Mark Finnane

Ireland was the location of the earliest comprehensive public provision for the care and control of the mentally ill. Between 1817 and 1870 the British government in Ireland directed the establishment of 22 district lunatic asylums throughout the country. Initially welcomed, discontent with the institutions grew with the growth of asylum admissions after the Famine and the failure of the asylum to restore more than a small proportion of inmates to society. Political battles between central and local government developed on the question of financial and administrative responsibility for the mentally ill. Originally published in 1981, this book examines the crisis through an analysis of the social function and context of the asylum. Institutionalisation of a growing proportion of the Irish population proceeded particularly through judicial committal. A law which had been intended only for the detention of the ‘dangerous lunatic’ became the routine mode of dealing with a variety of ills from alcoholism to domestic violence.

This title is written in highly readable style with interesting anecdotes. Finnane had access to Barry's personal correspondence and an archive of over 10,000 letters documenting Australian and American life from the Korean War, McCarthyism and Petrov to the Vietnam War. JV Barry was the most important figure in the development of Australian criminology and an internationally renowned. Barry established the Council for Civil Liberties in 1936, was a patron of criminology as a discipline in Australia and a constant advocate for law reform. His life illuminates much about Cold War politics in Australia and he had an ASIO file run on him throughout his career.This is the history of John Vincent Barry: judge, historian, criminologist, civil libertarian and public intellectual before his time. Drawing on an archive of more than 10,000 letters as well as recent interviews with those who knew him, Mark Finnane looks at Barry in the cultural, political and intellectual milieu of inter - and post-war Australia, and describes Barry's considerable role in the creation of a discourse of justice and human rights in Australia. The book approaches under-documented domains of Australian life such as crime and the courts, divorce, the building of institutions, the conduct and consequences of public enquiries, enriching our understanding of the constraints faced by earlier generations and the possibilities opened up by their choices.