Tuam - beyond comprehension

[MrsDustyBusty]

So it seems like the initial investigation into the graves (for want of a better word) in Tuam is even more horrific than had been imagined.

www.rte.ie/news/2017/0303/856914-tuam-mother-baby/

Poor, poor women. Poor, poor babies.

Minnie forgive me I should have said your poor Mum also.

Claire Byrne's show has just shown the 796 names of the babies who died in Tuam. It was tough viewing.

Reports claim there are at least 7000 babies in mass graves in the other mother and baby homes and magdalene laundries.

People were so in thrall / in the grip of the church...it was a different era.

Yes, it was. I studied history in college, and one of lecturers (very famous but can't remember her name...this was more than...let's just say it wasn't today or yesterday) connected this brutal regime of sexual repression with post famine trauma.

www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/names-of-dead-infants-at-bessborough-and-roscrea-were-given-to-the-hse-in-2011-780324.html

You only have to look at Fethard in Tipperary to see how you'd be ostracised if you didn't kowtow to the church and that was the norm across the country. People did not tend to travel outside their area unless to emigrate and didn't have outside influences like we have today plus they were not as educated either and were brainwashed in school and had fear and shame instilled in them from such a young age.

Yes the wider community have some responsibility for what happened but ultimately the people who disposed of babies bodies in such a callous way are responsible for this scandal.

I have been reading a thread on boards.ie also and a few posters have told stories of where, in one case, a mother died, and the priest was up to organise the children to be sent to homes... The only thing that stopped that from happening was an aunt moving in to the family home to care for the children.

Another where both parents died, and again, pressure on for the children to be taken away. In that case, the eldest who was only 17, himself, refused, and he looked after them.

And of course, why were the nuns anxious to get hold of them...money, and free labour, I presume.

MrsDustyBusty
Was the lecturer Marguerite Mc Curtain or MaryDaly?

I happened to pass by a crèche / play school yesterday. Little children playing, happy, cared for.

And my heart broke again for the little mites in that hell hole who probably never saw or felt the slightest whit of kindness towards them. And when their little lives ended, their bodies were thrown in a sewer.

How did people live with what they did...I will never understand.

And to this very day many are in thrall to this evil organisation that is the Catholic Church, People who are educated and in the professions, people who are politically and socially aware.
The church certainly " did a number " on us, the people of Ireland.
The scales fell from my eyes after my experience in a convent boarding school some years ago now.
The interview with Catherine Corless makes for sobering and riveting viewing.
I hope that the lid is blown off the toxic secrecy that has surrounded this scandal.
Enda Kenny we are watching you with bated breath.

I am also sickened by the fathers who took no responsibility for the children they fathered.
Great piece in the Irish Times Wednesday 8th March by Kathy Sheridan on this.

At least one politician has come out with a response, Luke 'MIng'

*"You've had your bit of fun, now feel the bloody pain"

Those were the words said to my Mother as she screamed in pain while giving birth to me. They were said to her by a bride of christ or a nun for those who don't follow the lingo. Now you'd think the nuns would have loved my mother. Catholic. Didn't believe in contraception. Pro-life as the phrase goes. Four children already delivered for god. My father was even a carpenter.

But they didn't love my Mother. They loved no one. Just hated. Hated the fact that this world is uncontrollable. Full with people of free will. Full of unpredictability. However that didn't stop them from attempting to control it. Whatever it took. Even if it meant making my mother feel dirty for having enjoyed the love of my father. Even when my Mother had followed their teaching, it wasn't enough. It had to be hell. Any bit of fun wakes the devil so it seems.

I myself now have three beautiful daughters. If my wife and I had been around fifty years earlier I would now have none. You see the first two were born outside wedlock. Fifty years ago the church would have intervened to make sure the second one would never have happened. My first born would have been sold, she's pretty. My wife would have died prematurely in a glorified concentration camp and because I wouldn't have accepted it, I would have been sent to a mental hospital to rot.

I don't believe in god myself. But the story of Jesus I heard certainly doesn't chime with what was rammed down this countries throat. Whatever happened to loving your neighbour? Where did the bit about free will disappear to when it comes to women's bodies? Whatever happened to the parable of casting stones? In fact from what I can see, if Jesus had been around Ireland in the 40s, 50s and 60s he'd have been locked up himself for being different.

When I hear the line that society was complicit in the latest church atrocity to be exposed, I get angry. Who are we on about here? People living in overcrowded houses with barely enough to eat. They were expected to speak out? Do I really need to write this. Do I really need to spell it out for those bullshit academics. Does one really have to say -But they too would have been incarcerated if they spoke out- Is this not obvious?

Well it is obvious. But accepting this obvious truth can't be allowed. You see if we don't take the blame then the Church will need to. Sure we couldn't have that. Especially after all they've done for us...

I held my children that bit closer last weekend. For fear of what might have been.*
'

Ming had nailed it. When unmarried mothers were in labour they were denied pain relief as it was their penance. My sister muttered jesus christ during a bad contraction and was told by the midwife if she'd been saying her prayers 9 months earlier she wouldn't be in labour.

Peanut, that's shocking for sure.
The Brides of Christ behaved in a most un Christlike manner didn't they?
My heart is breaking thinking of the misery inflicted on an already downtrodden people.
Yes, we had our own version of The Gulags in those so called Mother and Baby homes and Magdalen Laundries.
The Church was not content with total domination, they had to grind people down.
And of course they brooked no argument, as anyone who popped their head above the parapet got told where they belonged.
My only consolation is the fervent hope that as we are now wise to their ways, we can fully and thoroughly investigate their evil activities, and hold the Organisation to account.

Was the lecturer Marguerite Mc Curtain or Mary Daly

Now that you remind me, it was Mary Daly. I am that elderly now!

Did anyone read Miriam Lord in the IT? Excellent as always.

So anyway, I can't really get this all out of my mind. But one thing definitely occurs. My grandparents, I'm sure, would have held the disgusting opinions that led to these places. Obviously they never said that, but I can recall things they did say that make it pretty clear what they thought of unmarried mothers. My cousin got pregnant before she married her now husband. They were in America and for the years between hearing of the pregnancy and the wedding, my grandmother would not hear her name said.

Just saw that the Dail debate on Tuam was delayed as less than 20 TDs showed up.
This is an absolute disgrace.
The one thing I disagree with Mings statement was his comment that society wasn't complicit. Maybe not those people he says living in poverty and fear but definately those who were in 'power' at the time, TDs, Doctors and other 'upright members of the community'. Now our current batch of TDs show they are no better.

What a shower they are in the bloody Dail, they're a disgrace.
Not much hope of any thorough investigation into the crimes committed by the Church in those dreadful institutions. Looks like The Top People really want it to all go away and let them all enjoy their cosy little lives.

It was on Women's Hour on bbc4 this morning. Interesting, as they said that even not burying them on consecrated ground was not necessarily required at the time. That surprised me.

minnie that's desperate. My story us different - my grandmother had a baby 'out of wedlock' in the 1930s, who stayed in a convent and became a (lovely ) nun, she had a good life and was well looked after. My grandmother asked for her on her death bed and she came. None of my DM's siblings or herself knew but they kept contact up until she died last year. Imagine how sad the hello and goodbye were.. her daughter a 50yo woman. Im crying at the thought of all of this. Am I naive to hope most deaths were a sign of the uneducated times and that such burials were 'normal', as mentioned by a pp who said her aunt's babies were buried on a farm? The thought of the hatred of these poor women in those places. They were still going in the 80s (90s?) , definitely families

*hatred for the women

..families have a lot to answer for also. I was born in the 70s to extremely devout parents and I was in no doubt growing up that they would support me and my sister's in such a situation. They however are very Christian which a lot of the people in tuam and elsewhere clearly were not.

Well I'm listening to loonline at the moment and there's a woman on saying that the extended families of these women are owed reparation along with the women themselves. The families who had them locked up, is it?

Perhaps theyre talking about the women's other kids? The women would be elderly now so certainly the people who put them in the homes are long dead. And of course in many cases the mothers themselves are dead.

The one thing I disagree with Mings statement was his comment that society wasn't complicit. Maybe not those people he says living in poverty and fear but definately those who were in 'power' at the time, TDs, Doctors and other 'upright members of the community'.

YY to this. I think there's a vested interest in blaming solely the nuns and priests (who certainly deserve every bit of castigation they get) and turning a blind eye to the mainstream, lay society who were either happily complicit or actively gained from the system. It's more comfortable to blame the religious orders as an alien other than acknowledge that people just like us facilitated the whole thing.

The ministers and county councillors who didn't have to think about proving maternity services or financial support for unmarried mothers. The families who cared more about their social standing than the wellbeing of their pregnant daughters and sisters. The married mothers who refused to use maternity hospitals if unmarried mothers weren't banned. The hotel and boarding house owners who used the cheap services of the Magdalene laundries. The gps who informed the local priest if an unmarried women was pregnant. The shopkeepers who refused to serve women who had borne a child out of wedlock. The employers who fostered children from the homes to exploit as cheap labour.

These people do not deserve to get off scot free.

MarDhea - excellent post.

MarDhea, great post. Background: I'm half Irish and have grown up Catholic in a Scandinavian country.* Here the RC church was/is an underdog so to speak. Also, I had priests and youth leaders who encouraged critical thinking (not necessarily true for all my countrymen, mind), and all this means that I have a completely different feeling towards the church than what my Irish relations have, I've noticed and I do have a different perspective.

Anyway, when I was little visiting Ireland there was still the whole "go to Mass and do as you're told" mentality. Then there was a good few years when I didn't go to Ireland for various reasons and during that time everything changed in the attitude to church - relations didn't go anymore and expressed disgust at previous attitudes etc and horror at emerging scandals (rightly so, mind, fair enough). And inside me is this voice saying "but you went along with this before?! where is your sense of responsability for what you accepted?".

I might get flamed for this but I would like to see a discussion happening over why all these horrible things have happened in Ireland in particular. It's easier to blame church, clergy and convents as a separate alien entity externally imposed on the Irish but it's not the whole truth, just like you say. This was Irish culture for a good while. Not just Church culture. Intelligent, educated people made a deliberate choice to NOT create or at least work towards a society based on secularism and religion-free state schools, for example. There is a lot to learn and discuss around this and it'd be a shame if it all died down to "those horrible nuns".

*I've been lurking Craicnet for a while but haven't posted.

Catherine Corless just got a standing ovation on the Late Late show - Ryan said he couldn't remember when he'd last seen it.