Grangegorman Histories: Storysharing evening

As part of the Dublin Festival of History, Grangegorman Histories hosted a storysharing evening on 5th October 2024.

 

Grangegorman in Dublin’s north inner city is a significant place in the national and citywide psyche as a former workhouse, prison, and founding place of many hospitals. In some ways it traces the history of the provision of welfare by the government authorities for the poor, destitute and outcast from society. For this reason, during the current process of transformation by the Grangegorman Development Agency, there is a commitment to not forget this sometimes difficult, somewhat dark, past. Now becoming the campus of TU Dublin, the emphasis on remembering and not forgetting is grounded in the new institution’s commitment to integrity and knowledge.

Grangegorman Histories, as part of its outreach programme, aims at ‘commemorating the eventful history of this site and the surrounding area’. One of the objectives is to better understand the place and people who inhabited Grangegorman, whether home or place of work, and to share this with all the communities of interest for whom it matters.

I’m researching the two-hundred-year architectural history of the institutional buildings at Grangegorman. In a collaboration with colleagues who are also working with Grangegorman Histories to curate and stimulate the cultural memory of Grangegorman, we held a storysharing evening of remembering, poetry and showcasing photos of the former St Brendan’s hospital site on the Saturday evening in the St. Brendan’s Hospital former Church of Ireland Church. We didn’t have a microphone – it was an intimate event with chairs arranged in a circle and we didn’t take any notes or make any recordings, but I’m jotting down here what I remember about how the event went.

The church itself is atmospheric and holds memories for some people. The memories of those who know it best – retired employees, neighbours, former patients and their family members, and the wider community – are invaluable in understanding what the place means to people. In remembering it, we can add layers of personal recollection and significance to its record.

The dim light at end of day (the better to see the slides) was conducive to a sharing of stories. I was struck by the strength of feeling and attachment of people to their forebears whose lives intersected with the institution. Genealogy is definitely more important to people than a history of the buildings. There is powerful emotion in finding a photograph of a nearly forgotten deceased relative. We respect our ancestors and want to know their stories, what happened to them, how did their lives go. For some it was a way of bringing the memory of a relative back to life through being able to talk about them, for others the experience was from their own life, whether nurse or patient.

As the light faded the recollections flowed, stimulated by photographs, poetry and the stories being told. Brian Cregan, one of my colleague organisers, some of the photographs he made in 2012 as the hospital was closing. Many were evocative of the place of work, and looking at them, one imagined that the patients, doctors, nurses, and orderlies were just out of view, a coat thrown across a chair, a bunch of keys left on a mantlepiece or desk.

Damon Berry, another of my colleague organisers, wants to find and commemorate places of significance across the campus for ‘Smart Posts’. His project will place QR codes there to access a history website to help people understand the time-depth of the site. We had an old map and post-it notes on which people marked things they remembered happening in particular places, like where the Bohemians Football Teams trained. Damon is developing interactive installations for further engagement of the general public.

Poet Lianne O’Hara, the fourth colleague organiser, recited from her work-in-progress a series of poems commissioned by Grangegorman Histories to document the experiences of patients in the psychiatric hospital. The empathic refraction and remembering of experiences in the poetic form was warmly appreciated as a way of holding up in the light the sometimes bitter, or conflicted histories of women whose life courses flowed through the institution.

All four of us are looking for ways to better understand the place and the people who inhabited it when it was a psychiatric hospital, whether home or place of work. It is our intention to turn this listening into responses in our own research, or artistic practice (including, perhaps, lessons learned). These responses will be anonymised and paraphrased.

This is intended to be the first of a series of out-reach events in which Grangegorman Histories will invite the opinions, reminiscences and reflections of people who know this place and have experiences of it. This will achieve one of the of the aims of ‘commemorating the eventful history of this site and the surrounding area’, not as a memorial, but a ‘remembering together’. If you are interested in getting in touch to document your memories, meanings, and values in relation to the buildings and site, please contact me at grangegormanhistories@ggda.ie so that Grangegorman Histories can invite you to a future similar event or stay in touch by signing up to our newsletter here. Grangegorman Histories is also running an Oral History project, with long form one-on-one interviews. We want to hear as many stories as possible; there will be other opportunities to be heard.

Colm Murray, PhD researcher

Grangegorman Histories, Site and Society, 1770 – 2012