IRELAND
Vox
Updated by Dylan Matthews on June 5, 2014
Researcher Catherine Corless has uncovered records suggesting that the bodies of 796 infants were buried in a septic tank in Tuam, Ireland. The tank — previously believed to have held victims of the Irish famine of the 1840s — was on the property of a “mother and baby home” run by the Bon Secours nuns between 1925 and 1961; while the cause of death is unknown, the unsanitary conditions of the homes was likely a major factor.
The mother and baby homes, along with the Magdalene laundries for “fallen women” and other institutions erected by the Catholic Church in Ireland (often with state participation), have seen renewed scrutiny since the 1990s as abuses committed against the women condemned to live in the institutions have come to light. The mother and baby homes sometimes forced mothers to put their children up for adoption, often to the US, while Magdalene laundries subjected women to forced labor (usually, as the name implies, washing clothes and linens) and physical abuse. One mother and baby home, Sean Ross Abbey, was featured in last year’s film Philomena. Last year, the Irish government agreed to compensate survivors of the Magdalene laundries, while those abused in mother and baby homes have yet to be compensated, and children of mothers in the homes say they have been denied access to records.
Mari Steed is the cofounder of the group Justice for Magdalenes and US coordinator for the Adoption Rights Alliance, Ireland. She was one of more than 2,000 children born in Ireland and put up for adoption in the United States without their mothers’ consent. We spoke on the phone Wednesday, June 4, about the history of the Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, what we know about the conditions that led to the tragedy in Tuam, and what reforms still need to be made. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. …
DM: How did they relate to the mother and baby homes, which the current revelations concern?
MS: [Boston College professor and activist] James Smith refers to it as Ireland’s “architecture of containment,” and that’s exactly what it was. You had these industrial schools, the Magdalene laundries, the mother and baby homes, all with different remits, but the basic model was to contain and segregate anything that was deemed morally inferior by society, whether that’s children, unwed mothers, the women in the Magdalenes, etc. They were all cross connecting at various points. Children were sent to laundries, women came out of laundries or went into laundries from mother and baby homes.
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