IRELAND
Irish Times
Una Mullally
Mon, Jun 9, 2014
I’m sure I’m not the only one who, upon seeing the dramatic splash screaming “800 BABIES” in the Irish Daily Mail, stared at it incredulously. It took days for it to sink in, as I tried to find out more. I think it’s a version of this personal process that unfolded as a collective, national one.
Journalists who stuttered on this “story” will contextualise it on a news agenda that was coming out the other side of a rollicking election, and the implosion of the Labour Party leadership. The news came from an unfamiliar source, a local historian compiling research. The initial break came in a local newspaper, not a blockbuster Prime Time or an Irish Times front page.
It all happened so long ago. The facts were scant. They were allegations. Tread softly, I’d imagine news editors thought, because this seems so big – surely we would have known about it before? We still don’t know all of the facts, but we know the context. We all know by osmosis the horrors committed in this State. It’s oral history. We all heard our parents talk about dodgy priests, creepy buildings at the top of the town and babies not deserving of burial in consecrated ground, its soil fertilised with hypocrisy.
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