Legacy of abuse alive and active - HSE adoption report

Irish Examiner
June 02, 2015

http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/ourview/legacy-of-abuse-alive-and-active--hse-adoption-report-334049.html

THE catalogue of horrors uncovered about institution after institution entrusted with the care of our most vulnerable infants, children, young girls, and women is so disturbing that it is hard to know how to react to another series of shocking revelations.

Our first, almost understandable, instinct might be to look away, but that would be another betrayal of those vulnerable, abandoned people made victims by a relentless and cruel system, a system run in the main by Catholic religious orders but endorsed by the State and operated in the full, unquestioning knowledge of this society.

Today’s details from a 2012 internal HSE report that an adoption agency — Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork — may have forged death records so children could “be brokered in clandestine adoption arrangements” suggests procedures that would be described as child trafficking today, arrangements that would mean extended jail terms for the organisers and recipients — vendors and purchasers — if they were charged and convicted.

That the report describes infant death rates that were “wholly epidemic” and a “cause for serious consternation” again raises all sorts of questions about how families and society abandoned their daughters and unseen grandchildren to a fate so terrible that it is almost beyond our emotional or psychological ability to comprehend.

Were the people who worked in these institutions evil, deeply ignorant, or just brainwashed? Was the society that did not care enough to impose even light-touch regulation on these appalling establishments so in thrall to the moral diktats of a now discredited theocracy that it dared not intervene? It is hard to imagine our forefathers so supine, so vengeful and cold, so terribly indifferent but the evidence points almost irrefutably in that direction.

The report describes a “cold and lonely environment... characterised by harrowing social, emotional, and physical isolation and institutionalisation” and it is hard not to think that this was not a deliberate act of punishment inflicted by the Catholic version of the Taliban’s infamous moral police.

Anger and shame are the instinctive responses but the tsunami of horror, and even the passage of time, may dilute our reaction. However, there are very contemporary equivalents of those horror stories — admittedly not on the same scale but just as terrible for those involved — that suggest a culture that regards those in need of care and protection need not be regarded as our peers. This culture imagines that residents of homes for the intellectually challenged or simply the old need not be given the comfort, respect, and security we all expect.

Recent revelations about how residents at homes for the intellectually challenged were abused and how thousands of older people in nursing homes were given sedatives to subdue challenging behaviour seem today’s versions of the abuses of the mother-and-baby homes. Rather than be horrified — justifiably — by the past we should be far more forceful in rooting out today’s horror stories.