Bad Bridget—An unexplored aspect of the Irish migration story

Abstract

This paper examines how museums can address and raise awareness of histories of incarceration through a case study—the Bad Bridget exhibition, which opened at the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in April 2022. Originating as an academic research project (2015–2019) led by Dr Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) and Dr Elaine Farrell (Queen's University Belfast), it tells the stories of women who left Ireland for North America between 1838 and 1918 and ended up in trouble with the authorities for one reason or another. A unique mix of sights, sounds, and smells, further enhanced by first-person narration, is used within the exhibition to encourage visitors to emotionally engage with the experiences of these women. For much of the nineteenth century, Irish-born migrants were the biggest group in American prisons, and there were disproportionate numbers of Irish girls and women in the justice system, court, and prison (Farrell & McCormick, ‘Bad Bridgets’: The criminal and deviant Irish women convicted in America. Irish Times, 2019). Bad Bridget has provided us with a platform to reveal this previously unexplored aspect of the Irish migration story at the museum, contrary to the “American Dream.”