“…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.…”