Shining a Light on Cries in the Dark

By Martin Flanagan
The Age
June 12, 2014

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/shining-a-light-on-cries-in-the-dark-20140612-zs5e7.html

I’ve never been to Tuam on the west coast of Ireland, although I have climbed the mountain further west called Croagh Patrick.

Croagh Patrick was an ancient pagan site, people climbing it to celebrate the summer equinox. Then Saint Patrick came along and fasted for 40 days and nights on its summit and claimed the mountain for his God. Irish pagan spirituality has a strongly female side. The Roman Catholic church which arrived around the 5th century was, and is, solely male in its lumbering hierarchy.

In the 1840s, Ireland’s population was halved by a terrible famine; in its wake, the grip of the Roman Catholic church intensified. During the 20th century, Ireland’s long-time leader Eamon De Valera embodied the notion that the Roman Catholic church was central to the identity of the poor, deeply conservative nation.

Like many others, I shuddered upon hearing the story that 800 babies had allegedly been found in a septic tank beside a former ‘‘Mothers and Babies’’ home in Tuam. The deaths occurred between 1925 and 1961 in the home for unmarried women and their illegitimate offspring.

A furious battle is now being fought, in Ireland and elsewhere, over the detail of the Tuam story. Some extremely angry Irish voices want an international body such as the United Nations to investigate, because they trust neither church nor state. Others say the whole matter has been misleadingly reported. One of only two witnesses to have seen inside the septic tank (in 1975) has said he saw no more than 20 bodies.

What is shocking about the story was best summed up this week by Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny when he said that, for decades in Ireland, babies of unmarried women were treated as ‘‘an inferior sub-species’’. The same phrase, it should be said, could be used to describe the treatment of Aboriginal people in this country during the same period.

In Ireland, illegitimate children were denied burial in consecrated ground (the Tuam story was revived after a local historian found death certificates for 796 children at the Tuam home but no records of their burial). Knowing the awful fate illegitimate children faced during this period can only have added to the suffering of the women who bore them.

Ostracism of illegitimate children was not unique to Ireland. My mother-in-law, who is 84, grew up in rural Tasmania. She remembers illegitimate children being marked out for special treatment. ‘‘You might play with one in the schoolyard but you never went to play at their house.’’ But, even so, some of the Irish figures are staggering – in 1943, one third of the children in the Tuam home died. Other homes had even higher mortality rates.

The treatment of any group of human beings as an ‘‘inferior sub-class’’ is obscene. It happened in the 19th century with slavery and, more recently, with the apartheid regime in South Africa. But all these stories are also about the human capacity to look the other way. I think the good news for humanity is that most people are normal; the bad news is that most people will accept almost any state of affairs as normal.

And so we sit in judgment of the Irish. But one day the story of an asylum seeker who tried to get into Australia and was diverted to Cambodia may be told. People will be shocked. People of our generation will say we didn’t know what was going on and, true, we won’t know the detail. But the future will scornfully reply: ‘‘What did you expect would happen to homeless people when they ended up in one of the poorest and most corrupt countries on earth?’’