Lisa Godson receives RIA funding to research Royal Hospital Kilmainham
Dr Godon has been awarded a Royal Irish Academy commemorations bursary supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media.
'We are all Paddies here': the transfer of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, 1922-31
This project involves research to mark the (ambiguous) anniversary of the closure and transfer to the Irish Free State of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (RHK), an institution established in the 1680s to house ‘antient and maimed’ veterans; in time successive Masters of the RHK were also the Commanders of the British Army in Ireland. In his memoirs, the last Master of the RHK General Nevil Macready described leaving the institution and Ireland just after the clock struck 9 on 17 December 1922 and the union flag lowered from the flagstaff for the last time as Irish Free State troops entered from the west gate. A journalist reported that one of the pensioners remarked 'we are done with ye now…we are all Paddies here and we will be looked after somehow’. Although the British military formally withdrew from Ireland in 1922, the veterans of the RHK were temporally and physically left behind. They remained in an institution still overseen by the British Army Council located in a country where nation-building included disquiet with the widespread Irish involvement in imperial wars. Plans to close the Hospital were announced in 1926 and the remaining RHK pensioners finally moved to the Royal Hospital Chelsea (London) in 1929. Although the site wasn’t legally transferred to the Irish state until the 1960s, from 1922 it was subject to actual and speculative reuse by initiatives associated with independence including detailed plans for it to be central to a new parliamentary complex until the Free State were permitted to use it as the administrative headquarters of the Garda Síochána in 1931. From the 1930s it was also used as a storage site for objects and monuments associated with British imperialism, and later the folklife collections from the National Museum of Ireland. This created a post- and pre- museological dynamic of material out of place due to formerly public imperial objects and monuments not being fully assimilated as waste and objects associated with rural Irishness not yet fully assimilated as display.
The award will fund archival and other research in Ireland and the UK with a focus on government records, correspondence, architectural drawings, artefacts and artworks. The planned outcomes comprise a publication and an online resource to be hosted by IMMA (who are located in the former RHK).
The main themes addressed by the project are:
1. The biopolitics of the site as a home for those physically, mentally and reputationally disabled by their role as combatants at the corporeal vanguard of empire.
2. Speculative reuse of buildings associated with a recent ‘enemy’ regime post-conflict and post-independence including the tension between entropy and conservation.
3. The material culture of withdrawal including informal deaccessioning and destruction of monuments, artefacts and buildings.
4. The ambiguous transfer of power post-conflict including a challenge to an 'evental' approach to anniversaries and the unfinished project of decolonisation.
5. Rituals of withdrawal including moments of closure and the culture of forgetting.
6. Artistic responses to the carceral-care-military history and architecture of the RHK including work by Emily Jacir and Emilia and Ilya Kabakov.