Nochtaithe (Unveiled ): an original performance created by university students in response to survivor testimony from the Mother and Baby Institution located in Tuam 1925-61  

Details of the Impact

Production/Student Details: This multidisciplinary approach (performance and live art, poetry and spoken word, dance and installation, media) resulted in a 45-minute filmed performance led by Dr Haughton in collaboration with eleven undergraduate and three postgraduate students in spring 2021, programmed in Bealtaine Festival (May 2021) and Liverpool Irish Festival (October 2021). It is also accompanied by a 5-minute ‘Behind the Scenes’ trailer, and both recordings remain freely accessible online. The stylised performance relied on physicality but not dialogue. Voice over and sound design added during the editing process. The repetition of pushing, stretching and collapsing signifies the sense of ongoing pain suffered by survivors and families whose search for personal and burial records of relatives remains blocked by varying legal and bureaucratic procedures. The physicality of the performance also offered a way to respond through the fullness of our corporeal selves. The women’s bodies, and those of their children, became invisible to wider society due to this architecture of containment, enabling the prevention of intervention in varying degrees. It was important to foreground and render visible an embodied response to this distinct absence of bodies from the public sphere. Furthermore, the difficulty of finding the right words or language to convey the magnitude of this history often resulted in a form of creative paralysis, or risked cliché.

Project/Community Background: Death records for 796 children over a forty-year period are not accompanied by burial records (Corless 2012; Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes 2021). Fetal, baby, and infant remains have been found in a sewage tank at the site of the institution (Commission 2021), demolished since the 1970s. The vast majority of mothers sent to the Institution are no longer alive, and thus, survivor voices of their children (now elderly) are the most significant and accessible record for addressing this difficult past.

Critical Context Framing Research Project: In Frames of War (2009), Butler’s contention that some lives are rendered grievable by prevailing power structures while others are not measured with equal value offers an insightful lens for how certain prevailing hegemonic ideologies in 20^th century Ireland concealed a deeply punitive culture for women and children, and more widely, economically-disadvantaged communities. Butler builds on her earlier work in Precarious Life (2004) by arguing that ‘specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living’ (2009: 1). She expands, ‘Subjects are constituted through norms, which, in their reiteration, produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognized’ (3-4). Unmarried mothers and their ‘illegitimate’ children in Ireland were constructed as Others, while heterosexual marriage became the norm through which subjects were constituted in order to access full and fair treatment by the law and wider social acceptance. Furthermore, class dynamics played a major role in the constitution of ‘norms’ and the process of Othering during this historical period.

Direct Beneficiaries: The most significant beneficiaries of Nochtaithe were the Tuam survivor members of the advocacy group ‘The Tuam Home Alliance’ (THA) and the university students. Survivor testimonies were shared with Dr Haughton who used them as a blueprint for devising an original multidisciplinary performance. The proposal for Nochtaithe was put to the THA and received approval. Survivors met with the students and Dr Haughton multiple times during rehearsal online due to COVID lockdowns. The first cut of the filmed performance was sent to the THA for private viewing who were invited to submit feedback directly to Dr Haughton, the TOHP team, or via an advocate, which they did. Following unanimous approval by the THA to release Nochtaithe on public platforms, post-performance discussions were also programmed which included representatives from the THA, TOHP and students. Through this process, the THA felt their personal experiences were understood, believed and respected by the students and wider public. The students’ understanding of Irish history, society, politics and culture underwent major critical reflection and analysis, with many learning for the first time about Ireland’s history of institutionalisation, and the lifelong disadvantages and trauma survivors’ experienced as a result.

Community Engagement: The Bealtaine Festival (May 2021) was established in 1995 and is the world’s first national celebration of creativity in older age, reaching annual audiences of 10-12000 people approximately. The performance, followed by a panel discussion, spoke directly to Ireland’s older generations who possess more knowledge and memories of institutional experiences. Programming in Liverpool Irish Festival (October 2021) provided an opportunity to engage with the significant Irish community in the UK, some of whom emigrated there following experiences in Ireland’s institutions. LiF has an annual audience reach of approximately 10,000 people. As part of the LiF’s ‘In:visible Women’ series, we produced a day-long event with Nochtaithe bookended by webinars with survivors, legal experts, historians, artists working across the island of Ireland and Britain, and Ireland XO, Ireland’s national archive for ancestry. The students also benefitted from this as they learned the processes involved in drafting press releases, preparing publicity packages, and reflectively analysing their own creative work.