IRELAND
Echo Live
January 20, 2021
By Colette Sheridan
Young women today have no idea what life was like in Ireland as recently as the 1970s, so says Colette Sheridan in her weekly column
IN town last Wednesday, with half an hour to kill while my new phone was being synched up, I decided to pop into St Peter and Paul’s Church to light a candle for my late parents.
Although not religious, I’ve taken to calling into churches for this purpose. And besides, Cork city is a ghost town these days with most retail outlets shut. So, with no opportunity to browse through rails of clothes, I was taking the spiritual route.
But then I backtracked because the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes had just been published. How could I darken the door of a Catholic church given the appalling litany of abuse meted out by nuns (in cahoots with priests) on vulnerable young women whose ‘crime’ was to become pregnant ‘outside of wedlock.’ (The State was complicit too, beholden to well-heeled bishops who wielded enormous power.)
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