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?

All the money in the world can never give back what was taken. Some women have already said they won’t take blood money to ease the conscience of those that allowed this to go on, right up until 1998!

@Colouringaddict

All the money in the world can never give back what was taken. Some women have already said they won’t take blood money to ease the conscience of those that allowed this to go on, right up until 1998!

I agree with that.

Nonetheless I support Alan Kelly, because sadly hitting organisations in the wallet tends to be the only language they understand. The bastards need to be held to account somehow, and I doubt it's going to come through prison sentences for the perpetrators, however much I would like to see that happen.

I'm Irish, and from a very catholic family. When I was 18 I got a horrible virus. It made me faint and be sick several times over the course of 2/3 days. I felt so I well. My mother stood over me several times and kept saying, you better not be pregnant, if you are pregnant I will be so ashamed, oh god what will my family think! No sympathy no compassion. This was 1999!

There some stories on Youtube - the women/girls had absolutely NO sex education. When they were raped or had sex they didn't even know what they'd done or what the consequences could be.
If you were considered a very pretty orphanage girl you would automatically be put in a laundry, I suppose it was described as being for the girl's own good. Too much of a temptation for men.
And that priests took advantage of these girls - unbelievable.

Did anyone see DNA, I think it's still on iPlayer? That had a "mother and baby home" in Poland where the girls were forced to give their babies up for adoption by nuns. It is fiction so not historical fact, but this practice in Poland looked recent. There wasn't anything about deaths or neglect of the children or mothers which doesn't mean it didn't happen in RL. I wonder if there's a scandal waiting to be uncovered in Poland.

It's certainly not just Ireland. Remember the huge baby trafficking scandal in Spain where it emerged that doctors, priests, nuns had conspired to have babies illegally adopted abroad for large sums, often pretending to their birth parents that the babies had died? I think it started under Franco but continued into the 90s. I remember reading about it at the time I had my son in 2012.

And it's also not just a Catholic thing -- some of the Irish homes in the Mother and Baby home report were run and administered by Protestants for Protestants, just as the original Magdalen laundries were Protestant foundations begun in England. The first one was in Whitechapel. Apparently there were about 300 in England in Wales by 1900. (One of the differences compared to Ireland is that they were inspected under the Factories Act after 1901, which meant more oversight of how many hours the women could be compelled to work and conditions, whereas Ireland, not having had an industrial revolution, didn't have a similar legal framework over commercial activities that might have protected the inmates against some of the worst excesses. Possibly.)

I wonder if there's a scandal waiting to be uncovered in Poland.

I think there might be one in the making. Under communism abortion was widely available and cheap/free. Swedish women used to travel to Poland like Irish women have travelled to England for abortion.

After communism the RC church is gaining more power and it is virtually impossible to get an abortion.

It is absolutely horrendous. The shame that was projected on to women leading them to ruin. Men bore no shame.

@Cluas I see that report on the bethany home used as proof by some apologists that it wasn't a catholic problem. I see it as proof of nothing. It corroborates how deeply entwined church and state were imo, that it was so utterly utterly shameful to be pregnant and not married in our society, it hardly mattered at all if you were catholic or not, you were still RUINED. It was the patriarchy, endorsed by the church. No religion was going to celebrate an unmarried woman's pregnancy but the church perpetuated the misogyny and the patriarchy and men projected all the shame on to women and escaped scot free.

And another important thing to note was that occasionally when individuals try to stand up and show decency rather than cruelty, they were quickly made aware of the reality that your eggs your butter won't be bought so, your hardware shop won't be patronised, your pub will be avoided......... This was the reality. Priests stood up in the pulpit and told the town where to shop and where not to patronise.

And yet women don't get pregnant without men. This is one of the things that enrages me about the Catholic Church and other man-made misogynistic religions. Made by men to benefit men. And they take no responsibility. Gosh I'm cross.

Aren't there reports of a lot of abortions/forced adoptions in church-run children's homes because the priests get the girls pregnant? I may well be mistaken, but I think I've read something along those lines recently.

@2021hwg

I'm Irish, and from a very catholic family. When I was 18 I got a horrible virus. It made me faint and be sick several times over the course of 2/3 days. I felt so I well. My mother stood over me several times and kept saying, you better not be pregnant, if you are pregnant I will be so ashamed, oh god what will my family think! No sympathy no compassion. This was 1999!

I remember I dropped a pen and picked it up and then dropped it again! My mother said ''are you pregnant! are you pregnant!'''

The level of shame is just unimaginable. Even if my daughter ended up a heroin addict I'd feel less shame, I'd feel upset/grief.

The whole thing is so heartbreaking. I have a huge Irish family and as far as I know, within my own family, no one was affected by this (apart from of course my own Grandmother who went through pregnancy and birth 10 times because there was no contraception!)

However, I have a friend whose mother was born in one of these homes, and the negative repercussions of that have passed down through 2 more generations, and will probably continue to pass down to the next in all honesty.

Philomena is such an excellent film, but I'll never be able to watch it again I don't think

Also fuck anyone who says that 'biology is irrelevant' and just a 'grey area' and it's all about how you feel on the inside. And that includes Colm Fucking O'Gorman and his scorn for women who 'defend biology'.

[quote WiseOwlRelaxing]**@Cluas* I see that report on the bethany home used as proof by some apologists that it wasn't a catholic problem. I see it as proof of nothing. It corroborates how deeply entwined church and state were imo, that it was so utterly utterly shameful* to be pregnant and not married in our society, it hardly mattered at all if you were catholic or not, you were still RUINED. It was the patriarchy, endorsed by the church. No religion was going to celebrate an unmarried woman's pregnancy but the church perpetuated the misogyny and the patriarchy and men projected all the shame on to women and escaped scot free.[/quote]
I'm sure it's been used that way, but I don't see it as in essence an apologist's point -- I think it lets Irish society as a whole and the State off the hook to an extent if fingers are only pointed at the Catholic hierarchy. I think it's too easy to promote the idea that villainous types like John Charles McQuaid and an army of vicious nuns were ultimately responsible for the incarceration, forced labour, illegal abortions, deaths by neglect etc of thousands of women and children.

Considering the extent to which these homes were ecumenical in their desire to lock away 'deviant' or unwanted women and their children means we need to consider what forces ultimately condoned this and who was complicit. As does considering the children of these homes 'boarded out' to farms around the country as free or cheap labour, like indentured, underage servants treated like farm animals. Some families treated the children well, but there was widespread abuse -- and these were in ordinary families, not inside the walls of an institution staffed by sadistic nuns. No one required these families to mistreat these children, and they weren't being coerced by vows, or an overseer, or a powerful church hierarchy.

I know a woman now in her seventies who was boarded out from a laundry in the 60s I think she was the child of an unmarried mother who was considered 'unadoptable', and the same farming family would 'foster' her when they needed labour and send her back to the laundry when they didn't and her stories would draw tears from a stone.

My Irish Catholic mother was educated by nuns. All she would really say about them was that the Sisters of Mercy had no mercy.

There were 2 nuns left at my school in the 1970s in the West of Scotland. One was a horrible nasty horror. I wonder how she managed to maintain such a repellent attitude all the time. Really deeply nasty. Argh, that's taken me back a bit.

There was one nun still teaching when I attended a convent secondary school in the 90s. She was grand, very nice actually, and didn't mention religion once (it wasn't her subject!)

Rather, the uber-Catholic, socially conservative, judgemental-as-fuck teachers were all lay teachers. Most of the bad ones had been to the Mater Dei for teacher training (shudder) and had a very skewed view of religion and ethics and their place in the school hierarchy (at the top, obvs). I remember getting into a stand-up row with a teacher during a civics class when we were discussing the X case because I refused to agree that "abortion was always wrong".

Thankfully these uber-catholic handmaidens of the patriarchy were in the minority, and there were plenty of other normal teachers as well, but the damage they did was awful enough that it made me adamant I would never send my kids to a catholic school.

I agree with @Cluas - and I am really annoyed that people are giving out that this wasn't "society" it was the Church and the State.

Well of course it was the Church and the State but both of those institutions are only there at the will of the people, and the will of the people was to punish women for the sins of men. Everyone knew what these places were - that was the point, there is no point in having a deterrent if no one knows about it . And they all stood idly by, while it went on underneath their noses.

And even to-day, as we can see with discussions on the GRA, and all the other anti-women new Ireland Institutions, there are many willing handmaidens in society who stand by, knowing full-well what is going on, and call us bigots for pointing it out.

Some day our children will read the report on the GRA and the next generation of handmaidens will say "well it wasn't society, it was the State"

^^ Yup.

One of the few ways for women to gain status in a patriarchy is by helping enforce the patriarchal rules. So women with social standing = those pillars of the community who police behaviour deemed unacceptable by the menz in charge, whether that's sexual activity outside marriage (then) or wanting single-sex protections for women (now).

I have a lot of words I could call such women but they all feel misogynistic in their own right, so I'll settle for calling then traitorous sleeveens who value their own personal status above the common good

So true @MarDhea

Making women pay the price for men's morality has so many knock on effects.

I read Boy George's mum's memoir, she was brought up in a poor Catholic family in Dublin. Her first boyfriend 'ruined' her by getting her pregnant then abandoning her despite his promises. Her family (despite having other issues ie domestic violence) actually stood by her and allowed her to keep her baby.

When she moved to London and met Jerry O'Dowd (Boy George's father) he was brutally violent to her even before they married, beating her severely on a number of occasions. She married him because by becoming a wife, she became an 'honest woman' and she never left him, despite a lifetime of abuse at his hands. She remained grateful that he had willingly married a fallen woman.

Her family had no sympathy at all, and told her she'd made her bed and had to lie in it.

Wow - 😢

@MilkMoon

Exactly, *@NorthernIrishFeminist*. And I think a lot of people outside of Ireland (or probably in Ireland now, for people under the age of 50 ish) think of people becoming nuns because of a particularly strong religious faith and a freely-chosen 'vocation', when in fact there was often nothing like a free choice, especially for small farmers' daughters considered 'unmarriagable' who didn't want to emigrate and in a country where employment opportunities for women were few.

I'm 48 and was educated entirely at convent schools, and it's very clear to me now that many of the nuns who taught me in the 70s and 80s had no particular vocation, they were 'encouraged' into the convent by their families as a respectable way of getting a plain one off their hands, or had few other choices, and of course there was also a hierarchy among orders, and inside orders, between the choir nuns who were from better-off backgrounds and brought dowries, and the lay nuns who didn't. And the orders running these homes weren't the 'prestigious' ones.

And the powerless can behave in very ugly ways when they're given power over those who are even lower on the totem pole than they are. I assume that is in part what lies behind some of the treatment by nuns of the women and children they had care of -- in some cases they were striking out to punish 'fallen' women expressing a sexuality they hadn't been able to express on their own account, as well as exercising a power they didn't have in any other context.

And don't underestimate the power of a kind of mass Stockholm syndrome for every survivor rightly indignantly talking about their mistreatment to the media, there is a dwindling band of the older generation who would not recognise the term 'survivor' and who will not hear a word against the nuns. I know several elderly former Magdalen laundry inhabitants who get terribly upset when any criticism at all is directed against the laundries one was very reluctant to leave when the former laundry finally closed in the 90s, because she'd only ever lived there, alongside the even older nuns who had once incarcerated her. She now lives in a tiny flat and is incredulous at being offered reparation money, which she tried to refuse, and goes to Mass daily. It would be beyond cruel to ask whether she's ever angry she had her life confiscated.

I completely agree with everything you say here @MilkMoon and I also think the point stands for not just the nuns, but for large swathes of Irish society in the first half of the 20th century. With almost no opportunities apart from emigration, very low marriage rates, and very late average marriage ages, I believe Ireland was full of deeply thwarted people who were ready and willing to vent their anger and bitterness at their own limited lives on 'legitimate' targets like unmarried mothers and 'bastard' children.

From what limited knowledge I have, Christian Brothers werent exactly known for being christian in their attitude towards their pupils either?

I agree with a pp that it wasn't just the church and the state that were responsible for this, people handed their daughters over to these hell holes rather than living with the so called shame. I can't get my head around this still going on in the 90s though. I had my first baby in 1990 and although i was married, lots of single women i knew had babies and no one batted an eyelid. There was a certain amount of sneering about unmarried mums claiming benefits, but it wasn't a moral or religious thing at all. I lived in Dublin, so can only assume that it happened in more rural areas. Shocking and very, very, sad.

@torquewench

From what limited knowledge I have, Christian Brothers werent exactly known for being christian in their attitude towards their pupils either?

One put my dad’s head through a partition wall