IRELAND
Irish Independent
Dan O’Brien
Published 22/06/2014
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.
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.
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