Cork Mental Hospital, also known as Our Lady’s, was once the longest building in Ireland: a monster of 19th-century gothic, much added to before its closure in the 1990s, that stares from the north bank down to the River Lee and the city beyond. In recent years, a lot of the complex has been turned, predictably, into apartments. A developer’s website now invites you to “Live comfortably, live conveniently, live with us”.
This, surely, is a spectral sort of invitation: hard for “us” not to conjure, amid bright mockup interiors, the fretful shades of the unwell – and the unwilling. When Doireann Ní Ghríofa – celebrated poet and author of the nonfiction A Ghost in the Throat – began exploring the derelict site several years ago, she recognised it straight away as a place she might herself, but for historical fortune, have ended up. Said the Dead is an intimately researched but also wildly imaginative study of lives (mostly female) lived and often concluded during the hospital’s first 70 years or so.
