ABSTRACT
This chapter explores connections between the brutalised aftermath of Industrial School experience in an Irish context and a form of elective homelessness that forms part of the lives of the men concerned. The Industrial Schools were places of primitive punishment and abuse, and the outcome of this for the children involved has been a lifetime of deep suffering. An experience of home–in this instance, the institutional home–as a cruel place fosters an ambivalence about home: there is both a lasting desire for a more ideal home and, at the same time, a kind of dread of home. Patients who were raised in the institutions have conveyed how each developmental stage in life has involved a kind of homelessness. Many of the adults who experienced institutional abuse as children endured periods of homelessness in late adolescence and early adulthood. Former detainees were often drawn to joining other highly constraining institutions–the army or even prison as an ultimate container.
