James Joyce and a North Dublin asylum

It is perhaps surprising that mental illness has such a limited role in the various works of James Joyce. When one considers the volume of material in his books relating to Dublin, topographical and biographical, there appears to be a studious avoidance of psychiatric institutions. The then huge Grangegorman complex (now St Brendan's Hospital) must have had an ominous presence in the city: the size of its population (between 1,500 and 2,000 patients) indicating that few families of whatever class could have escaped contact with it. Indeed, as an institution it probably had economic power comparable to Guinness's brewery or the British Army, which had five barracks in the city, each about the same size as Grange-gorman.