Irish Mother and baby homes

[Colouringaddict]

Finally today a five year report has been released. 9,000 babies dying and being placed in a mass grave sparked the investigation.

Decades of suffering for thousands of families.

The church will be asked to contribute to the restorative justice for the victims. Despite the fact that there was no evidence of the church forcing the women into these homes ( and we all know that isn’t true).

The Irish P.M will also issue an apology.

It isn’t enough is it?

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

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???

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.

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

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???

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.

The photos on the Irish Examiner article link are heartbreaking.

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.

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.

@AmandaHoldensLips

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

My experience too.

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

[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'.

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.

@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.

@Arnoldthecat

I think it is all very well for the MSM to be hyper critical of the catholic church but what they are doing is judging historical events by modern day standards!

Are they saying for example that officers of the catholic church ie priests and nuns MURDERED these infants?

We are talking about a time when ireland did not allow any form of contraception and the Church in Rome rules supreme across the land !

We are also talking about a time when there as great personal and family shame in being an unmarried mother.

Against that backdrop the catholic church of the time did great charitable works providing shelter, food and work for many unmarried mothers,facilitating the birth of their child and either caring for the child or rehoming it.

As with all things ,there are some undesirable outcomes but a hell of a lot of good was also done by caring people who did their best at the time.

Wow, someone clearly cannot read the room.

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?

@Annasgirl. astonished that these apologists still exist and are actually stupid: unaware enough to post that crap excuse why what they did is only bad because it’s being judged against modern standards. Jimmy Saville did a lot of good work for charity - should he get a free pass for his other crimes.

I don't know as much about the mother and baby homes but I've read extensively about the Industrial School system that only fully closed in the late 1970s. Children there were beaten, raped, starved and denied knowledge of who they even were, then on their 16th birthday they were given a bus or train fare into town and thrown out. Literally the day that the state stopped providing money for their keep the 'charity' of the church stopped.

In the report, Bessborough mother and baby home had an infant mortality rate of 80% at one point. The babies only had their nappies changed at feeding time, and were left alone in filth for hours at a time. It was death by neglect, and even by the standards of the time, inspectors were horrified.

I’ve done an advanced search and Arnold claims to be male on another thread. How fucking arrogant to come on this thread and spout the kind of bullshit justification that he has given as to why the Catholic Church was not guilty. Makes you question why he’s on this site at all when he obviously has so little regard for women.

Undesirable outcomes ?

What a horrid and vile thing to say. Arnoldthecat

I can’t believe that someone would actually write that

It is tragic that Ireland is again in the grip of a misogynistic belief system whose primary spokespeople are men and enforced by some women that refuses to accept others women’s autonomy and facts about themselves and treats them as sinners.

I listened to the Taoiseach’s apology yesterday and felt a rage that they have learnt nothing.

@littlbrowndog. we have a man (Arnold) coming on here and claiming that crimes against women were undesirable outcomes and it’s ok because they had brainwashed the Irish people at the time to believe that they were the good guys. These men walk amongst us and actually have the arrogance to think that we should accept their bullshit rationale for why this really wasn’t a bad thing.

@Arnoldthecat

I think it is all very well for the MSM to be hyper critical of the catholic church but what they are doing is judging historical events by modern day standards!

Are they saying for example that officers of the catholic church ie priests and nuns MURDERED these infants?

We are talking about a time when ireland did not allow any form of contraception and the Church in Rome rules supreme across the land !

We are also talking about a time when there as great personal and family shame in being an unmarried mother.

Against that backdrop the catholic church of the time did great charitable works providing shelter, food and work for many unmarried mothers,facilitating the birth of their child and either caring for the child or rehoming it.

As with all things ,there are some undesirable outcomes but a hell of a lot of good was also done by caring people who did their best at the time.

Yes, those babies were murdered.

Why was there shame? Because of the Catholic church.

Why were pregnant women hidden away? Because of the Catholic church.

You eejit.