Harsh conditions in psychiatric hospitals were hidden from the public by Ministers for Health who, for decades, ignored their legal obligation to publish reports on them, a new book states.
The book, to be launched tonight, also complains that thousands of mentally handicapped people were incarcerated in mental hospitals because they were rejected by religious orders and voluntary organisations.
Walls of Silence is written by Ms Annie Ryan, the mother of an autistic man, who has been campaigning for better conditions in St Ita's Hospital, Portrane, for more than 20 years. She is a former president of the National Association for the Mentally Handicapped of Ireland and was a member of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities.
No reports of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals were published from 1962 until 1979. After that, a further nine years passed before publication of reports resumed in 1988, she writes.
Overcrowding, poor nutrition and gross deficiencies in bedding, clothing, hygiene and sanitation all escaped public scrutiny for the best part of 30 years, the book says. Nurses and doctors in the hospitals were treated with "equal contempt" by the health authorities, and this contributed to bad industrial relations in the hospitals.
Psychiatric hospitals became the homes of thousands of people with mental handicaps, and the author lays much of the responsibility for this at the door of religious orders and voluntary organisations.
These bodies were given money and land by the State to provide care for people with mental handicaps but their selectiveness about who they would accept meant the psychiatric hospitals were the only alternative for many people.
Ms Ryan paints a distressing picture of "the little mildly mentally handicapped children who were sent away to distant institutions, never to come home again".
When they were discharged at 16, often the only place for them was the County Home or a psychiatric hospital.
In 1980, she writes, a Department of Health working party found that 2,000 people with mild or borderline mental handicap were in residential care who should have been living in their communities. At the same time, 2,000 people with serious mental handicap needed residential care but couldn't get it. And 2,500 mentally handicapped people were in psychiatric or geriatric institutions.