Featured Article - Attitudes of Catholic religious orders towards children and adults with an intellectual disability in postcolonial Ireland

J Sweeney

Nurs Inq. 2010 Jun;17(2):95-110.

University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. j.sweeney@ucc.ie

Abstract

Attitudes of Catholic religious orders towards children and adults with an intellectual disability in postcolonial Ireland The purpose of this paper is to examine the intersecting roles of Catholic religious orders and psychiatrists in the development of residential care for people with an intellectual disability in Ireland during the fifty-year period after political autonomy from the UK in 1922. The context is the postcolonial development of the country and the crucial role played by the Catholic Church through several of its religious orders in developing and staffing intellectual disability services. The paper will consider the divergent positions of church and psychiatry in the foundation and contemporary position of what was originally known as the care of people with a mental handicap nursing in the 1960s. The development of this form of nursing during the mid-twentieth century can be seen as part of a wider postcolonial response to health and social care by the newly independent Irish state. The author argues that intellectual disability nursing in Ireland has been nuanced by association with the nation's struggle for self-determination from colonial oppression through adoption of a religious identity. This conflation of education and social care combined with a specific form of Catholic nursing has left an enduring legacy on the service provision to people with an intellectual disability in contemporary Ireland.

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