Not to Scale is Anne Fitzgerald’s response to the Irish Government’s Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes final report, published on 30th October, 2020.
This long poem introduces us to architect, and designer of religious institutions, Ralph Byrne. It revisits Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and politician Éamon de Valera’s architecture of containment, pertaining to illegitimacy, incarceration, waywardness and the adoption culture. Underpinned by legislation such as the Carrigan Report (1931), the Dance Hall Act (1935) and the Children (Amendment) Act (1957), it ensured that censorship and religion thrived – the remnants of which still exist in twenty-first century Éire.
Related poems explore the plight of an unmarried mother in ‘Granard, Co. Longford’ and of children born out of wedlock in ‘Climbing Machu Picchu’, while the poem ‘Dinner Dance, 1946’ pays homage to Licensed Vintners.
Anne Fitzgerald was raised in Sandycove, County Dublin. She is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poetry collections are Swimming Lessons (Wales, Stonebridge, 2001), The Map of Everything (Dublin, Forty Foot, 2006), Beyond the Sea (Co. Clare, Salmon Poetry, 2012), and Vacant Possession (Co. Clare, Salmon Poetry, 2017). In 2006 Anne founded Forty Foot Press – www.fortyfootpress.ie – in addition to two School Publishing Houses, Monkstown Educate Together Press (MET Press, 2003) and Loreto Abbey Dalkey Press (LAD Press, 2004). She is a recipient of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Writer-in-Residence bursary at The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. She has taught Creative Writing extensively across Ireland, Iceland and the United States of America. Anne lives in Sandycove, Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, Ireland.
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Front Cover Image: Grief (Mother & Baby Home), 2021, ink & pen drawing, 28 x 30 cm, signed IMOGEN. Reproduced by kind permission of artist Imogen Stuart RHA. Photograph of cover image © John Bellew, 2024
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