesne was directly onto the adjacent estate of Turvey. Moreover,

the timing of land purchases in Portrane and elsewhere directly follows the passage of the 1933

Land Act in particular, which removed exceptions associated with the breaking up of the

demesnes contained in the 1923 act. In 1929, Portrane Estate was listed as having 604 acres of

land, of which 68 were tilled along 376 reserved for the grass on which the hospital’s

substantial herd of cattle grazed. In 1934, the hospital expanded to 857 acres and by 1935 the

hospital’s total land use was 1006 acres. Similarly, in 1933 ‘The Harristown estate, Castlerea,

Co. Roscommon, comprising a dwellinghouse and 320 acres of land …[was]... acquired by the

Joint Committee of Management of the Ballinasloe Mental Hospital for the purposes of an

auxiliary mental hospital.’ Altogether, the landholdings of District Hospitals would reach their

collective peak in the 1950s at around 6486 acres.

Although Quinlan notes that the farming activities of mental hospitals had ‘neither the charm

of the vernacular nor the formal trappings encountered on the demesnes and some farms of the

gentry,’ the dynamics of power that were associated with the management of immense farms

by the RMSs and the Mental Hospital Committee Boards bear an eerie similarity to those

associated with the landlord class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. RMS of Portrane,

Dr Stanley Blake, who as we have already noted opted to live in Portrane House even as

overcrowding was endemic in his institution, is described by Prof. Browne in terms that are

highly disturbing:

‘In those days Dr Stanley Blake, who as long since passed away, was the RMS in St Ita’s,
which he ruled like a feudal lord. If two nurses were proposing to get married, they had to
present themselves to him for his permission. … When patients arrived from St Brendan’s,
Blake had a rather novel method of diagnosis. He would review a parade of the new arrivals,
selecting patients according to their strength - this one for the coal yard, another for the
laundry, pig yard and so on.’
In an institution where discharge was rare, Browne began to make some progress with a patient

and anticipated his release, only to be informed by a nurse ‘You can’t discharge him, he’s the

RMS’ gardener.’

The patterns of deference and obedience, namely the presentation of tenants to their landlords

and their heirs on different occasions of significance, described by Kevin McKenna on landed

estates in Galway in the nineteenth century bear some resemblance to the relationship between

patients and doctors in these new institutions. The ideology which sustained landlordism was

on its last legs from the onset of the Land Wars in the 1870s. On much of this same land, and

indeed in some instances in those very same structures, an ideology based on claims to

empirical medical truth sustained the unimpeachable authority of the chief medical practitioner.

This would be legally calcified with the 1945 Mental Health Treatment Act, which removed

the role of the judiciary in the admission of patients to psychiatric institutions and enshrined

this power entirely on the basis of the legitimacy of diagnostic criteria.

In 1932, the Irish Times lamented the passage of the country mansions into hands other than

their original owners by writing ‘A great house, whether its history has been good or bad,

possesses a soul that vanishes with its owners.’ In a sense however, the soul of many of these

estates lived on the new uses of their land and of their domiciles. Architecture and geography

entail their own hierarchies even when the ideologies which initially sustained those hierarchies

disappear and are replaced by others.

Whatever one thinks of free labour, (1) the onset of a gradual decrease in the hospitalised

psychiatric population from 1958 onwards caused by new pharmacological treatments; (2) the

increased mechanisation of farming, which was unsuitable to involvement from psychiatric

patients and required an investment Mental Health Authorities weren’t willing to make and;

(3) the increasing proportion of psychiatric populations that were either infirm or intellectually
disabled, contributed to a collapse in the self-sufficiency of psychiatric institutions whose

structures had grown reliant on a large supply of free labour. Lacking the option that had been

available to the Anglo-Irish gentry faced with a similar rot in their model of sustainability —

institutions had statutory requirements to cater to catchment areas and therefore had no recourse

to sale or abandonment — a deep malaise set in at many institutions. Quinlan elucidates this in

respect of the structures at Portrane:

‘What was feasible [in terms of maintenance] in an era when a large able-bodied
patient population could undertake such work would become a growing challenge as
the buildings advanced in years and the cohorts being cared for within them declined
in capability.’

The discovery that, in 1978, up to two hundred people with intellectual disabilities were living

in six huts originally designed to house the workers that built the 1897 structure — huts whose

floors were soaked through with years of urine — was accompanied by revelations that the

dining hall was populated by rats and birds. In 1982, Portrane was without power for 31 hours,

a reflection of ‘mechanical and electrical system that had limped along for years on a policy of

make do and mend.’ Proceeds from the sale of Portrane’s many excess acres ‘never came home

to roost where most of this money should have, namely St. Ita’s,’ according to the memoir

written by a disgruntled employee who began working in the hospital in the 1950s. Portrane,

which now stands abandoned after decades of neglect, offers a final tragic parallel to the many

Big Houses across the country left in similar states.

Hazelwood: A Site of Humiliation and Redemption

The final portion of this essay looks to the adaptation of houses at Hazelwood to explore how

direct conversion of Big Houses reflected desires whose roots reflected deep postcolonial

tensions.
Hazelwood was the only country house identified which was converted for use as an auxiliary

unit for the secular District Mental Health Hospital in Sligo, with houses at Drumcar and

Kilcornan both being taken over by religious orders who ran their institutions independently.

The controversy surrounding Hazelwood has received extensive attention in the work of

Mairéad Carew, Terence Dooley and Emer Crooke, although their narratives largely cease after

the house was sold to the Sligo District Health Committee in 1947, noting mainly that it was

sold again in 1969 to serve as headquarters of an Italian manufacturing company. A brief

summary of the important points is worthwhile however: Hazelwood House was the former

residence of the Wynne Family. Regarded as architecturally important largely because of its

architect, Richard Castle, who among other high-profile structures was responsible for the

design of Leinster House, it came into the possession of the Land Commission around 1927,

which, after one attempt to sell it in 1937 made another in 1946 which stipulated that it had to

be demolished. The National Monuments Act of 1931, at least as interpreted by those

responsible, meant there was no statutory obligation to protect the structure. Despite this, the

prospective demolition sparked a small-scale furore, largely contained within pages of the Irish

Times and consequently, as Crooke has argued, within the minds of the country’s political and

cultural elite. A large number of potential uses for Hazelwood were floated, with many, such

as its use as a hotel, being dismissed as unfeasible. Despite some indications that the Minister

for Lands, Seán Moylan, was extracting some amount of personal enjoyment from the

destruction of this historic residence, Hazelwood was eventually sold to the Sligo District

Mental Hospital in 1947, where it opened its doors in 1925 to alleviate overcrowding in the

main facility to the tune of approximately 90 male patients.

The decision to transform Hazelwood into a mental hospital, specifically, and the extent to

which this may have been a sort of post-colonial compromise is worth considering. The state

had not seen fit to accept the gift of Russborough House, offered in 1929, nor to make anything
of the grounds of Muckross House, gifted in 1933, until the 1960s. Spending significant

amounts of money on the restoration and maintenance of buildings which were seen as

monuments to a widely resented and now increasingly alien Anglo-Irish class was simply

unacceptable. These houses represented the humiliation of the Irish; that which the ordinary

man could not have.

Michel Foucault argued that the desire to confine and control madness was facilitated in part

by the creation of sites of isolation and stigma for lepers in the middle-ages, which then became

the very same sites in which the mentally ill were confined and stigmatised centuries later. In

much the same way, Hazelwood House’s history meant that it was a site of stigma against the

ordinary Irish people; its continued use demanded that it be symbolically transformed in a

manner that would humiliate its previous inhabitants and thereby restore the dignity of its

dominators.

We can see in the words of even the most ardent nationalists, such as Captain Patrick Giles,

that there was something in the architectural majesty of these buildings that the spirit of Irish

nationalist sought to dominate. The cheapest way to dominate such buildings, of course, is

simply to demolish them. Yet in the case of Hazelwood house, where there was a perceived

need to compromise with a community more sympathetic to its restoration, the option of

turning it into a mental hospital may have seemed an attractive solution. To transform the

esrtwhile glory of the oppressor into a site for the unwanted, the disabled and the insane, can

be understood as a means of inverting the experience of past humiliation in order to process it.

In the Irish Times, W.J. Tolan, senior Alderman and member of the District Mental Hospital

committee reflexively suggested that ‘‘I feel that it is a great pity to pull down a building like

Hazelwood in these times. Surely it could be used as a sanatorium or something like that.’ The

sanatorium and the mental hospital, both representing places for the depositing of society’s
wretched, fulfil similar functions in discourse. Indeed, as David Kilgannon relates, the despised

and the insane were elided in Sligo, at least according to testimony from a nurse that ‘it was no

secret that many that went to St. Columba’s [Sligo District Mental Hospital] were social cases

- an old person or someone the family couldn’t get on with.’ The site where the oppressor was

materially sanctified could be obtained and made profane; simultaneously, it could be said that

the wealth of that oppressor had been captured and exploited.

An article in Western People, reflects a spirit of victory at the opening of the new auxiliary unit

at Hazelwood: ‘the house has now been restored to its former beauty. A total of £16,000 has

been spent on the building and it will go a long way towards solving the overcrowding problem

at the Mental Hospital.’ Notable not just because it is one of the rare public acknowledgements

of an overcrowding problem in the hospital, which was only barely alleviated by the opening

of Hazelwood, it reflects the apparent synthesis of the desire to both claim and to invert the

legacy of the landlord class. In 1953, at a meeting of the Sligo-Leitrim hospital board, a member

proposed that the unit be renamed the ‘Liam Lynch Home’, in honour of the anti-Treaty Civil

War military leader. The extent of the controversy caused by this is said to have led patients to

crane their necks out of their windows to see what was going on . Although the discussion

quickly devolved into a disagreement over whether or not Seamus Devins signed the Treaty or

not (he did, in fact, not), its passions are indicative of the manner in which the post-colonial

reclamation of dignity can only ever be partial. To fully incorporate Hazelwood into the

national myth would be to give its inherent profanity as a site for the insane an association with

Irish identity that was uncomfortable; to leave its signification untouched meant that the

oppressor could never be fully purged.

Conclusion
This has been the story, or more precisely the start of a story, about two categories of buildings,

which in different contexts and at different times have been paid extreme deference and been

subject to rank revulsion. The Big House and the psychiatric hospital alike have found

themselves filled with hope and with sorrow, in states of liveliness and then abandonment.

There is much, much, more that remains to discuss in respect of the influence on these two sites

of power and helplessness on one another. For one, there is much work to be done in respect

of the minutes of Mental Hospital Committees and the precise formal and informal

relationships they had to influential farmers in respect of agricultural production that I have left

largely untouched. Beyond that, demands of space have meant that I could not explore in any

worthwhile level of detail the different structure of discourse that accompanied that conversion

of country houses by religious orders to independently managed institutions for the care of the

intellectually disabled — especially in respect of Drumcar and Kilcornan house.

Three conclusions remain despite these omissions: (1) the isolation of psychiatric institutions

was informed and occasionally affected by architectural and geographic legacy of Anglo-Irish

aesthetic and moral preferences which emerged, in part, from their own experiences with

country mansions; (2) the activities of the Land Commission in respect of breaking up country

estates likely contributed to the expansion of the District Psychiatric Hospitals agricultural

capacity, which itself created parallels between the governance of landed estates and

psychiatric institutions; (3) the conversion of Hazelwood House to a psychiatric hospital was

accompanied by a discourse which indicated that its significance went beyond mere

preservation and utility, reflecting deep contradictions in the soul of the nation.

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