Scripting Blame

What is it about?

This article compares how women potentially guilty of infanticide were dealt with in coroners' courts in pre independence Ireland with cases post 1922. We use the social construct of blame to examine how the 'tenor' of cases altered in a short period of time.

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Why is it important?

This is one of the few scholarly works to mine Irish coroners' inquests as a source. It follows our 2012 article published in Irish Historical Studies on 'unknown Infant dead', that is where infant bodies were discovered but parentage was unknown. It is a particularly timely article as the matter of infant and, indeed, maternal deaths in institutions has been the subject of recent controversy and the film Philomena (2013).