Iarlaith Ní Fheorais:
There’s a Tunnel Under Ballybrit Business Park

As part of her ongoing research in disability, health and medicine, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais’ publication There’s a Tunnel Under Ballybrit Business Park critiques the continuing rise of Ireland as a key location for the global medical technology industry. Generously assisted by the Irish state’s financial support and industrial policies, MedTech has grown rapidly to become a dominant economic force, with factories producing millions of advanced medical instruments, devices and equipment for export each year.

Yet, as multinational corporation revenues soar, state bodies tightly regulate access to publicly-funded healthcare. Ní Fheorais investigates the land-use techniques, landscape aesthetics and architecture of MedTech as an inheritance of the colonial regime of the British Empire and dogma of the Catholic Church that create these conditions. Through her account of the barriers encountered in accessing prosthetic care, it becomes evident that infrastructure plays a crucial role in shaping the politics of healthcare, and how access to medical technologies is managed.

There’s a Tunnel Under Ballybrit Business Park is published as part of access: practices and habits, a collaborative artistic research programme involving Askeaton Contemporary Arts in Limerick, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution in Amsterdam and Bulegoa z/b in Bilbao.