IRELAND
The Guardian
Roy Greenslade
Filmmaker and journalist Sinéad O’Shea interviewed me for her 2008 documentary “The McCanns v The Media”. She has made films and reports from all over the world. In recent years she has worked on child abuse investigations for the BBC, Al-Jazeera English and RTÉ.
I am carrying this guest blog in part because she touches on a topic I often mention – the failure of mainstream Irish media to do their job properly. But she goes way beyond the lack of inadequate reporting to consider the darker side of her home country.
I want to stress that this is her view, and not mine, but I do think her piece needs an airing. Absent a forum within Ireland, I am delighted to provide one here…
In the past couple of weeks Ireland’s problem with itself has again become the subject of global headlines.
Four years ago Catherine Corless began collecting testimonies from former residents of the Bons Secours mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.
The institution was run by the clergy and funded by the state to house unmarried mothers, the “untouchables” of Irish life.
Corless remembered the place from her own childhood surrounded by eight-foot walls with “broken bottles on top.” There were so-called “home babies” in her school too.
They were, said Corless, kept to “one side of the classroom, arriving and leaving at different times so there would be no interaction with ‘ordinary’ schoolgirls.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.