UCC SONM 25 Year Book

UCC / School of Nursing and Midwifery

Mental Handicap / Intellectual Disability Nursing

This residence was built and named “Montenotte House” by Francis Lyons in 1870. In 1960 Cork Polio and General After- Care Association (now COPE Foundation) purchased the house and property and, for the following 27 years, it functioned as residential accommodation for children, from rural areas, attending the Association’s Schools in 1960. In March 1988, the house was re-opened as an education centre for COPE Foundation.

COPE Foundation and St James School of Nursing

Dr. John Sweeney

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The foundation of residential health services in this country for children and people with an intellectual disability occurred across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during Ireland’s pre- and post-Independence relationship with the United Kingdom. From the mid-nineteenth century, people with an intellectual disability in Ireland began to be institutionalized within county gaols and newly established workhouses along with the poor, infirm and homeless. With the passing of the Criminal Lunatics (Ireland) Act (1838), a distinction was made between mental illness and intellectual disability (ID) and persons classified as having an ID were moved from the workhouses to the new mental asylums under new rules adopted in 1843 (Walsh, 1999). In 1869, Stewarts Hospital at Palmerstown, Dublin became the first service in Ireland to recognize people with an intellectual disability as a homogeneous group requiring specialist medical care (Hensey 1979). Whilst Stewarts Hospital was managed by a medical superintendent and staffed by untrained ‘asylum attendants’, its services were limited to people from the Protestant community across the island of Ireland (Sweeney, 2010). Following Catholic emancipation in 1829, Catholic religious nursing and teaching orders began to work with the poor, destitute and infirm in Ireland (Luddy, 1999) and with emigrants (Nelson, 1997).

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