Fergus Finlay: We must identify and honour all who died in psychiatric hospitals

These were people who died innocent of any crime. They did not, and do not, deserve an unmarked grave

Niall Breslin in a scene from the RTÉ documentary All that Remains.

I was almost moved to tears by Niall Breslin’s intensely moving documentary All That Remains on RTÉ the other night. (I’m going to call him Bressie (with huge respect), because that’s how most of us know of him.) It moved me to tears, and also to anger. And yet there wasn’t any anger in the piece. It was a journey of discovery for Bressie about a particular hospital in Mullingar, St Loman’s, a place he’d known all his life.

The documentary was an elegy for all the people — “psychiatric patients” who had died and been buried, perhaps in a cemetery attached to the hospital, perhaps in a nearby field. In essentially unmarked graves, their identities and their stories buried with them. Bressie wants to start a campaign to have those identities restored with proper headstones and a memorial wall with their names.