A new book Transforming Justice Responses to Non-Recent Institutional Abuses (Oxford University Press, 2025) has been published by Mitchell Institute Fellow: Legacy, Professor Anne-Marie McAlinden (School of Law) and Dr Marie Keenan (University College Dublin) and Dr James Gallen (Dublin College University) and is available open access.

This book critically examines justice responses to non-recent institutional abuses across the island of Ireland, comprising Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland within an international context.  It draws on insights from interdisciplinary literature (eg law, political science, history, sociology, criminology, and social policy) and extensive primary research.  Utilising the island of Ireland, North and South, as its primary case study, it comparatively examines the dominant forms of justice responses to non-recent institutional abuses, including prosecutions and civil litigation, inquiries, redress, and apologies in both Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries.  The critical analysis of justice responses is set against the complexities of the legal, historical, cultural, institutional, and political realities of addressing non-recent institutional abuses.

The primary research took the form of

(i) comparative documentary analysis of inquiries, apologies and redress across a range of jurisdictions (including Anglophone countries such as Australia, Canada, England and Wales; and non-Anglophone countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands);

(ii) a media analysis of newspaper coverage of non-recent institutional abuses in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland over the last 25 years; and

(iii) 74 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted across the island of Ireland with elite level actors (high-ranking actors with decision-making capacity) including members of religious orders, societies or dioceses, related to the Catholic Church; senior politicians and government officials; senior civil servants; senior police officers and prosecutors; judges/commissioners; as well as lawyers and human rights advocates; journalists and academics; victim advocates/representatives; and victim/survivors.

Based on extensive reading of the subject and the original primary research, the book offers a new definition of ‘non-recent institutional abuses’: ‘harms occurring in the past within institutional contexts, comprising either acts which are violations of the criminal law and/or historical policies of institutionalised care which violate contemporary international human rights norms’.  This recognises the twin aspects of institutional abuses—institutionalisation per se as a response to social welfare problems as a harm or ‘policy wrong’; as well as the range of abuses which occurred within the institutions.

Drawing on the literature related to restorative justice, transitional justice, and transformative justice, the book advances a re-imagined hybrid approach to justice which draws on conventional and innovative justice approaches and seeks to bridge the accountability gap between seeking and achieving justice for non-recent institutional abuses.  This includes a new typology of responsibility and accountability which recognises the moral, legal, relational and ideological elements of what it means to be held accountable and take responsibility for the abuses of the past.

In including the voices of multiple key stakeholders and their experiences of justice processes—victim/survivors as well as church and state actors—in a unique project, it considers how we might reframe discourses on accountability and responsibility, improve justice processes at the level of praxis, and increase engagement between victim/survivors and institutional actors in order to better address the complexities of non-recent institutional abuses and improve justice processes and outcomes.

The project was funded by Higher Education Academy North-South Research Grant (Grant Ref: TJHIA- NSRP) as well as the British Academy which funded the pilot work (Grant Ref: SRG21\210319). The AHRC funded Anne-Marie McAlinden for a Fellowship dedicated to the project (Grant Ref: AH/ W011077/ 1).

 

Professor Anne-Marie McAlinden

Professor McAlinden's interests are in the area of sexual offending against children, including the dynamics of how offending behavior occurs and how it can best be managed.