Asylum Workshop

<i>You think this is dignified? A bunch of students playing with someone's medical records?</i><br/><br/>Why did twentieth-century Ireland lock up so many people? <br/><br/>After all the scandals about Ireland's institutions - the industrial schools the mother and baby homes the Magdalene laundries - why have we still barely investigated the largest institutions of them all: the psychiatric hospitals?<br/><br/>Today Grangegorman is home to the open new campus of Technological University Dublin. But for nearly 200 years it housed a forbidding institution behind high walls.<br/><br/><i>The Asylum Workshop</i> is a new documentary play by Colin Murphy about the history of Ireland's first public psychiatric hospital. Drawing on unique access to the hospital's archives it weaves together verbatim testimony from patients and families reports from doctors and nurses and analysis from<br/>historians and psychiatrists.<br/><br/>This edition is published to coincide with the production by Technological University Dublin and Grangegorman Histories in the East Quad Black Box Theatre in June 2023.