Franco Basaglia
If history is the story of what happened, then Franco Basaglia appears to have no place in the history of psychiatry in Ireland. But if history is also the story of what did not happen, Basaglia is surely one of the seminal non-events in the history of Irish psychiatry. He is not alone. He joins the unlikely company of the Roman Catholic Church and psychoanalysis in conspicuously failing to shape Irish psychiatry to any substantial degree. The reasons are complex. The Irish asylums were profoundly social creations rather than medical ones, and deinstitutionalization, when it arrived in earnest in the 1970s, found its roots in broader social change, human rights, and pragmatism. Irish psychiatry has always been wary of abstract thought. So, while a few reforming and critical psychiatrists were influenced by Basaglian ideas, Basaglia himself remained—and remains—curiously absent from public psychiatric discourse in Ireland.