7 - Locating Investigations into Suicidal Deaths in Urban Ireland, 1901–1915

Summary

Introduction

Since medieval times until the early nineteenth century, suicides had been buried outside consecrated ground. This was a spatial expression of their status as outcasts from the community of the honourable dead. By the eighteenth century in England (there is little corresponding information for Ireland) there had been a decline in burials at crossroads and in unconsecrated ground: suicides were increasingly buried within the sacred spaces of the churchyard owing to legal verdicts that found them ‘innocent’ via temporary insanity. After 1872 and the removal of forfeiture of criminals’ goods and chattels, there were no statutory measures available to punish the suicide even though it remained a crime in Ireland until 1993. Despite the fact that it was a crime without punishment, the coroner continued and continues to be responsible for inquiring into the context behind such deaths. A medico-legal process, concluded by a coroner's certificate, was and is required to register a death as suicide. This administrative, governmental process achieved spatial expression when sanitary reform began in earnest and when the office of the coroner became more professionalised. While the coroner continued to be required to ‘go to the Place where any be slain, or suddenly dead or wounded’, in urban settings by the end of the nineteenth century bodies were often brought to the coroner instead. Between 1901 and 1915, approximately 40 per cent of all inquests on suicides were held at the city morgue in Dublin. The city authorities controlled the movement of certain dead bodies around the city by constructing a scientific and administrative space – the morgue – for the investigation of sudden death in Dublin. The professionalisation of the coroner's office acquired a spatial element. As Ian Burney notes, ‘the pub-based inquest served as a kind of rallying point for a campaign to transform the spatial and conceptual grounds for public inquiry into death’.

This chapter explores in detail a sample of suicide cases that occurred in Dublin during the period 1901 to 1915. It will reconstruct the lives and deaths of four suicides from approximately 127 identified using the Dublin Morgue registers and consider the role urban space played in their lives, but more particularly in the legal inquiry into their deaths. We will follow the suicide from their place of death on their various final journeys, via hospitals and morgues, towards their resting place.