Our Past Was Cruel but Decent People Are Righting Wrongs

The Herald
June 13, 2014

http://www.herald.ie/opinion/our-past-was-cruel-but-decent-people-are-righting-wrongs-30350309.html

The Tuam babies story presents us with the usual depressing challenges, but some hope.

The challenges include distinguishing the facts from the hysterics and the blame-storming from the truth.

Rosita Boland in The Irish Times did us all a favour by interviewing Catherine Corless, who spent significant time and money researching the deaths at the home.

Boland reported Corless’ dismay that about headlines claiming that the remains of 796 bodies were dumped in a disused sewage tank.

DISTORTIONS

No such discovery took place. No one even knows if the vault was ever used as a septic tank. And they think about 20 bodies were in it anyway. Considering the facts are horrendous in themselves, the distortions are inexcusable.

Historian Sean Lucey has revealed the social context of the “committals” to these Mother and Baby homes. He recounted one case of a girl sent to Bessborough - not by a priest - but by a council official in Kerry on the recommendation of a local “respectable” woman.

When the girl’s father asked if his daughter could come home, the official checked first with this bastion of social acceptability. She said it would be a mistake as it would give poor example to local girls and the official refused the request.

In other words, the regime that existed was not a straightforward case of an authoritarian Church crushing a desperate people. As with the Magdalene Laundries, Tuam existed with the consent and at the behest of the people.

However, this is where hope enters the story. Because although some people try to persuade us that these deaths have been ignored, that just isn’t true.

All over Ireland, good people like Catherine Corless have found ways to right the wrongs that were done to these innocents. In Tuam itself, locals knew the site was a burial ground and treated it accordingly. A grotto was built, roses planted and the site tended.

Corless’ research was motivated by the desire that the names of those buried there would be recorded on some kind of plaque or memorial.

There are people like Catherine everywhere and many have focused on cillini, the burial grounds for unbaptised babies, since the Church decreed that not having been baptised, they couldn’t be properly interred in consecrated ground.