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?

The report is heartbreaking. The Catholic Church has a lot to answer for. DH's Irish Catholic dad married an English C of E woman after getting her pregnant, in England in the late 40s. The children were all baptised Catholic until DH was born and a new parish priest had started. He visited the home and stated that because MIL was not Catholic, the marriage was not recognised and all the children were bastards. DH and his younger siblings were subsequently baptised C of E, and FIL didn't return to the church until MIL died. DH was vehemently atheist.

Even on a thread about the deaths of children, a male person has to come and self righteously shit all over it.

Hiding this thread. I can't bear watching this, it's too much.

A pp stated there would be no justice for the families-- the families did this to those girls, the 'families' don't deserve justice.

Ireland needs to accept that this isn't just a catholic thing, the whole country is responsible for encouraging the culture that allowed these atrocities.

@GingerAndTheBiscuits

As a person born to an unmarried mother in Ireland in the early 1980s I’m reassessing my (sometimes negative) view of my staunchly Catholic grandfather. It must not have been an easy thing to “allow” my mother to remain at home when so many were sent away. The findings are horrific.

Absolutely. That won’t have been easy for him and the rest of the family. The younger sister of one my best friends got pregnant in the early/mid 80s in Dublin. Her parents said they would only support her if she gave the baby up for adoption. Her options were a mother and baby home or staying at home and having the baby and having it adopted. I think she honestly thought they would change their minds when she had the baby. But they were too worried about what the neighbours and priests would say. So she had her baby and he was adopted. Actually half the neighbours were pretty disgusted that they made her have the baby adopted.

I know Michelle. It’s. Really shocking

The deaths of women and children. A point of view. 🤷‍♀️

If I ever thought that I would consider myself to be heartless

Were any nuns ever prosecuted/questioned about their roles?

After all, concentration camp attendants, some very young at the time have had to face justice even in advanced old age.

Has anyone read Edna O'Brien's books: The Country Girls and The Lonely Girl? They were written and set in Ireland in the early 1960s, right at the peak of activity for these mother and baby homes.

It gives a very evocative overview of just how rigid and repressive the social structure of the day was, how girls and young women either had to conform or get out and live secret lives. And even if they did try to get away and live independently, there was always the risk that they would be found out and brought home. There was no security. 99% of individuals had no power because the collective oppression of the church and state was so strong.

I do indeed blame the Catholic Church for its role in the mother and baby homes, and also for the iron grip it deliberately exerted on social structure at the time. I also blame the Irish state for complicity in the church's behaviour. I blame de Valera and his cosy relationship with the church that led to far too much involvement of church views in state policy (contrast with WT Cosgrove, who resisted church interference on many issues in the early years of the free state).

But I do find it difficult to blame every individual person who knew what went on in these homes, because most individuals were so utterly powerless that there was nothing they could do.

to the thousands of women and children.

Mardhea yes and the fact that those books were banned says everything.

I agree with Annasgirl, there was a collective culpability that we have to own. I get impatient with young people, who don't have any memory of what it was like and who aren't willing to accept that. Even the heroic Dr Noel Browne who apparently did battle with the Catholic establishment with the Mother and Child scheme - he wrote the most crawling obsequious letters to Archbishop McQuaid that were only uncovered a few years ago. Everyone was in on it.

What I'd like to say about Roderic O'Gorman would probably get me banned so I won't. I'm avoiding social media today because the loudest voices protesting about this are the ones claiming sex doesn't exist.

This story truly resonates with me. "There but for the grace of god", etc. My dad was born "out of wedlock" as they used to say, in 1943. His father apparently was willing to step up and support my dad and grandma, but her Irish catholic mother told him to never darken their door again, so he didn't. We dont know much about him other than he hadnt told my grandma that he was already married until she got pregnant with dad when she was 36 years old. My dad spent the first 7 years of his life in a convent, the only male amongst about 150 girls, with accommodation and food costs paid for by my grandmother, until she was able to bring him home. He can still recall her once yearly visits, accompanied by her brother, and being taken to his new home in a large black car. He hated the nuns due to their treatment of him almost as much as he hated his grandmother. And for some reason, he was a god fearing churchgoer until fairly recently! He was so, so, fortunate in many ways. He visited the convent a while back, and was shown the old ledgers that the nuns kept which detailed the 5 shillings a week my grandma had to pay to keep him there.

My DM was catholic, my DF was not. When I was born (late 1960’s), it was common for the priest to be allowed on to the maternity ward. My DM had an awful time having me, resulting in forceps and my face looking very very bruised and battered. The midwives on the ward decided it would be too upsetting for my DM to see me so I had been kept from her for 3 days, she was convinced I had died. It was my DGF that created a massive noise that got us reunited.

The priest stood at the foot of her bed on the day she had been allowed to finally see me. He told her that because she had married a Protestant man in a registry office, I was an illegitimate child and I would, along with her, be cast into the holy fires of hell. She was distraught. He tried to take me from her so that I could be baptised into the church to save my soul, luckily my DF arrived and he chased that priest out of the hospital and into the town. My DF was the most mild mannered man ever at the time (dementia has sadly changed that now), but he said he would have beaten that priest for the grief he caused my mother.

Both my DSis and I were baptised into the Church of England, most babies born then were baptised so it wasn’t unusual.

So this was happening in England, I dread to think of the power the church had in Ireland.

Criminal proceedings need to be brought against those still living, nothing less will do.

Yes, I wore about DH's parents experience in the 1950s that was similar to your parents. Shocking that it was still happening in the late 60s.

Poking my head above the parapet as I don't usually brave FWR.
I've been reading as much of the report as I can, whilst my DD sleeps next to me. I can't begin to imagine.

I spoke to my DM about this earlier, and she recollects her aunt and uncle adopting a baby in Liverpool (she's in her late sixties now) and taking her along to collect the child. She says that only now has she remembered the nuns that were there, and wonders if the child had been brought over.

I will make my way through the report slowly and surely, it's not an area I have any form of knowledge on but i'm trying to address that.

I think the Catholic Church is now finished in Southern Ireland. As th e older generations have died out, its influence has too, and it’s a good thing.

What a shameful history we have. I was brought up an Irish catholic, convent school etc but have long since ditched the church because even as a teenager, I could sense the misogyny that ran through the whole institution. Ireland back then and still to some extent even now, was all about silence and shame, people worried more about being seen to do the "right" thing than they did about doing the morally correct thing, Growing up the 80s, the overriding fear as a teenage girl, moreso than any life-threatening disaster, was the fear of getting pregnant. This was before contraception was available and decades before legal abortion. The nuns showed us graphic videos of abortions.
May none of the perpetrators of these atrocities rest in peace.

We have a baby who was born in Scotland in our family, returned to Ireland to be adopted. There was earlier incest among siblings and I am now, thanks to this thread, beginning to wonder if Granny's miracle change of life baby really was her son or her grandson???

@Arnoldthecat

Ask yourselves this, who are the real criminals? The men who got them pregnant and the families who abandoned them and cast them out. What relief would those women have had? would they have lived and died on the streets?

Fuck off Arnold

When you look at the records and recorded year of death there seemed to be gaps of time when no deaths occurred (up to a year in one case) and other times children seemed to be dying at a rate of one a day.

Infectious disease? Something like diphtheria or TB could rip through an institution and would be particularly dangerous for children already in poor health due to malnutrition and neglect.

I’m in no way condoning the cruelty of nuns, having been taught by them they make me uneasy decades later.

I used to wonder why so many nuns who taught small children so clearly disliked them, then I discovered the nuns would be made to do the jobs they disliked as penance. Many girls were ‘strongly encouraged’ to become nuns in Irish Catholic families so many did not chose that life.

The whole ethos and emphasis of suffering being good for you was one of the many toxic aspects of Catholicism.