‘We are the heroin capital of Europe’: Marginal Communities, Health, Identity, and the Opioid Epidemic in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Wellcome Trust
University College Dublin
Keywords: Heroin, drugs, Ireland. By 1990 heroin had devastated working-class communities across Dublin and, in some families, wiped out entire generations. But how did things reach that stage when three decades previously heroin was only known in Ireland as a symbol of distant, undesirable, foreignness? This project will explore the history of heroin in Ireland, from its first public discussion (1918) to the end of the first heroin epidemic (1990). It will approach the history from two directions. First, analysing the public discourse about the drug. This will reveal, inter alia, different ways that heroin was used as a symbol of dissolute otherness, and how this shaped health policy and provision. Secondly the project will collect 100 oral histories to investigate how heroin affected everyday life in the communities at the centre of the heroin epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, the project will use reception theory to integrate these approaches and achieve three key goals: • To understand how the public discourse shaped community members’ interaction with each other, the wider world, and healthcare providers. • To give marginalised communities a voice in the production of their own history. • To produce the first history of heroin-use in Ireland.
8.1 Organisation and delivery of services