From the middle of the nineteenth century, the Irish urban landscape was transformed by the construction
of large institutions, developed for the management and ordering of society. These included gaols,
infirmaries and schools and, in the latter years of the century, convents, religious institutions of education
and health, and new churches that signified the resurgence of Roman Catholic social power. The
development of these institutions had a profound impact on the nature of public space within these urban
contexts, changing the way that the spaces of towns and cities were used, named and experienced. This
paper explores the impact of one of these institutions - the lunatic asylum, later known as the mental
hospital - on the experience of the urban landscape. While the architecture and infrastructure of these vast
complexes certainly impacted the lives of patients and staff, they also had an impact on the wider urban
landscape, around which ideas of mental health and illness, and physical freedom and incarceration were
negotiated visually, verbally and spatially. This paper represents part of a larger project on the negotiation
of public space in Ireland throughout the twentieth century, and focuses on the representation of the
asylum in Edna O’Brien’s short fiction, as well as the evidence of the sites and their position within urban
spaces in an Irish context.