Introduction: A Decolonial Approach to Ireland’s Protean Carceral Network

Abstract

From the colonial through to the postcolonial and contemporary eras, a whole network of incarceration developed on the island of Ireland, as was the case in many European countries. This network, however, involved prisons, specific schools, institutions designed to contain certain women and their children, indeed to make money from them, and, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, asylum seekers. The widespread and varied practices of detention or imprisonment of various parts of the Irish population were highly political, and part of a colonial matrix of power which began in colonial times and extended well into the postcolonial era, straddling the border which separated the Free State and then the Republic of Ireland from the complex colonial statelet of Northern Ireland. Adopting a decolonial approach to analyzing carceral apparatus in Ireland is a way of overcoming the seeming difficulty in examining the architecture and protests in the prisons in the North (under British rule) alongside industrial schools, prisons, and Direct Provision in the South, an independent republic. This book, through the resolutely interdisciplinary approach adopted in its constituent chapters, hopes to change the terms of the conversation about how the carceral apparatus has worked and proliferated in Ireland, in an attempt to analyze, contextualize, and explain its widespread nature.