The Horror of Tuam's Missing Babies Is Not Diminished by Misreported Details
By Tanya Gold
There was a vigil outside the Irish embassy in London on Thursday. It was for the 796 children who died in a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway, which was operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961. There are death records but no burial records for these children. The location of their graves is a mystery, although it is probable that they are near the home, and that some of them, according to testimony from two local boys, who found skeletons in 1975 after disturbing a concrete slab, may be in what was once a septic tank in the grounds. When the story broke a month ago there was fury, and misreporting. All the missing children, it was said, were in the tank. This is supposition. No one knows precisely where they are. The site has not been searched. I do not praise misreporting. It should not have happened. The New York Times and the Washington Post carried corrections. So did the Guardian. But the scandal – and here scandal blooms upon scandal – is how an initial error has allowed the fate of the mothers and babies of Tuam to be diminished and then normalised. It is similar to watching fabric fray. Tug at a thread and hope the whole collapses. In a piece for Spiked Online, Brendan O'Neill railed against the false headlines. He was right to abhor them, but then he lost his balance. He presented those furious at the needless deaths as a "Twittermob constantly on the hunt for things it might feel ostentatiously outraged by". He was, it seems, more interested in what was misreported than what actually happened; the conditions in the homes, the stigma that took the women there and the question of how many similar graves there might be across Ireland were less important. What began as a polemic seeking fact swiftly became the opposite. In fact, he said, the "unhealthy obsession over the past 10 years with raking over Ireland's past … has become a kind of grotesque moral sport, providing kicks to the anti-Catholic brigade and fuel to the historical self-flagellation that now passes for public life in Ireland". Is that what the survivors of the Magdalene laundries, the industrial schools, and the sexual abuse by priests think is the result of their testimony? Hysteria? Kicks? Or, at last, an acknowledgement of what happened? O'Neill – a professional agitator himself – believes the popular outrage is fake. He is wrong. It was not the septic tank detail that propelled the story everywhere. It was the knowledge, brutally exposed, that young women, some of whom were raped or coerced, were abandoned by family, church and state to a punishment hostel after which they were almost always denied their children. It takes an expert cynic – or a denier – to dismiss this on a detail. Elsewhere, in Forbes magazine, Eamonn Fingleton deals in straw nuns. "Does an Anti-Catholic Bias Help Explain This Hoax?" he asks. A hoax, I should remind Fingleton, is "a humorous or malicious deception"; is there anything to laugh at here? "[The story of] wicked-witch nuns shovelling countless tiny human forms into a maelstrom of excrement and urine – almost certainly never happened," he says. As I said, straw nuns. He thinks we should withhold judgment until an inquiry, which has been ordered by the Irish government, is conducted, but he doesn't extend that edict to himself. "Prison guards at Belsen or the perpetrators of bestial biological experiments at Imperial Japan's Unit 731 facility in Manchuria … would have been accorded more fairness than the nuns of Tuam," he says, which is a line from the school of hysterical polemic he loathes. "Were they [the nuns] holier-than-thou harridans who looked down on the unmarried mothers who came to them?" he asks. "For the most part, probably yes. But they did do something for those mothers' ill-starred children." Ill-starred? Did astrology do this to them? Perhaps for Fingleton, it did. Mortality rates were high in every public institution, he notes; conditions bred infection. Single mothers were despised by everyone; the nuns were not baby thieves who watched women give birth without painkillers, and denied them medical care afterwards, as punishment for their sin. They were saviours. This I call the Stockholm syndrome analysis. It is shape-shifting, and convenient propaganda; it is retrospective complicity. Blame everyone and you blame no one. There is more diminishing of what happened in Tuam, and claims of deep offence from apologists, which is ludicrous; are there any victims in this tale beyond the children and their mothers? The president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, Bill Donohue, wrote a long defence of the home, in which he states that stigma – he speaks specifically of the stigma attached to unmarried mothers – "exists as a corrective, as a means to discourage unwanted behaviour". Unwanted by whom? And with what results? In the Telegraph Dr Tim Stanley said Catholic dogma had nothing to do with what happened in these homes. So were local priests – and nuns – agitating for women and their children not to be separated, ostracised and denied medical care and decent food, or were they, as testimony tells us, at least complicit and often the agents of cruelty? The apologists have one line in common. They do not dispute the death rates in the homes or the fact that the graves of the children are unmarked; and they do not agitate for what survivors at the London vigil seek. This is, briefly: an opening of the adoption records, so surviving families can be united, and a properly funded investigation into every former mother and baby home in Ireland, dealing with accusations of medical trials performed on children, illegal adoptions and an acknowledgement of the savagery of the crime. The investigations into the Magdalene laundries and the sex abuse scandals have been much criticised. Tuam survivors want a full confession. The only appropriate response to this story is disgust; and not towards a media that exposed it imperfectly and much too late. Instead, the slurs fly, breeding denial and compounding hurt. The excellent local historian Catherine Corless, who first noticed how many children were missing, and wondered where they were, is accused of "inflammatory" rhetoric by Donohue, and of even changing her story under pressure from anti-Catholic campaigners; the Irish Times wrote that she retracted some of her findings, which is untrue. Corless, incidentally, paid for a copy of the death certificate of each lost child. That is a humane response. Another response could be this, but I have not heard it: it is time for Ireland to liberalise its abortion laws. The fates of the mothers at Tuam and the unhappily pregnant in Ireland today are not identical, but they are connected. Irish women, if they can afford it, must now travel abroad, often alone and at great expense, to secure an abortion; if they cannot, there is forced childbirth, or gin and the knitting needle. I will not detail the obvious – and humane – arguments for abortion here, beyond reminding you that childbirth is life-threatening. I will only say that Irish abortion laws are a modern incarnation of the ideology that led to mothers' punishment at Tuam. The dilemma – the shame – of the sexualised woman is still denied. She is still abandoned. Septic tank or not? Apologists miss the point. It doesn't matter now.
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