FROM Empire’s Rule to the Vice-like Grip of Rome: Irish Did Church’s Bidding over Tuam

By Claire O'Sullivan
Irish Examiner
June 14, 2014

http://www.irishexaminer.com/analysis/from-empirersquos-rule-to-the-vice-like-grip-of-rome-irish-did-churchrsquos-bidding-over-tuam-272090.html

THE Ryan and Cloyne reports into child abuse in the Catholic Church could be seen in simple black and white terms: It was easy to loathe the abusers and the parish priests and bishops who colluded to protect them, to shudder at how bereft and powerless the child victims were, and at the torment of parents when they learned what had gone on around them.

But, following Martin McAleese’s Magdalene report last year, the lines began to blur. We saw that 25% of women sent to the laundries had been referred by an arm of the State, 8.8% by priests, and a notable 10.5% by families. We saw how Church, State, and families were complicit in subjugating, degrading, and dehumanising young girls who had fallen foul of Catholic and therefore societal, norms.

The uproar about conditions in mother-and- baby homes over the past number of weeks has underscored this theme — with the finger increasingly pointed at the families and communities that wanted these pregnant women and their babies out of view; who shoved crying girls through the front door of these homes in the dead of night, expected them to feed, care for, and love a child for a year and then to hand their child to a stranger without question.

Nowhere is this blinkered, ignorant, craven supplication and groupthink better illustrated than in the Twitter feed of @limerick1914, where Limerick librarian and historian Liam Hogan posts excerpts from regional newspapers, local authority, and public health archives.

A Tuam Herald report revealed how, in 1907, the Carlow Board of Guardians wholeheartedly approved the Viceregal Commission’s recommendation that all unmarried mothers who had two or more children should be detained at the workhouse. These women were seen as beyond redemption.

In 1924, a Connaught Telegraph journalist wrote of how the “children of misfortune” at a County Galway mother-and-baby home should remain in the home rather than be boarded out “where they might learn of their origins before they had been given the opportunity to outlive it and to form their character”.

A 1922 Connaught Tribune article illustrates how a girl who tried to kill herself with a razor was sentenced to six months in jail or to report at a Magdalene laundry until she was “medically fit”.

Much of this petty, ignorant snobbishness was dressed up in Catholic dogma — with a 1926 Connaught Tribune article on a Board of Health meeting showing how “paying customers” objected to giving birth alongside unmarried women.

Then excerpts from a 1927 County Galway Committee meeting showed how its chairman, Canon MacAlinney, concluded “we have reached a great depth of evil” when the number of unmarried mothers using the hospital increased from an average of three or four to 11 the previous month. At around the same time, a County Galway Meeting asked for a separate ward to be built for the women as they might “remove the stigma or prejudice that some people have against the maternity hospital”.

And then, in 1928, an article in the Anglo Celt revealed how the Local Government Department Minister had written to mother-and-baby homes asking that matrons have discretion about whether an unmarried mother should leave the county home as “it appeared that several women had been shown leniency by the Board... and had returned subsequently with a second illegitimate child”.

Against all this contempt stood the former minister for health, Dr Noel Browne, who in 1975, said that the Canon Law attitude to illegitimate children was “cruel, repressive and totally unjust”, adding: “It was impossible to say what suffering was caused by the monumental stupidity and insensitivity.”

To have death rates of 30%-50% in mother-and-baby homes in Tuam, Cork, and Westmeath in the 1930s and 1940s was outrageous. However, what was more appalling was that these religious orders were just providing a service requested by the newly independent Irish State and in very many ways, their attitudes just mirrored the view of society at large, a society that happily wanted to define its new, hard-won independence by replacing rule by London with rule by Rome.