A chara, – Our politicians are currently looking to the German reunification experience to help us find a roadmap for dealing with Brexit. Germany may also provide some signposts for navigating another Irish upheaval. The German language has a word which, loosely translated, means dealing with the atrocities of the past (Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung). It represents the idea that what happened during the second World War cannot be denied or forgotten; school children, for example, must study this element of their history.
In light of what is emerging at the Tuam mother and baby home, where babies’ bodies were dumped in a sewage system, is it not time for the Irish people to confront our unsavoury past and the atrocities committed against women and children? An awareness and critical analysis of the collusion of the Catholic Church and the Irish state in the dehumanisation of some of its most vulnerable citizens should be part of how we face up to our historical shame. We could include this on our school curriculum. We owe it to our young people and to those women and children who suffered. – Yours, etc,
AINE RYAN,
Craughwell,
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Co Galway.
Sir, – I believe the State and Catholic Church should fund a “Forest of Forgiveness”, planting a tree for every child’s body exhumed in Tuam. It would be a place to go not only to remember each child, discarded namelessly into a hole in the ground, but a place where all of us can go to ask forgiveness as a nation for the shame with which the church has shackled us. – Yours, etc,
JANE DEVITT,
Clonskeagh,
Dublin 14.
Sir, – There, but for the grace of God, go I. It brings me back to my own situation 30 years ago in 1987 when I was in a mother and baby home for six months in Dunboyne, Co Meath, where I was treated with kindness and cared for by the Good Shepherd Convent sisters. I went there because I could not face being a single mother in a society that looked down on me and judged me. These judgments were instilled in me by my family, the community I lived in, and the Catholic faith I was born into. However, I had a future, because we as a society evolved, but my “kind” in the years previous to the 1980s had no future. – Yours, etc,
ADRIENNE MURPHY,
Bandon,
Co Cork.
Sir, – Una Mullally ("Tuam scandal shines a light on Ireland's darkness against the Catholic Church", Opinion & Analysis, March 6th) is correct in writing about the cruelty and barbarity of the Catholic Church in the recent past, but she neglects to mention that the same description applied also to the Protestant churches and the institutions of the state. Irish society, in the recent past, saw the churches and the institutions of the state as "fixers" of every problem in society, thus creating the need for mother and baby homes and orphanages. Thankfully, as a society, we're moving to a more mature and humanitarian approach to problems, but we're not there yet. – Yours, etc,
TONY CORCORAN,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 14.
Sir, – There is little to disagree with in Una Mullally’s powerful commentary on the scandal of the Tuam babies, interred without ceremony or dignity in underground burial chambers, destined to be forgotten in perpetuity.
Except, the discovery in 2010 of 220 children's remains from Dublin's Protestant evangelical Bethany Home in unmarked paupers' graves did not generate an equivalent opening Irish Times paragraph on the depravity of Protestant, as distinct from Catholic, Ireland.
It is often forgotten that social control mechanisms in the Irish State were provided by a churches (plural) and state alliance.
More than one Christian community treated unmarried pregnant women and their marginalised children appallingly, on both sides of the Border. Indeed, for the evangelical Protestants who ran the Westbank home in Greystones, the Border was a convenient line over which “poor Protestant orphans”, which were deliberately denied adoption, could be paraded for fund-raising purposes. Small children were used as farm labourers in return for funding as well.
The Church of Ireland Magdalen Home and its associated Nursery Rescue Society also literally farmed out supposedly fostered children as free labour, from the age of five. A survivor who entrusted me with assisting him in drawing up his life story, referred to as "John" in an Irish Times article (July 8th, 2014), was the only one of a group of seven he knew while growing up not to succumb to drink and drugs, as a means of escape. The fact that he was sent to a prestigious boarding school as a teenager masks the treatment. He and fellow "foster" children were not permitted to play school games and were sent instead to work on the school farm. They were thrashed regularly for failing lessons, unsurprisingly as their primary schooling was interrupted with unrelenting farm work. Other boarders went to their families at the weekend, while the abandoned "foster" children were left behind on their own.
It is a great pity that the terms of reference of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Inquiry are too narrow to enable examination of what happened to children when they left their respective mother and baby homes.
Some of the latter are not even on the list to be examined by the commission. The terms should be expanded. – Yours, etc,
Dr NIALL MEEHAN
Head of Journalism
& Media Faculty,
Griffith College Dublin,
Dublin 8.