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accommodation of a different kind can be provided, but also exemplifies the utter hopelessness, or rather the total impossibility, of providing for the due treatment of insanity in small local asylums. No adequate provision is made or is likely to be made, in such establishments, for the medical or moral treatment of the unfortunate patients; no classification; no employment; no sufficient grounds for air or exercise. Hence the necessity of a coercive and severe system of treatment. The chances of recovery, if not altogether extinguished, are at least reduced to their very lowest term.161

      The select committee went on to demonstrate its point by citing specific evidence it received relating to conditions in Kilkenny, Wexford and Lifford. In the case of Wexford, the committee drew attention to the evidence of Dr Francis White, Inspector General of Prisons, who reported that ‘the state of the Wexford lunatics in the local asylum is most disgraceful; nothing could equal the state in which I found that asylum; it is part of the old House of Industry’:

      The number amounted to fourteen males and seventeen females; the place was quite dilapidated; the yards gloomy; the dinner rooms equally so; the cells were the worst I ever saw. There were two patients under restraint, one of whom was chained to a wall. When I went to his cell, with the keeper and the medical officer, I asked to go in. The keeper said it would be dangerous and frightful to go in. However we went in. He was naked, with a parcel of loose straw around him. He darted forward at me, and were it not that he was checked by a chain which went round his leg, and was fastened by a hook to the wall, he would have caught hold of me, and probably used violence. I asked how it was possible they could allow a man to remain in such a state; they said they were obliged to do so, as the funds were so limited that they had not money to buy clothes for him, and that if they had clothes they would have let him out. Now, the consequence of this treatment was, that the man became so violent that his case was made tenfold worse. I went to another cell, and though the individual there was not chained, he was nearly in as bad circumstances as the other. One of the two was once a respectable person. Altogether, those two cases were the most frightful I ever witnessed; I could not describe the horror which seized me when I saw them.162

      When asked if there was ‘any moral superintendence’ at the Wexford establishment, White was blunt: ‘There was both a male and female keeper, but they appeared to me totally unfit for the discharge of their duties’. There were similar problems with staffing at other locations. An appendix to the select committee report recounted that in Clonmel District Lunatic Asylum163 efforts to recruit appropriate staff were ‘a sad calamity’, and Dr James Flynn, manager, reported that ‘the majority of attendants had to be removed, after my appointment, for drunkenness, cruelty to and neglect of patients, and a total disregard for order and discipline’.164

      To illustrate the difficulties faced, Flynn presented three examples of objectionable behaviour in Clonmel:

      I visited the Female Refractory Ward, as usual, on 13th September 1841, and found a patient crying bitterly. I had before asked the reason, and received an indefinite reply; however, I examined on this day the cause, and found her arm had been broken for a period of four days, and no report whatever made by the nurse in charge.

      I visited the Male Refractory [Ward] on the night of the 6th of October 1841, and found all the keepers of the House, save one, playing cards; the one not so occupied was stupidly drunk in an adjoining bath room.

      I visited the Female Tranquil Ward on the night of the 19th December 1841, at 10 o’clock, and found the assistant nurse perfectly intoxicated.

      Having considered evidence relating to all places of confinement of the ‘lunatic poor’ in Ireland, ranging from District Asylums to prisons, the 1843 select committee made a series of recommendations:

      1.The necessity of discontinuing, as soon as practicable, the committals of lunatics of gaols and bridewells.

      2.The necessity of amending the Act of the 1 Vict. Cap. 27. [Dangerous Lunatic Act 1838], which appears, on the Authority of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, to have led to the most serious abuse.165

      3.The inexpedience of appropriating the Union Workhouses as places either for the custody or the treatment of the insane, for both which purposes they appear wholly unsuited.

      4.The necessity of providing one central establishment for criminal lunatics, under the immediate control and direction of the government of Ireland, to be supported from the same funds and under the system adopted in respect to criminal lunatics in England.

      5.The necessity of increasing the accommodation for pauper lunatics in Ireland, and of providing for the cases of epilepsy, idiocy and chronic disease, by an increased number of the District Asylums, by an enlargement of those asylums, or by the erection of separate establishments specially appropriated for these classes of patients.166

      Following its completion, Lord Eliot, the Chief Secretary, sent the select committee’s report to the governors of the District Asylums, seeking their comments. The report was discussed by the governors of the Richmond District Asylum, Dublin on 3 January 1844 and, while they supported the call for asylums for criminal lunacy, epilepsy, idiocy and chronic insanity, the Richmond governors suggested that, since these measure would take time, District Asylums should be offered some measure of relief by permitting the admission of harmless and chronic patients into workhouses.167

      Overall, however, the 1843 select committee saw expanding the public asylum system as the key solution to the problems presented by the mentally ill, recommending more public asylums, larger asylums and specialist asylums for certain groups of patients.168 This was a familiar response to the problems presented by the mentally ill and it defined public mental health services in Ireland for almost a century after the 1843 report. The ‘criminally insane’ were one of the groups most affected by this trend and these are considered next.

      Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum (Ireland) Act 1845: Insanity and Criminal Responsibility

      The idea of reduced criminal responsibility among the mentally ill and intellectually disabled has a long history in most societies for which there is recorded history, stretching from ancient Greece and Rome to contemporary Europe and the US.169 This idea was also reflected in early Irish law which specified that responsibility for an offence committed by a person of unsound mind devolved to their guardian, and injuries caused by missiles thrown by a drúth (person with intellectual disability) did not require compensation: it was the responsibility of the passer-by to keep out of the way.170

      In more recent centuries, defences based on insanity were presented in the Irish courts with varying degrees of success.171 One of the most celebrated was that of Captain William Stewart, whose ship, the Mary Russell, sailed into Cork Harbour from the West Indies on 25 June 1828. On board, seven crew members had been brutally killed by the Captain, who appeared insane.172 The Reverend William Scoresby, a fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh and Member of the Institute of France, was one of the first eyewitnesses on the vessel, and described it as ‘a scene of carnage so appalling … as to render, by sympathy, association and memory combined, the impression indelible’.173

      At Captain Stewart’s trial, medical evidence of insanity was compelling and the jury returned a guilty verdict but added that they believed Stewart to have been insane at the time.174 The Chief Baron at the trial rejected this verdict; it was argued that the law did not recognise this as guilt because the act was committed while the person did not know right from wrong. The jury promptly altered its verdict to ‘not guilty’ owing to Stewart’s insanity. This change of verdict in the early 1800s prefigured the verdict of ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ outlined much later in Ireland’s Criminal Law (Insanity) Act 2006 (Chapter 7).175

      Internationally, the field of forensic psychiatry took significant steps forward in the mid-1800s with the publication of Dr Isaac Ray’s ‘Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity’ in 1838176 and the emergence of the McNaughton Rules which proved hugely influential as the insanity defence became more widely used in the courtrooms of Great Britain, Ireland, the US and elsewhere in the latter part of the 1800s.177 Against this background, the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum (Ireland) Act 1845178 was introduced to establish ‘a central asylum for insane persons

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