Irish Mother and baby homes

Today is about our collective shame. Please leave your ‘whataboutery’ at the door.

Do we excuse the Nazis by saying they found some great medical cures?

@Arnoldthecat. Are you honestly arguing that the Catholic Church (which also includes the church in Rome btw) was not guilty of disgusting acts against women and children? Doing works of charity does not give you a free pass to commit other crimes. And when you say society was harsh on these women that judgement was driven in large part by the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is a disgusting corrupt misogynist organisation which seems to hate women but you are actually defending them here? Unless you’re a man then you are suffering from a serious case of Stockholm syndrome.

It happened in the UK as well as Ireland, but there hasn't been a national enquiry in the UK yet. Some reports have the conditions in England & Wales homes as bad as they were in Ireland, with about half a million forced adoptions, and there have been demands for an enquiry but there has been nothing so far from the govt. Some coverage in this 2016 Grauniad article.

What's interesting to me is that the England and Wales homes were run by the Methodists and Salvation Army as well as the church, which really highlights that - in any country - it's a complicit society that allows such things to happen. Catholicism doesn't have a patent on misogyny. Society allows and rewards misogyny.

[quote bumpertobumper]@MichelleofzeResistance I agree with pretty much everything you say, but have to pull you up on saying "this happened in the UK"
The period covered in the report starts in 1922, so this happened in the Republic of Ireland.
While the Catholic Church was influential in pre- independence Ireland, it was after, when it became responsible for providing almost all education, that the insidious power that lead to these situations really took hold.
There was of course shame I being an unmarried mother before, and was similar social and religious shame in the UK until relatively recently, but not the disgusting and disgraceful system of mother and baby 'homes'. [/quote]
In the UK girls and women were committed to secure mental hospitals for being pregnant or off 'low moral fibre'.

@MichelleofzeResistance great points but this did not happen in the UK, it happened in Ireland.

It’s heart breaking. I am an adoptee and my birth mum went to a mother and baby home in NI although she says it wasn’t as bad as many places and she felt she was treated well or better than many of the girls there. However, it’s not just the church and state that are to blame, it’s society too - they sent their daughters there. Even to this day the way that adoptees are treated is poor and outcomes are poor too. By way of example numerous studies have shown that adoptees are around three times more likely than the general population to commit suicide, have mental health issues and addiction problems. Those stats increase for inter-country and inter-racial adoptees. Unfortunately the research on the outcomes for birth mothers is fairly non-existent. The focus in the media is on adoptive parents and presenting it as a happy blessing. No one mentions the loss for both mother and baby.

Closer to home, some family members were adopted and the story of their birth mother is similar to those of many women who were forced by family into these mother and baby homes - and these adoptions happened in the 1970's.

There were, "naughty girls' homes" in the UK. I have two cousins who were adopted from one.

I hope conditions were better but it cannot have been a happy place, young women from Ireland would spend 6 months in England and return home with no baby.

All the babies were baptised 'Mary' or 'Joseph' regardless of their actual names.

The photos on the Irish Examiner article link are heartbreaking.

Its a very difficult thing to come to terms with as an Irish person, particularly as a woman.
@Annasgirl brilliant, succinct comments on how society allowed it to happen.

No it’s definitely not enough! There were mother and baby homes all over Ireland, what else is buried in the other homes that we don’t know about???

Such sadness
www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlight/arid-40204676.html

Similar shit goes on all over the world - the various ways patriarchy strives through culture, language, media and social norms to control women.
All the way from FGM to defining what a wonan is to covering your head in public to the domestication of women to benefit men, to the personal dead end of motherhood.

Absolutely horrific treatment of women and children and yet another disgusting chapter of Irish history after the reports on clerical sex abuse.

I have two relatives that have suffered unbelievably because of the church and the states failings.

And every time I think about self id I think of my pregnant young teen relative locked away in a mother and baby home, I highly doubt if she'd suddenly revealed to the nuns that she felt like a man that they throw open the gates, apologise and let her leave
This was about biology keeping women down and less than in society and the church.

Why weren't all the unwed fathers of these children locked up too to keep them away from the unwed women???

Just awful. Utterly tragic. Catholicism and the Irish establishment have a lot to answer for.

Totally horrifying and not that long ago! I do think alot of families would have taken on a younger girls/women child if they had the means to do so. Those with Irish ancestry may notice if you look it up that women in their late 40s/early 50s were named mother to children and I don't think that many women in that time were biological miracles (it can happen but its rare) but I always think a younger girl in the family fell pregnant and the girls parents chose to raise the baby as their own to protect the girl. But of course if the family turned the young woman out, it is beyond horrifying. Also many girls were also sent to England for abortions but what the nuns and the church did is one of the biggest scandals of the 20th century. How many older women now ache for the child they were forced to give up, utterly heartbreaking.

I'm crying buckets here, yet it isn't even deemed important enough for the online Guardian to have it on its front page. Fucking hell. The patriarchy is alive and kicking.

I recommend Alison O'Reilly's book although it's hard reading, as a daughter of a woman affected she is one of the family members who has fought this into daylight and describes the campaign.

Oh and whilst I normally agree that comparisons to Nazi Germany weaken rather than strengthen arguments, I wholeheartedly agree with the poster who said Ireland needs to accept this dirty episode in its past and the fact that it was only possible for it to happen because the vast majority of the population went along with it tacitly even if they didn't outright support it.

I'm not sure I can bring myself to read much about this. It is so heartwrenchingly wrong. I'm pregnant now and was at secondary school in 1998, it's really not that long ago. For all the idiots bleating that we don't need feminism (not here, but it's upsetting how often I hear this as a secondary teacher): yes we do, and this is why!!! This is why church and state should be separated. This is why we should never, ever disapprove of women getting pregnant in less than ideal circumstances. A baby is a blessing. Not embracing that idea is the first step on the road to practices like these. A woman's choice is final, always.

That information was actively suppressed, wrong doing concealed, atrocities looked away from, because of politically sensitive ground and special people with special rules being involved. Women and children were harmed in this agenda in full sight and knowledge for the 'greater good' as it was seen at the time.

This could easily be mistaken for a description of what has recently been uncovered at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust (women and babies being killed, bereaved families being blamed for their losses), and will still be happening in others in darkness. Again, misogyny.

In both cases, light was only shone on the atrocities because individuals campaigned and fought and poured their souls into shouting at people who did not want to listen until they were heard.

Not because government or other institutions were listening or alert to the possibility of atrocities and the need to safeguard people.

Because individuals managed to get media outlets with sufficient clout to take up the story. I was reading today that the first media org to cover the Tuam mass grave went ignored - action was only taken in response to a more powerful org taking it up.

This news today was not the result of the people responsible choosing to finally take responsibility, nor because government fulfilled its duty of care to the population, nor because society had changed and was seeking to make amends - but because the media made it embarrassing for them to continue ignoring it.

That makes it so much more horrifying to me.

Think of all the suffering that does not have the power of a voice and is still being ignored and suppressed. It is dangerous when we declare that things like this are entirely of the past and could not still be happening "because it's 2021" . Like the date on a calendar is some form of protection. Misogynistic atrocities are still being enabled and committed in our societies today.