Dan O'Brien: It was an age of monstrous behaviour for everybody

By Dan O'brien
Irish Independent
June 22, 2014

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/dan-obrien-it-was-an-age-of-monstrous-behaviour-for-everybody-30374033.html

People leave candles and mementos during a march and candlelit vigil from the Department of Children and Youth Affairs to the gates of Dail Eireann on Merrion Square, Dublin, in memory of the Tuam babies. - See more at: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/dan-obrien-it-was-an-age-of-monstrous-behaviour-for-everybody-30374033.html#sthash.Sy5H0Afs.dpuf

THE national discussion around the history of the Tuam mother and baby home until its closure in 1961, and more generally about the way in which unmarried mothers were treated in the past, has been strong on hyperbole.

One newspaper described the loss of life in the home as "Ireland's Holocaust" and a panellist on a radio talk show wondered if there was something "innately" bad in Irish people to have made them behave so cruelly towards single mothers and their children in years gone by.

While the comparison with Nazi death camps is so absurd it does not warrant response, and the notion that a people is innately less virtuous than others has led down some very dark paths in the past, both observations at least attempt to put what happened into some sort of wider context. That context is how societies elsewhere treated unmarried mothers and their children in more socially conservative times.
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Let's start by making very clear that seeking context is in no way an attempt to downplay the awfulness of anything that happened in the past. Moreover, as a social liberal I see changes that have taken place in Irish society since then as extraordinary and very welcome progress.

But much of the discussion around the appalling way single mothers were treated is of the Irish exceptionalism variety, which distorts the past rather than enhancing our understanding of it. In fact, Ireland has always been very similar to its peers and the notion that this country was a dark spot in a more enlightened world does not bear any serious scrutiny.

There is very little evidence to point to Irish society and its institutions being harsher towards single mothers than in most of the rest of Europe, or indeed the world.

There is, by contrast, an awful lot of evidence to show that traditional societies with limited public resources, as Ireland was until recent decades, almost universally make childbirth out of wedlock a taboo and go to great lengths to discourage it.

Among the most common ways of doing this is/was to stigmatise and punish women who have sex outside marriage and the children born to unmarried women.

In developing countries across the world today, honour killings of unmarried pregnant women, women accused of premarital sex and rape victims remain common, as is the concept and legal status of 'illegitimacy'.

There are plenty of theories as to why these practices evolved, but nobody seriously disputes their prevalence across the world and over time. All of Europe, with the exception of a few urban pockets, remained a traditional society until the Sixties. Having lived in six other European countries, not one of them would be proud of its past treatment of unmarried mothers and their children.

Switzerland, where I lived most recently, is generally placed in the 'model' category of countries, with its well-functioning society, high wealth levels and efficient public services. But its treatment of what it once called 'discarded' children – orphans and abandoned children, as well as children taken from their unmarried mothers – was appalling.

From the early 19th Century up until the Fifties there was a system in place whereby orphanages auctioned off children, usually to farmers, to work on the land. They were, in effect, placed in conditions of slavery, with all of the abuses and privations that go along with that condition.

In Europe and North America, the social revolution of the Sixties brought about the beginnings of change. But the speed with which different societies were affected varied considerably.

In northern Europe, attitudes towards childbearing outside wedlock changed earlier than elsewhere, as the rise in the numbers of non-traditional families from the Sixties attests.

But Ireland did not uniquely cling to less enlightened attitudes. Shortly after moving to Italy in the early Nineties, I was surprised to hear someone making a very derogatory reference to a single mother.

It was surprising because such a remark would, even then in Ireland, have been unusual. It was also surprising because Italy – on the face of it – was a more socially liberal place than Ireland, having, for instance, legalised divorce and abortion in the Seventies.

While this is a mere anecdote, the figures on single-parent households back it up. To this day in Mediterranean countries, having children outside wedlock is much less common than in northern Europe. Moreover, when it happens it is mostly the result of divorce and separation, rather than singletons deciding to start families alone, something much more prevalent in northern Europe.

That the evolution of Irish attitudes towards single parenthood more closely resemble our northern European neighbours is reflected in the welfare system. While Ireland was certainly not a leader in expanding the social safety net, change did happen comparatively early.

Following recommendations in a 1972 report by the Commission on the Status of Women, an Unmarried Mothers Allowance was introduced the following year. In 1990, the Lone Parents Allowance was introduced for all single parents, ending the distinction among those alone with children for different reasons, such as bereavement or separation.

It is not as clear that the scale of the change in family structures in recent decades is widely known, perhaps because the scholarly community seems curiously uninterested in it. In Ireland, there are proportionately more single-parent households than in any other EU member state.

According to Eurostat, almost one in 10 Irish households in 2010 was headed by a single parent. That is considerably higher than Denmark, the country with the second highest level, at 7 per cent, and more than twice the bloc's average.

Ireland is a much-changed place. From today's vantage point, its socially conservative past seems almost incomprehensible and the thought of living in such a society sends a shiver down the spine of anyone with socially liberal bone in their body.

But that is how life tends to be in undeveloped and traditional societies everywhere. It is nothing to do with anything uniquely or innately Irish.

Sunday Independent