Laissez-faire politics of the time said that the government should not meddle and should allow the famine to fix itself. The British government was slow to intervene. A series of crop failures left many Irish with few places to turn for help. Many Irish had grown dependent on the potato because it produced a high yield on their small plots and had great nutritional value. The potato blight that triggered the Great Hunger was brought by ship from the eastern seaboard of Canada and the United States. Walsh is a founding member of the Consortium for Medical Humanities and she works in research and funding initiatives with colleagues from the University of Limerick, Queen’s University Belfast, University College Cork and the National Archives of Ireland.ģ Where did the Irish potato blight come from? She has written several book chapters and articles on medical history, particularly psychiatry and gender history. Walsh’s most recent book, “Insanity, Power and Politics in Nineteenth Century Ireland: The Connaught District Lunatic Asylum” was published in 2013. She rebuffed the idea that there were also high rates of asylum admissions among Irish emigrants in Australia and Canada. Possibly some families who were not emigrating also did this. She told the Irish Times that the Dangerous Lunatic Act, which permitted persons perceived as being mentally deranged and intending to commit a crime to be held in a jail or asylum, was “abused on a staggering scale.”Įmigrating families who did not want to bring along a relative who would be an economic burden would commit their family member to an asylum instead. Walsh did note that not all the patients checked into asylums were mentally ill. There were 17,000 in district asylums and a further 8,000 “lunatics at large.” 3 The aftermath of the Great Famine, Dangerous Lunatic Act and the ensuing abuse.īy 1900, fifty years after, the Irish population had been halved, but the number in asylums had increased.
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