The Kerry Babies, criminology, and Reinhart Koselleck

Abstract

The Kerry Babies case was a criminal investigation that followed the discovery of a dead infant on a beach in the southwest of Ireland in April 1984. Charges were laid and dismissed. A tribunal of inquiry into alleged police malpractice followed, and the case returned to the courts 35 years later. This paper takes a multidimensional approach to historical time, drawing on the works of German philosopher Reinhart Koselleck to analyse the case, its legacy, and its implications for criminological theory. A Koselleckian approach – drawing in particular on the role of anachronisms, the mobilisation of memory and the categories of experience and expectation – facilitates a novel perspective on child killing, unmarried motherhood, and policing in 20th-century Ireland.

Alcohol Regulation, Historical Change and the Contemporaneity of the Non-Contemporaneous: A Non-Linear Story in Four Parts

“…Although more tentatively, Koselleckian approaches are also being adopted within criminology (e.g. Churchill et al, 2021;Molloy & O'Donnell, 2022). In a subject area animated by a reformist impulse (Channing et al, 2023) and often marked by frustration at the durability of ineffective interventions and the persistence of systemic injustices, there is clearly analytical value in greater application of the sort of nuanced view of change and continuity valorised by both theoretical approaches discussed here.…”