Irish Mother and baby homes

It is not enough.

What is needed is full disclosure, identification and location of children living or dead, families to be informed, prosecution of any individuals left with evidence against them, 'truth and reconciliation' hearings for families who sent their pregnant daughters and sisters to such places and transparency with full accountability for the church and government. All secrets laid bare.

Those children. And so many more around the world.
Those women.

I wail and rage in silence, my anger tears at the souls of those who harmed you, while i despair at my own failing, in my lifetime, to stand with those in need. May this never happen again.

Reading some of the findings and then have to stop as it's so upsetting. The treatment of these women and children was disgusting and full of hatred.

15 year old girl held down with ropes during labour. Brought by her mother and she didn't tell any of her 12 siblings.

Lots of girls and women were raped and this is how they were treated as a result of getting pregnant from that rape?

Also Ireland was apparently one of the last countries in Europe to bring in legal adoption as they had concerns that Irish babies would be adopted by people from other religions

So ashamed that this is what went on in this country and still goes on in different guises

I find it difficult to understand how the parents of these women would place their daughters in these homes. Did they know how they and the babies were treated ? Did they not care ?
The nuns did not have to recruit these women , they were delivered there by parents usually. I know people will say that the country was in the grip of Catholicism , but to me , that is the same as Germans saying they were in the grip of Hitler.

While the actual women who carried put this abuse and neglect are ultimately responsible, I think the people around these women also bear some responsibility.

There is no such thing as any meaningful compensation. Money doesnt matter. The present government was not responsible , so can not issue any real apologies. The only thing that can be done is releasing this Report and acknowledging the dark history of these institutions.

And yes, no one was incarcerated in a mother and baby home because of a feeling rather than their female bodies and a capacity to be oppressed and othered because of that biology.

Remember evil as those places were, it was the girls & women’s families that sent them there.

The interview tonight with the lovely man born to an unwed mother in the Tuam mother and baby home. Truly awful, the nuns wouldn't even let those children mix with the other children, he kept emphasiding that it was always the women that bore the cost (and the children of course). And all the ones that didn't make it, their little bodies just dumped. Beyond awful.

My friend had her baby in one of these homes in the early 90’s. She was sent by her family, her mother really, because she was pregnant out of wedlock. She was at university, living away from home and working and there was no reason at all she couldn’t just have carried on as she was and raise her baby. But no- the shame was so much for her mother that it just wasn’t going to be allowed. She was sent away for the last 3 months to hide her belly and then have the baby adopted. She had him, and on the day she was to sign him over she took him and ran. The nuns tried to stop her but she got away. Thankfully when she turned up at home with him her father decided to be a decent human being and convinced her mother to them stay. He couldn’t convince her mother to talk to her for several months after that but her baby was safe and with his mum.

It's bloody heartbreaking.

I used to have a cleaning job when I was a student, the lovely Irish lady who shared my shift used to talk about the asylum that she used to work in back in Ireland when she was a teenager, there were ladies who had been commited for having children out of wedlock, they were perfectly sane and had rotted for their whole lives in an institution, they didn't know what had happened to their babies.
My friend talked about it a lot, it still haunted her years later.

Yes and I think the film Philomena is very accurate about what went on in these homes.

Those poor women and children. Just unthinkable.

@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'.

A complete atrocity. There will be no justice for these families. I really can’t see what they could possibly do to make amends now. Im sure versions of this went on in the whole of the U.K, although not state sanctioned I suppose. There was a care home type place for people with disabilities in the town I grew up in (huge old building that had been the workhouse). I know in the 80s there were old women in there who had been sent there by their families and spent their entire lives essentially incarcerated because they’d had children out of wedlock as teens. No idea what happened to the babies. My own family did it the kind way. My great grandfather was bought up believing his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his older sister. She became pregnant as a teen after very probably being raped working in service. Im sure the entire village must have known the truth, but still a good effort on their part to keep the family together. My heart bleeds for all those poor women and children.

I cannot get my head around the fact that the people running these institutions thought they were morally in the right.

800 babies and children in a single mass grave, that's not accidental natural deaths that's murder and yet the poor mothers of those children were treated as the sinners.

I was educated in a convent.
Those nuns were some fucked up bitches-from-hell.
I am now a raging anti-theist.

[quote Weatherwarning]Terribly sad times.

"Some families stood up against it - I remember an old woman when I was a child, and she was a mother to a late middle aged man who lived with her and she had never married, but she had never entered a home nor had she had her son taken form her (for context, he would have been born sometime in the 1940's)."

This was true. I know a woman now in her 80's, who was" illegitimate" but was raised with her extended family. So yes, some families did not abandon their pregnant daughters. I also remember reading of a young woman who was pregnant and remained with her family but was turned away from 2 hospitals, when in labour, due to her being unmarried. She died.
www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-30862904.html[/quote]
This happened within my family too - I discovered in my 40s that my aunt's "youngest sister" was in fact her oldest daughter, passed off as her mother's "final fling of the ovaries late accident." (Irish branch of the family, so the alternative would have been a mother and baby home or a Magadelen laundry).

In retrospect, given the alternatives, this was a remarkably humane solution by the standards of the time. And I'm glad to say that since my uncle's death (all complicated, and I don't in any way blame my uncle for the fact that the family kept quiet while he was still alive, don't want to go into details because it's potentially outing for the family) my aunt has been able to acknowledge her daughter as such, and she and her younger half-siblings have a really good relationship.

This report is so long overdue. I just wish there was some chance of justice and reparations, but I fear that there won't be.

@Annasgirl
I had the same thoughts when I saw Roderic on the news. His remarks on misogyny were clearly lacking any sense of self awareness

Also important from a feminist pov to hold in mind that this was a patriarchial system, by male people for the benefit of male people - however there were no males maltreating those women or presiding over the wards where those children died.

Zeal, ideological fervour, feelings of own superiority and virtue looking down on others - while shouting wholly cognitive dissonant stuff about loving fellow man - meeting own needs by exercising power over others, gaining status, cruelty and inhumanity from women to women and children, a belief in an important role for self in exorcising and punishing evils - that's something that needs unpacking, because that hasn't passed on either.