Daniel: Is that a prison?
Me: No, actually, it’s a former mental hospital.
Daniel: It looks like a prison.
Me: It does a bit. When it was built, people with mental illnesses were treated a bit like prisoners and locked up in really unpleasant places. In fact, in Ireland, we have a very bad history of locking people up in mental asylums just because they were a bit strange or difficult. I read somewhere that in the 1950s there were more mental patients per head of population than anywhere else in the world.
Daniel: That Oliver Cromwell was really terrible, wasn’t he?
