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?

This report and the stories on this thread are horrendous. I have difficulty reading about it as it hits a bit too close to home.

I'm glad it's being acknowledged and spoken about though.

For those looking for a deeper understanding of how and why this happened, I am currently reading "Man's search for Meaning" written by Psychologist and Psychiatrist Victor Frankel about his experience of concentration camps. He too wondered how a man can be brought to such hatred of his fellow man as to strip and torture him. But he answered, the prisoner must first be "Othered" - set up as less than human by society, then it is easier to forget instinctive human kindness.

He discusses how prison guards were a mix of good and evil and how prisoners were a mix of good and evil - as he noted, there is no such thing as all good and all bad there was good and bad in the prison guards and there was good and evil in the prisoner cohort, just as there were good people in the Ireland of the time, like Alice Litster mentioned in the article in to-day's Irish Times.

There were good nuns and horrible nuns, there were good mothers and fathers who helped their daughters, there were good men who helped pregnant girls and then there were the evil ones, the evil women who stood by while other women suffered. As Frankel noted, it was harder for him to forgive another prisoner who trampled over the prisoners to get a reward from the SS than it was to forgive the SS themselves - and this is the heartbreak for us in Ireland. I think it is harder for me to forgive all the mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters who condemned young girls to these institutions than it is to forgive the awful nuns who ran them.

I don't know if it so hard for me to understand the families who sent their daughters to these institutions; in a time and place when opportunities for any kind of a decent life were so few and far between, and a baby born out of wedlock would have destroyed any opportunity for the girl in question, and quite possibly her siblings too, to achieve a half decent life.
And I think the truth is, as horrific as what happened to the women and babies in these institutions were, many of the women who left them did go on to live good lives, with jobs, husbands, more children, financial security etc, and sadly they wouldn't have had those things had people known they had had a baby as a single mother.
Of course, I don't mean to discount for a minute the horrific things that happened in the homes and the awful burden those women have carried for the rest of their lives.

I don't think I agree with you @Handsoffstrikesagain, I think there are many elderly ladies out there (any many more who would have died over the past decades), who have lived good lives (I hope that doesn't sound as though I am minimising the awful experiences they went through), but who aren't going to talk to the media about their experiences as even their own husbands and children, and certainly their wider circle or community, don't know about them. But I suppose we will never know for sure as it would be impossible to research.

@MilkMoon that is true and we don't think of that really, that the nuns were disappointed with life, that they were the one there was no money left to educate, or the plain one nobody wanted to marry or just the one who was nobody's favourite. Not an excuse but I think that the answers if there are any that make sense lie in human nature.

The point about ''othering'' upthread is spot on. Othering makes resentful inadequate insecure unhappy people feel better about themselves. While they are othering, they belong.

One of the women on my fb feed who is putting up the most posts about the mother and baby's homes, it's weird because I know if she'd been a nun she would have been a cruel nun. She is lovely to some people and vile to the few she considers low status. She considers me low status and I'm pretty sure that that's because I'm a single parent, no man in my corner.... the irony really, she'd never dare give any other woman in the group (with a man in her corner so to speak) the silent treatment but she has done it to me for a year now. All the while convinced that if she'd been there, she would have been one of the heroes.

Cluas we may be in secular 2021, but unmarried morherhood is still a concept, and a stigmatised one, in some English communities. My sister and brother, admittedly elderly, now deceased, had 'unmarried mothers' as one of their main outraged topics of conversation. The alibi this time was that they 'got themselves pregnant' in order to claim benefits. (North of England former mining community.)

[quote WiseOwlRelaxing]@MilkMoon that is true and we don't think of that really, that the nuns were disappointed with life, that they were the one there was no money left to educate, or the plain one nobody wanted to marry or just the one who was nobody's favourite. Not an excuse but I think that the answers if there are any that make sense lie in human nature.

The point about ''othering'' upthread is spot on. Othering makes resentful inadequate insecure unhappy people feel better about themselves. While they are othering, they belong.

One of the women on my fb feed who is putting up the most posts about the mother and baby's homes, it's weird because I know if she'd been a nun she would have been a cruel nun. She is lovely to some people and vile to the few she considers low status. She considers me low status and I'm pretty sure that that's because I'm a single parent, no man in my corner.... the irony really, she'd never dare give any other woman in the group (with a man in her corner so to speak) the silent treatment but she has done it to me for a year now. All the while convinced that if she'd been there, she would have been one of the heroes.[/quote]
She sounds awful 😕 I have been in your position too, it's horrible to know you're being treated badly (in this day and age!) due to your marital status! When I was (briefly) married I found some people treated me much more nicely! They'd never admit that though. It's insidious.

It is hard to fathom, but despite the protestations of ''how could this happen?'' there are still people who look down on single mums.

I don't want to sound unaware. I know there's a huge difference between 1) losing your baby, facing financial and social ruin and being shunned by your family and 2) being looked down on and ignored by a few insecure queen bees in a social group, but I think it's the same element of human nature coming out. These queen bees are still heightening their own sense of belonging by trying to ostracise somebody else. They're using you to feel superior.

People, nuns, queen bees, queen bee wannabeez, stalwarts of the parish, they are as exactly as horrible as it was / is socially acceptable to be.

I think too that we cannot grasp how little autonomy a female might have at that time. A poor family with several children, someone sees a pretty daughter and offers to marry them. She is married off, if she has a kind and reasonably wealthy husband she will have many children and a reasonable life and, should a Daughter be made pregnant, would be given the money to take her to England to have the baby adopted.
But were he selfish, ignorant, or just very poor, which many were. The wife would have no money to make decisions with, no autonomy, basically be a baby carrier and worker on the croft. A pregnant daughter in that situation would be packed off to a Laundry.
I read a book set in the US in 1880s - where the daughter ran off with a married man. Not only was she despised but no one in the town used her father's shop. He and the rest of the family were made destitute too, in punishment I suppose. It's hard to judge the behaviour of people then by how we think and behave now.

But I can't excuse the behaviour of those purporting to be men of God, followers of Jesus teachings and the Nuns. They knew what they were doing imv.

www.rte.ie/news/2021/0117/1190074-mother-and-baby-homes-vaccine-trials/

People, nuns, queen bees, queen bee wannabeez, stalwarts of the parish, they are as exactly as horrible as it was / is socially acceptable to be.

Notice how many of those you all out are female!

The reality is that men raped their sisters, their daughters, their parishioners, their students and their neighbours. In some cases, men had consensual sex with their girl friends. But in all cases, they did not take responsibility for their unborn children or the women they had caused to be cast out from society.

@chateauMargaux I see the point you're making but I am not internalising misogyny in any shape or form. Nor am I overlooking male violence, male entitlement and sexual abuse at all.

There are different types of abuse and I'm talking about one type rather than the other that is all.

In fact I got in to a ''discussion'' on fb only yesterday when a fb friend was saying ''i wonder how many men were aware'' and I was of the opinion that the vast majority of them were definitely aware of the fate they were condemning the woman to.

It is possible to isolate one type of bad behaviour at a time that doesn't mean you're denying any other type.

I agree with wiseowl.

Some pp have wondered how women (nuns, mothers, etc.) could do such cruel things to other women. There are a variety of reasons, but they all ultimately come down to either fear of or status building within a patriarchal culture.

It's not invalid, unfair, or internalised misogyny to discuss these motivations.

If anything, the motivations of the men involved are much less complex and imo not particularly worthy of discussion in the same way. Condemn yes; discuss no.

Good, reflective piece in the Scotsman about it www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/trans-gender-debate-world-where-life-women-can-be-worse-simply-virtue-their-sex-biology-matters-susan-dalgety-3101863

The economic and cultural oppression of women and girls throughout history and across the world is predicated on biology.
The girls in the Irish Mother and Baby Homes were treated harshly because of biology. Girls in Somalia have their clitoris cut out with rusty knives because of biology.