Fate of Ireland's Care Home Children Made Me Weep Tears of Rage

By Jane Graham
Belfast Telegraph
June 13, 2014

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/jane-graham/fate-of-irelands-care-home-children-made-me-weep-tears-of-rage-30350594.html

As a longtime journalist I've heard some gruesome tales and feel I've developed a pretty thick skin. But I'll admit, I just stood in the kitchen and cried when I read this week's story about care home children in Ireland being 'used' in medical trials in the 1960s and '70s.

There can't be many people currently residing in the developed world who haven't worked out that institutions, on the whole, don't work very well. In the UK, numerous recent revelations regarding – deep breath – corrupt policemen, lying politicians, bent journalists, predatory celebrities, cruel nurses, greedy councillors, crooked bankers, cheating sportsmen, double-dealing lawyers and self-serving educationalists, have left us with little faith in that once revered and respected thing, The Establishment.

(Don't get me wrong, the misty eyed Faragey notion that things were nicer in the olden days is risible; the only difference now is that we're more likely to find out about monstrous acts. Ironically, though the work of journalists who expose and shame our villains sometimes ushers in waves of despair that leave us struggling to stay standing, it also offers hope that society might get better – even if it's just because the bad guys are scared of ending up on the front pages.)

The case of almost 300 children in nun-run care homes being exploited in medical trials across two decades is a stinging reminder that the most dangerous institutions of all may be those in which the management believe their authority comes from a power higher than the democratic state; the ones, in short, who reckon they have God on their side. Of course the Magdalene laundries already persuaded many of us of that, and if allegations about dead babies from the mother and baby home in Tuam being dumped in unmarked graves turn out to be true, our hearts will yet again shrivel in horror.

It's one of the great unexplained mysteries – why an unshakable faith in being endorsed by an omniscient being has led to some of the most shocking examples of what Robert Burns brilliantly summed up as "man's inhumanity to man".

You'd think nuns and priests and pastors, who are presumably au fait with the generally good-natured and tolerant nature of their hero Jesus Christ, might behave rather better than the average day to day mercenary.