In the wake of their heroic victory over Partizan Belgrade, Rovers find themselves with a raft of new problems to contend with, not least how best to spend the £1m windfall which is guaranteed as a result of their qualification for the Europa League group stages. Under existing Uefa regulations, the club could be forced to stage their home games at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, although the cheaper and more romantic alternative is to install the seats that would bring their own ground up to the required standard. Of more pressing concern is the small matter of the Irish domestic football season played through the summer these days, with fiscal necessity dictating that the contracts of Rovers’ players expire in November. It is a state of affairs that is less than ideal, not least because their European campaign will last until the middle of December at the earliest.

 

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Photographer Michael O’Brien writes:

St. Kevin’s Hospital (a.k.a. St. Kevin’s Lunatic Asylum) is an imposing red brick structure overlooking the banks of the River Lee, in Shanakiel, Cork, Ireland. It is without doubt one of the darkest sites in recent Irish history. A place of such suffering and abuse that questions were raised in the Dáil and which would ultimately result in its overdue closure in 2002.

“Over the years the conditions inside Our Ladys Hospital and St Kevin’s was condemned and declared a total disgrace. The people incarcerated in the asylum were guilty of nothing. Vulnerable, innocent and harmless. They did not deserve what was done to them. Victims of misfortune, victims of illness and indeed, tragically, of abandonment. They were locked up in a vermin-infested, unsanitary, dirty, dark confinement” (the conclusion of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals’ Report).

 Photo Essay: Kevin’s Asylum, Cork, By Michael O’Brien 



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