Deaths of despair in Irish prisons and beyond: a necropolitical analysis
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Date
2026-06-23
Authors
Meade, Rosie R.
Kiely, Elizabeth
Swirak, Katharina
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Abstract
In the Republic of Ireland, the Prison Service is officially charged with ensuring the safety, security and dignity of the people who are imprisoned within its institutions and with creating an environment that facilitates rehabilitation. This article argues that this mission is substantively undermined by the necropolitical forces at work in and around Irish prisons. Written just as the Irish government plans to embark on the largest prison expansion project in the history of the state, our analysis is informed by an international literature that recognises the central role played by carceral institutions in both the expression and normalisation of state-sanctioned necropolitical violence. The article highlights the impoverished vision of “security” that is privileged within “build more prisons” discourses: the Irish government’s promised expansion of prison spaces occurs at a time when the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) has been recorded as rowing back on existing commitments to climate change policy. We see these tendencies as related, with the latter underplaying the gravity of what this Special Issue’s Call for Papers calls the “environmental basis of survival,” while the former serves as the ideological red meat of populist diversion. Against such trends, and informed and inspired by ecological abolitionist politics, we argue for a multi-scalar conception of security that embraces and acknowledges the interdependence of environmental, economic and social justice. Empirically, we show how the prison institution operates at the sharp end of a biopolitical and necropolitical continuum, beginning with communities beset by problems associated with economic inequality, lack of housing, poverty, and material oppression, upon whom disposability is conferred. The Irish state’s penal and social policies and rhetoric serve to maintain this necropolitical status quo by insisting that the carceral space of the prison is essential for “security” and for some lives to flourish. At the same time, the state’s structural violence generates conditions whereby the same constituencies of predominantly poor people circulate in and out of prison. Thus, we show how the Irish prison institution operates as a death-world, a reality that is persistently effaced or denied via official and academic claims that Ireland is moderate or pragmatic in its punitiveness.
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Keywords
Prison , Ireland , Necropolitics , Abolitionist , Ecological , Security , Violence , [SocialStudies]
Citation
Kiely, E., Meade, R.R. and Swirak, K. (2026) 'Deaths of despair in irish prisons and beyond: a necropolitical analysis', AMBIENTES: Revista de Geografia e Ecologia Política, 8(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.48075/16fzsw90