Introduction

Penality at the Periphery: Deficits, Absences, and Negation

“…Ireland is a predominantly White, Western, European, and Christian nation, and it has the major benefit of being English-speaking. All that being true makes Ireland’s instance as a peripheralized state within the criminological imagination all the more interesting and particularly instructive as a national case study (Brangan, 2022). Ireland is part of the Atlantic Isles, yet time and again we see accounts of English-speaking penal patterns that do not include reference to Ireland, as well as numerous characterizations of European penality that bear no resemblance to how people are punished in Ireland.…”

“…I have written elsewhere about the need to ensure Irish criminology advances its own focus beyond preoccupations with Anglophone penology (Brangan, 2020, 2022). There isn’t sufficient space to delve into it in sufficient depth here, but I remain cautious of earnestly aligning Ireland with other post-colonial nations that are peripheralized in the global economic order, as this might feed into an uncritical disposition where Ireland has a post-colonial memory but a Global Northern outlook.…”

“…How did our penal system get here? When looking at the critical decades of 1970s-1990s the term that now increasingly defines Irish penality is “Hibernian exceptionalism” (Brangan, 2020, 2022).…”

“…Simply put, by reading Irish penal history “from the centre” (Connell, 2006), using the vanguard lenses of punitiveness or penal welfarism, and without reflecting on the appropriateness of their attendant conceptions of punishment and penal politics, can point toward inappropriate metrics and cultural practices from which to conduct our analyses. Our “academic dependence” on mainstream concepts can lead to policy practices in our own contexts seeming “irrelevant” (Alatas, 2003) As I have written elsewhere, “if the theory has limited explanatory power here, the theory is lacking in this particular context, not that the context itself is lacking in activity, culture, values and ideas” (Brangan, 2022: 151). The problem of Irish penal history then is not one of absence, but one of invisibility (ibid.…”

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).…”