Institutional Violence in Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s All the Bad Apples: Ireland’s Architecture of Containment in Young Adult Fiction

Until the late twentieth century, Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes and industrial schools operated in Ireland, constituting what has become known as Ireland’s architecture of containment. These institutions were originally established with the intention of helping women who got pregnant out of wedlock and vulnerable children, yet rapidly turned into carceral places that punished these citizens. A culture of secrecy, shame and silence gave place to a punitive system which soon became enforced both by the Catholic church and the state authorities. In recent years, Irish young adult literature has begun to tackle a variety of topics that had been previously considered controversial, including the institutionalisation of women and girls and institutional child abuse in Irish society. An example is Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s 2019 novel All the Bad Apples, which emphasises the injustices endured by Irish women through the centuries, including institutional violence. This paper looks at how this young adult novel approaches some of the different forms of violence suffered by women and children within Ireland’s architecture of containment and aims to illustrate how this work contributes to denouncing such violence by breaking the secrecy surrounding these crimes.