IRELAND/UNITED STATES
Irish Central
Cormac McConnell @IrishCentral March 22, 2017
Here is a heartwarming true story from about 20 years ago which began on the pages of the Irish Voice. I am deliberately recalling it now in an effort to slightly balance that dreadful discovery in Galway recently of the bodies of scores of infants secretly buried in septic tanks on the grounds of a home for unmarried mothers and their babies run by an order of nuns for decades up until the late fifties.
That horror from our immediate past will now be fully investigated but, in the meantime, here is the story of a lovely woman called Mary Kowalski from New Jersey as far as I can remember, whom I met because I read in the Irish Voice that she was coming over from the U.S. to Co. Clare to try and contact her birth mother. I will never forget Mary, and if perchance she reads this I hope she is as happy today as she was the last time I saw her.
Mary’s mother became pregnant outside marriage, you see, and in the priest-ridden Ireland of the time there was a great stigma and shame attached to that. The homes run by orders of nuns were about the only refuge there was apart from flight to England forever.
It is now known clearly that both the state and the religious orders failed to live up to their responsibilities on that front. There were many abuses at every level, and this was reflected in a mortality rate for the poor babies which was thrice the level of other infants.
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