I've copied this from facebook, it's very powerful.
Here follows one of the most powerful commentaries on the Tuam babies scandal I’ve seen in recent days. Written by the formidable Brenda Power, it appeared in Tuesday’s edition of the Irish Daily Mail. I transcribed it from an unsharp pic I made of the printed article so hope it’s faithful to the original!
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THE HORROR INFLICTED ON THE TUAM BABIES IS A LOT CLOSER TO THE FINAL SOLUTION THAN WE’D LIKE TO ADMIT
Tubes of red lipstick were among the first provisions the Allies delivered to the newly liberated inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945. Along with the food and medicine that would revive theIr emaciated bodies, along with the warm clothing that would replace their threadbare rags, some kind souls realised that the thousands of shaven-headed women in the concentration camp needed more than their physical selves restored.
They also needed to reclaim the femininity, the expression of their human identity, that their captors had stolen.
In their rags and their stubble and their fleshless forms, they’d long since ceased to see themselves as women; they were just rattlebags of skin and bones in a sea of walking cadavers. They didn’t see themselves as women because their captors’ first objective had been to dehumanise them, to strip them of every mortal trait in an effort to process them through the death camps with maximum efficiency. Even the Nazis couldn’t have watched still-breathing bodies—the pace of work meant that the gas chambers didn’t always have time to complete their task—being crammed into the crematoria if they’d seen them as fellow humans.
In this country, for several decades of the last century, so-called “religious orders” ran the mother-and-baby homes that we now believe to have been dying rooms for unwanted infants. Following the discovery of a “significant number” of infant remains in cesspits in Tuam, with perhaps as many as 800 tiny corpses dumped in septic tank vaults, it now looks ominously likely that similar finds will be made in other former homes and laundries run by the men and women of God. As many as 4,000 children, according to some estimates, died in these places over four decades. Their causes of death might be dysentery, or convulsions, or fever, but the root cause was neglect, starvation and cold. They were left to die, in their hundreds and possibly thousands. And it is inconceivable that this level of mortality could have been achieved without a mindset that mirrored that of the genocidal Nazis: before you can starve, neglect and ill-treat another human to the point of death, you must first deny their humanity to the appeasement of your own conscience.
Before you could watch a baby die of hunger or hypothermia or disease for want of milk or warmth or simple medical care, you must have convinced yourself that the infant was not fully human at all. Before you could wrap a child’s emaciated corpse in an old rag and lay it on a pile of older bones—one observer described the stacked bundles as looking like mineral bottles wrapped in cloth—you must first have detached it from every association with a “normal” infant.
That was why the children in these homes were deprived of toys, games and treats as deliberately as they were starved of affection and food. They were denied affirmation of their childhood as consciously as women in Auschwitz were denied expressions of their femininity: to make them easier to process as units of inconvenient existence. Over the weekend, one survivor described his bewilderment when his kindly foster parents, who took him in at the age of five, began to decorate a Christmas tree. He had learned nothing of Christmas traditions, in the care of a Catholic religious order; he’d never heard of Santa Claus and he’d never seen a strand of tinsel or received a toy in his life.
VULNERABILITY
PJ Haverty, who lived in Tuam until the age of seven, has described his fear when he met a strange creature bounding towards him as he walked in the gate of his new foster parents’ farm. He’d never seen a dog—not in a picture book, not as a toy, and certainly never in reality. The mentality that would deliberately blind itself to a child’s instinctive playfulness, curiosity and endearing vulnerability, because of a hatred of the “sin” that child represented, has more in common with the Final Solution than is comfortable for us to admit.
The response of the Bon Secours order to the discoveries in Tuam was truly staggering: they found no room in their legally drafted statement to pity the poor babies dumped in a septic tank, to pray for their mothers and to beg mercy for the people who put them there. But in the rush to judgement and blame, we need to remember that the people who put them there weren’t just the ones who swaddled their dead bodies and piled them into a filthy crypt; they were also the mothers and fathers of the incarcerated women, the aunts and the uncles and the grandparents, the employers and the priests and the gossips and the parish worthies; they were also the men who impregnated these women and then walked away without ever troubling to wonder: “What became of the child?”
It is easy to point the finger at a few elderly nuns who might have been in Tuam, or in any of the other institutions now coming under renewed scrutiny, at the time these bodies were dumped, and to say they were to blame for this policy and for this inhumanity. But the orders were acting with the imprimatur of a society that did not trouble itself with the fate of unmarried women and their children. They were acting with the tacit approval of those families, and those men who fathered the babies, who were perfectly happy for them to disappear.
And there’s no comforting absolution in the myth that all these unwanted infants were believed to have been adopted by loving, childless couples, or despatched to better lives with rich families in America. The locals knew exactly who and where they were; they heard their hobnail boots ringing out on the road, each morning, as these children—boys and girls in the same ugly uniforms, the same ill-fitting footwear—were marched to the local school at a safe distance from the youngsters of the parish. They knew the children from the “home” were punished each day for being late, even though they’d been deliberately held back so they would not mix with the “normal” pupils; they knew they were kept apart at lunchtime so they couldn’t play with the others.
They knew the unwanted babies hadn’t gone on to better lives; they knew they were living the most miserable, loveless, impoverished existences of permanent hunger and cold and neglect right in their midst, and they facilitated and colluded, by their silence, in the torture of these unfortunate children. And if any of those guilty men stopped to wonder if they had a son or a daughter among them, if any of the parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles who had sent a girl to a mother-and-baby home asked themselves if these starved, skinny urchins might include their own flesh and blood, they managed to stifle their concerns very efficiently indeed.
We will, as the Garda investigation into the Tuam find commences, interrogate the orders and the religious who ran these homes. But we must also interrogate the society that permitted these hideous crimes to be perpetrated in plain sight. We have to confront the fact that people we knew and loved, the teachers and priests we were taught to respect, the communities and parishes where we grew up, were among those turning a blind eye to the convenient disappearances of all those unwanted babies.
We have to face the fact that our own people and our own places knew all about the ragged and hungry-looking children who never played and never smiled, and that these people, too, were just as guilty of refusing to see them as children at all.