IRELAND
Truthout
Friday, 06 June 2014
By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed
In 1995, several young boys in western Ireland came across something buried beneath a cracked piece of concrete. It turned out to be the septic tank for an old building, demolished decades earlier, that had been known as The Home. Run by the Bon Secours nuns, a Catholic sect, The Home had been, from 1925 to 1961, a place where unwed pregnant Irish women could hide themselves from an astonishingly judgmental society to carry their babies to term, and then flee into whatever new life they could manage to find.
Being unmarried and pregnant in Ireland during this time, you see, was utterly unforgiveable, and dangerous. A fair portion of the reason for this was the fact that Ireland – riven and torn asunder by disputed British rule, IRA warfare and all attendant chaos therein – saw fit to leave a vast swath of social concerns like schooling, orphanages and hospitals in the hands of the Catholic Church…and while the newly-minted Pope Francis has put a broadly-grinning happy face on Catholic doctrine, the fact of the matter is that women took the brunt of the consequences when they were raped and got pregnant, or had sex and got pregnant, because of the Church’s ironclad teachings.
The children, also. The nuns charged to care for the children of The Home deliberately ostracized them from the other children in the community, starved them, neglected them, disdained them, because they were the offspring of “fallen” women who had dared to get pregnant outside of the bonds of holy Catholic matrimony. The so-called “sins” of the mother were visited brutally and harshly upon their children.
You see, that septic tank those boys found in 1995 was filled with the bones of some 800 children who had been delivered in The Home. Malnutrition and neglect, measles and tuberculosis and pneumonia, compounded by disgust for the mothers who bore them, laid waste to these children. Their remains were not buried, or burned, or even thrown in a trash heap. They were dropped into a vat of feces and urine, and at the time of this printing, their bones remain there still.
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