IRELAND
IrishCentral
Cahir O’Doherty @randomirish March 14, 2017
You might not expect to hear it from this columnist, but I don’t solely blame the religious orders for what happened at the Tuam mother and baby home in Co. Galway.
Some commentators have called the Tuam baby story a tragedy. It was not.
A ship that sinks after hitting a looming iceberg is a tragedy. An institution that buries infants in an underground “sewage treatment works” is following a policy.
Did you know that when spirited young women fled these ghastly institutions – the mother and baby homes, the Magdalene laundries – they were usually picked up by the Irish police force and returned to them like escaped convicts?
It’s because we so easily conceptualized unwed mothers as criminals then. We thought them people of low character that society should be shielded from.
That’s how they stopped being our daughters and sisters and cousins and started being a dangerous moral contagion. Irish parents often dropped them off at the gates themselves.
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