Against Hibernian Exceptionalism

Beyond ‘stagnation and change’?: Path dependency, translation and the ‘layering’ over time of Irish penal policy

“…This account has not escaped criticism, however. One of a new generation of Irish criminologists, Louise Brangan (2021, 2022) adopts a postcolonial or southern theory lens to launch a swingeing critique of the exceptionalism argument. Her basis for doing so is that Ireland's exceptionalism is premised on ‘the belief that when it came to punishment and penal culture in the second half of the twentieth century, not much happened here at all’ (Brangan, 2022, p.145).…”

“…One of a new generation of Irish criminologists, Louise Brangan (2021, 2022) adopts a postcolonial or southern theory lens to launch a swingeing critique of the exceptionalism argument. Her basis for doing so is that Ireland's exceptionalism is premised on ‘the belief that when it came to punishment and penal culture in the second half of the twentieth century, not much happened here at all’ (Brangan, 2022, p.145). Taking aim at characterisations of the period as one of ‘neglect’, ‘stagnation’ and ‘calcification’ (Behan, 2018; Griffin, 2018; Kilcommins et al., 2004; O'Donnell, 2008), she argues that theorising Irish penality in a more appreciative manner renders visible its ‘pastoral’ characteristics, among them a concern with family, community and a clear suspicion of the prison as socially disruptive.…”

“…The public concern which had swept the country during the 1997 election quickly dissipated and by the 2002 general election crime was once again off the electoral agenda (Kilcommins et al., 2004, p.139). This was Ireland's ‘punitive penal moment ’ (Brangan, 2022, p.146, italics added), not ‘punitive turn ’. For another, the impact of these measures on the justice system was quite mixed.…”

“…Among Western jurisdictions at least, the Irish penal literature appears as an outlier to the criminological preference for penal change over stasis (Rubin, 2023). In the past decade or so a significant body of work on ‘Hibernian exceptionalism’ to broader punitive trends has emerged, within which the dominant characterisation of Irish penality is that it is exceptional for having been ‘largely stagnant from the middle to late twentieth century’ (Brangan, 2022, p.142). As a jurisdiction that appears synonymous with ‘stagnation’ or ‘inertia’ (O'Donnell, 2008) rather than change it appears as a particularly apposite case study for the examination of processes of path dependency across time.…”

Historical Gendered Institutional Violence: A Research Agenda for Criminologists

“…It also echoes the discipline's tendency to see violence in the street, in the home, and by the state as "separate and separable" (Walklate, 2018, p. 621). Criminology's failure to engage with Ireland's gendered mass confinement may also relate to the perceived geographic irrelevance of Ireland and its deviation from the template of Britain and the United States (Brangan, 2022). Further compounding the invisibility of the case is its characterization as "historical" within a discipline that often narrows its focus to the present (Lawrence, 2012).…”