Analysis: The Abbey Theatre, and other theatres, have created cultural responses to Ireland's institutional past (and present) by drawing on testimony and archival records, as well as contemporary experiences.

Home: Part One was produced by the Abbey Theatre and broadcast from the Abbey stage via its YouTube channel on St. Patrick's Day. It featured testimony read by forty-six women – survivors, actors, artists and public figures – that recounted experiences of those sent to or born in Mother and Baby Homes and County Homes in Ireland.

On Ireland’s national day, the Abbey prompted an important response to questions including how does the State remember those denied their identity? And how can theatre create a dialogue with the documented and undocumented past?

During Home: Part One, the series of recited testimonies is broken up by moments of stillness – filmed portraits of survivors Joan McDermott, Mary Coll, P.J. Haverty, Catherine Coffey O’Brien and Anne FitzGerald, look at us all as society and audience, bringing us closer to their words through their visual presence on-screen. A list of scrolling names closes the piece.

The list identifies the babies and children buried at and who died at Mother and Baby Homes in Tuam and Bessborough respectively. The starkness of loss and of the inestimable grief of those mothers denied care and support is made clear through the lost infants, aged from a single day old to a number of years.

The Abbey Theatre, and other theatres, have created other cultural responses to Ireland’s institutional past (and present) by drawing on testimony and archival records, as well as contemporary experiences.

In January 1961, Richard Johnson, a district court judge had his debut play staged by the Abbey Theatre. The Evidence I Shall Give was a courtroom drama based on Johnson's own experiences and cases before his court in Tralee, Co. Kerry.

The play addressed the interconnected networks of courts, schools, families and institutions and portrayed how families were broken apart through various official arms of the State and reinforced by the institutionalisation of women and children.

A closing scene of the play, where the young girl reveals her shaven head, an act of punishment by the Mother Superior, was removed from the Abbey’s staged production of the time.

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From Radio 1's Arena, Home is a series of extracts from the testimonies of survivors of Mother and Baby Homes, that will be read by 46 women, survivors, artists and public figures.

Journal of a Hole was written by Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan and staged at Project Arts Centre in August 1971. Directed by Peter Sheridan, the play depicted the physical and emotional abuse of children within Artane Industrial School in Dublin.

The play featured a 'plant’ in the audience, a Brother, who objected to the play and to the depiction of the school. Cast members argued back, prompting audience members to join in the debate with the actor/protestor.

Critic Kane Archer, none the wiser of the set-up, reviewed the play as being typical of ‘theatre of protest’ that sought to subvert the "Dickensian brutality" of the dehumanising industrial school system.

More recently, in 2010, the Abbey Theatre staged a series entitled "The Darkest Corner", responding to the publication of the Ryan Report – the Commission to Enquire into Child Abuse in Ireland. Quoting then Taoiseach Brian Cowan, the Abbey intended to shine a light into the "darkest corner of the history of the State".

The series included a staged reading of Johnson’s The Evidence I Shall Give, but also a new docu-theatre piece entitled No Escape by journalist Mary Raftery. The piece was developed through verbatim survivor testimony given to the Commission, using the archival record and survivor’s own experiences to speak out beyond the confines of the official context of the Commission.

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From Radio 1's Arena, Ian Walsh reviews Thomas Kilroy's 'Christ, Deliver Us!' with Sean Rocks.

Thomas Kilroy’s play, Christ, Deliver Us! dramatised the experiences of teenage boys in a boarding school in the midlands in 1950s Ireland, exploring their sexuality within the repressive system run by priests and Brothers.

One character of an aging priest, played by Tom Hickey, breaks ranks with his co-conspirators when he screams "the truth will out", as Kilroy’s play skilfully critiqued the hypocrisy of Irish church and state.

The series also included James X by Mannix Flynn. First produced by Far Cry Production in 2003, James X depicted Flynn’s own battle against the State and its agencies in order to secure his own records, and so be able piece back together his identity that was so fractured within his institutionalisation since childhood.

Beyond these cultural responses, survivor testimony is still being documented and archived today. The Tuam Mother and Baby Home Oral History project at NUI Galway, led by Dr. Sarah Anne-Buckley and Dr. John Cunningham, is creating a new online digital archive of testimony and documents directly from survivors and hosted at the Hardiman Library at NUIG.

The project is an act of archival intervention against the grain of decades of political, church and societal silence towards survivors. The digital preservation of survivor testimony is vital to a public engagement with this current as well as historic issue. It affords survivors agency over their own voice and words.

The recent deletion and subsequent recovery of recordings of testimony given by 550 individuals to the Confidential Committee of the Mother and Baby Home Commission is but one example of how without secure and ethical digital preservation practices, survivor testimony is at risk of future silencing.

The oral history interviews, conducted by Mary Cunningham, collect memory and testimony from throughout the lives of those who were born in the Tuam Home. Memories from the time within the Home itself are scarce, a reminder of how young infants were prior to leaving the Home but also how trauma can enforce the silencing of our own painful pasts.

Where memory may be absent, records are evidence which can inform our identity and of who we are. For the thousands of women and children directly affected and denied access to their birth or adoption records, personal archives become another form of institutionalisation.

Other archival problems persist which greatly affect how the State remembers. There is urgent need for reform and updating of the National Archives Act as well as drafting of new legislation to govern the legal deposit of Irish web archives and archiving of material published on the Irish web.

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From Radio 1's Morning Ireland, Dr Sarah Anne Buckley, Lecturer in History at NUI Galway and Co-Principal Investigator of the Tuam Oral History Project, on the long history of Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes.

Other questions on records arise from recent commission reports, academic and legal research and survivor advocacy, particularly on access to birth records by adoptees. The volume of original archives scattered across various bodies and institutions, outside of the remit of the National Archives Act, is staggering.

Access to original records held by groups, from religious organisations to state bodies such as Tusla, as well as records created by Commissions of Investigation, are often governed by conflicting and inconsistent access policies or without clarity on what records are respectively held.

The creation of an independent centralised repository for archives relating to institutions in Ireland, in dialogue with survivors, from Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries, to adoption agencies and for records of related Commissions of Investigations is a necessary step. Commitment to establish such a centre has been made by the Taoiseach Micheál Martin and by Minister Roderic O’Gorman.

Such an undertaking, apart from the specialist physical space and facilities, will entail a hugely labour-intensive and detailed archival process.

Adequate supports within a trauma-informed response to ethical archival practice, from cataloguing, digitisation with digital preservation, and education, will need to form part of the realisation of such a commitment by the State. Ultimately, those who will have greatest input on this records process needs to be survivors.

The testimonies recounted within Home: Part One are a catalogue of ill-treatment, documenting the inhumane responses to those who were most vulnerable within a theocratic Irish state.

The Abbey Theatre’s thoughtful and powerful response moved beyond the overbearing weight of a 3,000 page report and instead staged the power of testimony. Home: Part One was significant for letting survivors speak. It may yet prove to be more significant for enabling the public to listen.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ