Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa review – lost voices from an Irish asylum

Cork Mental Hospital, also known as Our Lady’s, was once the longest building in Ireland: a monster of 19th-century gothic, much added to before its closure in the 1990s, that stares from the north bank down to the River Lee and the city beyond. In recent years, a lot of the complex has been turned, predictably, into apartments. A developer’s website now invites you to “Live comfortably, live conveniently, live with us”. This, surely, is a spectral sort of invitation: hard for “us” not to conjure, amid bright mockup interiors, the fretful shades of the unwell – and the unwilling. When Doireann Ní Ghríofa – celebrated poet and author of the nonfiction A Ghost in the Throat – began exploring the derelict site several years ago, she recognised it straight away as a place she might herself, but for historical fortune, have ended up. Said the Dead is an intimately researched but also wildly imaginative study of lives (mostly female) lived and often concluded during the hospital’s first 70 years or so. The book’s historical span is a matter of official constraint. When she goes divining in the archive, chiefly in the hospital’s large green casebooks, Ní Ghríofa must stop reading at a century’s distance: anything more recent risks breaching confidentiality. As a result, the Victorian and Edwardian voices she has been hearing fall silent in the early years of an independent Ireland. Regardless, her notes seethe with the names, characters, adventures and misfortunes of patients. Bridget, heavily pregnant, who had emigrated to America but was thrown out and sent home by her brother when he discovered her condition. Anna Martha, a painter, “peculiar in her antics”, who pulled a gun on magistrates who wished to put her in the asylum. Sixteen-year-old Dora, who “wishes to be dead”: a great reader of novels, beaten into depression by her parents. Muriel, whose husband was Terence MacSwiney: republican lord mayor of Cork, soon to die on hunger strike in Brixton prison. …