Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In 1897, Julia Leonard was taken by police to St Loman’s Hospital after an altercation at home. Leonard had thrown a cup of tea at her husband, Christopher, during a row, leading him to call the police and have her committed at St Loman’s, an asylum for the mentally ill in Mullingar, County Westmeath, Ireland. She remained there for the rest of her life, dying in 1919. After she was hospitalised, her children were sent to a workhouse, meaning they were, in effect, orphaned. Meanwhile, Christopher remarried and had more children with his second wife. In the powerful new audio series The Madman’s Hotel, musician, podcaster and mental health advocate Niall Breslin tells the story of Leonard and the asylum where she lived out her years. Breslin has a personal connection: growing up in Mullingar, he and his friends used to play around the edge of St Loman’s grounds, trying to catch a glimpse of its patients. The asylum closed in the early 2010s and the building now lies empty and boarded up. Breslin, who is working on a PhD about the Irish psychiatric system, was alerted to Leonard’s story by her great-granddaughter, Julie Clarke, who had been to St Loman’s to visit her grave. Patients who were buried there had been given numbered metal markers without names; Leonard was number 339. But when Clarke visited, those markers had been pulled up and put into storage, meaning there was nothing at all to mark the graves.In revealing the fate of Leonard, this seven-part series tells a bigger story: that of the proliferation of asylums in Ireland in the 19th century, the egregious treatment of mental health patients and the powerlessness of women in the face of husbands, fathers and police who had the power to have them committed without a medical certificate. Breslin is a sharp, empathetic host who joins Clarke in her campaign to have the graveyard restored and who pulls us up short with shocking historical nuggets: patients digging graves for other patients; a child of five being incarcerated; the discovery that Leonard was pregnant when she arrived and had her son taken away at three months. That son, who has since died, knew nothing of his real mother until a cousin tracked him down in his eighties. But there’s another twist in this already shocking tale (and a mild spoiler here). When Clarke requested that her great-grandmother be exhumed so that she could receive a proper burial next to her son, an archaeologist was sent to examine the site of her grave. There he found no evidence of a body. All of which makes The Madman’s Hotel a gripping mystery wrapped in a scandal and bound in a little-known yet deeply troubling chapter of Irish history. audible.co.uk
