Una Mullally: Tuam scandal shines a light on Ireland’s darkness

‘Every time you think you’ve exhausted the depravity of Catholic Ireland, you’re reminded that your imagination is insufficiently dark.”

The writer Damien Owens tweeted that as the horrors of the so-called mother-and-baby home in Tuam snapped into focus last week.

The news of unmarked mass graves of babies and infants was out before, of course, thanks to the tireless and thorough work of Catherine Corless, vindicated after her research was initially met with both sensationalism and suspicion, the twin reactions of a media that salivates as much as arches its eyebrows.

But now it was being officially confirmed that the bodies of babies and infants were tossed away like garbage, a physical manifestation of the Irish pastime of pushing things we don’t want to talk about out of sight.

Una Mullally: Do most people really care who the next Fine Gael leader is?

---

Una Mullally: Beware political ambition of tech billionaires

---

Eircode: there goes another €38m down the drain

---

Una Mullally: Why Stephen Donnelly’s migration to FF is so dispiriting

---

The thing is, we know all of this stuff. We’re great people for oral history, stories passed down and around that exist in our collective memories.

The hearsay and gossip, the rumours and mutterings, the wink and the nudge. Writing things down, reporting them, makes it real. When that happens, people are “shocked” and “appalled”.

This is the Ireland of the upside down seen in Stranger Things, the horror that lurks right at our noses yet feels ethereal and out of reach. If we don't make it official, maybe it'll go away.

Does anyone think what happened in Tuam was an isolated situation? Are we ready and willing to start properly addressing the enslavement of Irish women and the illegal trafficking of their children?

It is as if these horrors can be confronted only when things align that harness the collective power of our willingness to forget and divert it towards a willingness to confront.

Unresolved scandals

As we know, there are not just unresolved scandals regarding mother-and-baby homes, but unresolved issues lurking within that web of State-sponsored religious incarceration, the imprisonment, torture, abuse and rape that occurred across a countrywide network of buildings and organisations: orphanages, Magdalene laundries, the mother-and-baby homes, industrial schools and psychiatric hospitals, not to mention the abuse that occurred in churches, schools and the homes of priests.

Some of these things have been teased out separately, but never collectively. And they are all connected. They are not one-offs. They are a system.

The other week the Guardian released a short documentary about Irish children taken away because their fathers were black. Where is the commission of inquiry or apology?

When the laundry in Seán MacDermott Street closed in 1996, women were still doing the daily washing for Mountjoy Prison there.

In 1993, to pay off debts, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity sold a graveyard where women from the High Park convent laundry had worked.

The remains of the 133 women buried there were removed and cremated. Imagine that? Selling the ground where women were buried. How little they must have mattered to the nuns.

This is not new information, much of it has been reported, but we are so used to the cruelty and barbarity of the Catholic Church, so used to scandal and horror that we no longer recognise what is outrageous.

The cruelty of Catholicism has conditioned us to impunity. We read these things and move on to the next sentence, turn the page. We are a damaged people.

This is our psychological landscape, and we have to face it and dismantle it. It messes us up.

Misguided narrative

The narrative that these things happened long ago and therefore we should move on is misguided and is about the desire for dark tales to retreat back into the shadows.

But the reason we can’t do that is twofold, aside from the fact that many of these cruelties were not perpetrated that long ago at all.

Firstly, shoving things under the carpet and perpetuating a culture of secrecy gives no one closure and lets the perpetrators of terrible crimes and those who colluded with them – the State, families, communities – off the hook, and we continue to suppress and oppress.

Secondly, this shaming and secrecy and judgment is still happening today. The bulk of this is and has always been about controlling women and shaming their sexuality.

At the Citizen’s Assembly there is a parade of people invited to reinforce that. Women in Ireland are still shamed and exiled, still judged and criminalised for having abortions, for wanting control over their bodies, for refusing to accept unwanted or unmanageable or non-viable pregnancy as punishment.

Our ban on abortion is not continuing in a vacuum, it is the continuation of a fundamentalist strand of Catholicism that is obsessed with women’s bodies and with sex. The hypocrisy is stunning.

The same bishops, priests, nuns and church cheerleaders who condemn women for having abortions are part of an organisation that threw infants into holes. Suffer little children, indeed.

We continue to shame, to judge, to imprison. In the 1990s, the Eastern Health Board was paying women in the Gloucester Street laundry on Seán MacDermott Street a stipend of about £22 a week, a figure frighteningly close to to the €19.10 given to people languishing in the direct-provision system today, another commission or inquiry waiting to happen when our minds finally snap into focus on the desperate reality of it.

As the Tuam story was breaking, the Angelus bell was tolling on RTÉ, the repeated reminder of how deeply embedded faux-pious Catholicism is in Irish society, a society which we continue to pretend is secular and modern, when so many reminders keep pulling us back, back into the shadows, back into the septic tanks, back into the unmarked graves of babies and children no one thought to care about. And we pretend to be surprised.