Irish Mother and baby homes

Oh I know they can dread I was more just musing on how someone can end up being that cruel and vile when they are also a member of the oppressed sex.

Crab theory.

You can put crabs in a bucket with no lid. When one tries to climb out another crab pulls it down.

I did not say that i thought it was haunted, theres no such things as ghosts (either holy or unholy). And Yes, Im fully aware that places like this were "all over" (which should be apparent from my earlier post), Im also aware that Tuam is a perfectly ordinary (albeit dismal) place. However, when I passed through it, I was unaware of one of these places having been there. I became aware of its existence years later when watching the news. To clarify my previous post: Ive never been anywhere, before or since, that has given me such a bad vibe.

And they’re in perfectly ordinary places. A former laundry full of unmarked inmates’ graves is just over my back garden wall in a prosperous, pretty suburb of Georgian and Victorian houses — developers keep pulling out although the site is worth a fortune because they would need a specialist forensic archaeologist on-site for the whole build and survivors understandably want the graves marked and not written out of history. My parents live close to one of the county homes, now a hospital and rehabilitation centre. Also entirely ordinary, in an ordinary city centre. These places don’t exist in some special haunted place apart.

It’s absolutely appalling and sad. The Catholic Church has a heck of a lot of evil to answer for, and it must. This cannot be brushed under the carpet. People must be held to account. Those poor children/babies/women.

In some cases another reason a girl in Irish Catholic families might have declared an intention to be a nun would be to get attention. Bear in mind if you’re one of 10 children it can be very hard to get any attention if you’re in the middle age wise and don’t stand out otherwise.

I dont want to derail the thread with something a bit "woo", but, in 2004, I went through Tuam when I was riding across Ireland from Dun Laoghaire to a small town called Cong. It was warm, sunny day (May bank holiday weekend) but i had an awful feeling of dread and went cold passing through the town. It was a horrible, silent, featureless, drab, grey place with nobody about, not like any of the other places we'd been through. I wasnt massively surprised when I heard about what had happened at the convent there a few years later.

I lost my youngest DD in childbirth, the emotional pain of her loss has stayed with me since. But, her birth was lovely and supportive and kind, I know where she is buried. I can’t begin to imagine the pain of these poor women and girls and my heart aches for them and their lost children.

And I think a lot of people outside of Ireland (or probably in Ireland now, for people under the age of 50 ish) think of people becoming nuns because of a particularly strong religious faith and a freely-chosen 'vocation', when in fact there was often nothing like a free choice, especially for small farmers' daughters considered 'unmarriagable' who didn't want to emigrate and in a country where employment opportunities for women were few.

Yes, the motivations were varied and complex.

Religious orders sometimes offered safety and opportunities for women they wouldn't have got elsewhere. Two nuns I once knew joined their orders in the 1960s, which then paid for them to go to university studying STEM subjects (one to masters level). They both started teaching in girls' secondary schools afterwards, though one later left teaching to go into counselling (or something like that). Both lovely, gentle, fiercely intelligent women, from farming backgrounds but not well-off, who wouldn't have had the chance to be educated to that level without joining the nuns.

I later heard that one of them had joined the order to avoid men after a sexual assault as a teenager, against family wishes, so there must also have been an aspect of refuge for her as well.

Complex motivations indeed.

I had a former nun as a teacher (girls convent school) who was very upfront and frank with us (she was one of my favourite teachers). She was very much still married to God, she made no apologies for that- she considered herself still a nun, just one who had left the order. She told us that she knew she couldn’t be with the order anymore when she went on a pilgrimage and was walking from one place to another, in silence as they were on a silent vow or something, and she was smiling as she had just had a great chat with God. She passed another nun, who must have been more senior than her and the other nun said “I’ll soon wipe that smile off your face”. For no reason other than she was smiling. That was it. I’m sure there were other things that all added up to make her want to leave but that was her final straw moment and she decided she couldn’t serve God in that culture of bitterness.

It's heartbreaking what these poor women and children went through.
Maybe they'll also do an inquiry into the huge amount of Irish people forced into 'lunatic' asylums as well for no real reason. In some cases half of some towns populations were forced in there.

There were also girls who were sent to become a nun because they had been flirting with boys/men or caught having sex. It wasn’t their choice to become a nun or remain chaste. Which could explain their anger towards the girls and women in their charge who they deemed to have enjoyed what they had been denied.

Exactly, @NorthernIrishFeminist. And I think a lot of people outside of Ireland (or probably in Ireland now, for people under the age of 50 ish) think of people becoming nuns because of a particularly strong religious faith and a freely-chosen 'vocation', when in fact there was often nothing like a free choice, especially for small farmers' daughters considered 'unmarriagable' who didn't want to emigrate and in a country where employment opportunities for women were few.

I'm 48 and was educated entirely at convent schools, and it's very clear to me now that many of the nuns who taught me in the 70s and 80s had no particular vocation, they were 'encouraged' into the convent by their families as a respectable way of getting a plain one off their hands, or had few other choices, and of course there was also a hierarchy among orders, and inside orders, between the choir nuns who were from better-off backgrounds and brought dowries, and the lay nuns who didn't. And the orders running these homes weren't the 'prestigious' ones.

And the powerless can behave in very ugly ways when they're given power over those who are even lower on the totem pole than they are. I assume that is in part what lies behind some of the treatment by nuns of the women and children they had care of -- in some cases they were striking out to punish 'fallen' women expressing a sexuality they hadn't been able to express on their own account, as well as exercising a power they didn't have in any other context.

And don't underestimate the power of a kind of mass Stockholm syndrome for every survivor rightly indignantly talking about their mistreatment to the media, there is a dwindling band of the older generation who would not recognise the term 'survivor' and who will not hear a word against the nuns. I know several elderly former Magdalen laundry inhabitants who get terribly upset when any criticism at all is directed against the laundries one was very reluctant to leave when the former laundry finally closed in the 90s, because she'd only ever lived there, alongside the even older nuns who had once incarcerated her. She now lives in a tiny flat and is incredulous at being offered reparation money, which she tried to refuse, and goes to Mass daily. It would be beyond cruel to ask whether she's ever angry she had her life confiscated.

I often wonder why a Nun, who is foremost a woman, was once a girl, would want to inflict such cruelty on her fellow woman. One must wonder what drove her to that point to commit true acts of wickedness.

She didn't see them as "fellow women" but as evil sinners, and she didn't see herself as "committing acts of wickedness" but as as doing the Lord's work. Women can be just as nasty as men when given motivation and power.

I’m in no way condoning the cruelty of nuns, having been taught by them they make me uneasy decades later.

I used to wonder why so many nuns who taught small children so clearly disliked them, then I discovered the nuns would be made to do the jobs they disliked as penance. Many girls were ‘strongly encouraged’ to become nuns in Irish Catholic families so many did not chose that life.

The whole ethos and emphasis of suffering being good for you was one of the many toxic aspects of Catholicism.

When you look at the records and recorded year of death there seemed to be gaps of time when no deaths occurred (up to a year in one case) and other times children seemed to be dying at a rate of one a day.

Infectious disease? Something like diphtheria or TB could rip through an institution and would be particularly dangerous for children already in poor health due to malnutrition and neglect.

We have a baby who was born in Scotland in our family, returned to Ireland to be adopted. There was earlier incest among siblings and I am now, thanks to this thread, beginning to wonder if Granny's miracle change of life baby really was her son or her grandson???