State has failed its children again and again
YESTERDAY, on foot of journalist Conall Ó Fátharta’s discovery of the historic mortality rate for ‘illegitimate’ children of 68% children in Cork’s Bessborough mother-and-baby home, my colleague Claire McGettrick asked if the State would ever do right by all those it had failed since it’s inception?
To recap, that includes the tens of thousands of children who had the misfortune of being born into denigrating poverty, whose parents lacked the financial means to clothe, feed, or educate them adequately, and who, as a result, the State sentenced to a childhood in cruel, punitive industrial schools, where sadism and torture were the order of the day.
It includes the young women who were deemed guilty of being sexually abused or attracting too much male attention; also those to failed to follow the rule of only having sex within marriage and avoiding pre-marital pregnancy. Of particular note are those girls from the industrial schools who were identified either as being biddable and hard-working or as hard to control, who were destined for a life of revolving doors between the schools, the Magdalene laundries, the county homes, and the so-called mother-and-baby homes, whose raison d’etre was to separate mothers from their children as a punishment for their egregious crimes. The worst fate of all befell those women whose spirits were so broken as a result of the crimes carried out against them that they were committed to medieval “mental asylums”, from which no such woman ever escaped.
Such industrial-scale denigration was not limited to the poor and illiterate. The claws of misogynists were also found in our treatment of all child-bearing women. From the butchering of women through symphysiotomies, unnecessary hysterectomies, enforced vaginal deliveries, contaminated blood transfusions, denial of contraceptives — the list goes on.
THE apologists from within the cabal of vested interests groups would have us believe that this series of unfortunate events are merely historical anomalies and that everyone knows better now and such crimes would never occur today — ergo in Ireland, we wish to dispense with restorative justice when the culprit is ourselves.
The astounding death rates at Bessborough discovered in local authority archives by Conall Ó Fátharta are only half of the picture: Of greater value to observers today is to note, on one hand, the genuine concern of individual public servants who sought to flag the death toll with their political masters and, on the other hand, to note the deafening silence after a once-off missive was issued to redirect the women and girls to the county home until matters could be resolved. We know from the memoirs of the State’s chief medical officer in the late 1940s, James Deeny, that no such resolution occurred and he reclosed the Bessborough home once again in the mid to late 1940s.
We might have hoped that the long predicted investigation into all matters surrounding the State’s treatment of unmarried mothers and their children announced by an internationally embarrassed and short-tenured Children’s Minister Charlie Flanagan in June this year, would finally have resolved the myriad of questions we might have asked. Our hopes were quickly dashed when we realised that Mr Flanagan was a passing good guy, empowered to promise the sun, moon, and stars, while he readied his briefcase for the more important foreign affairs portfolio.
Those of us who follow the appointments of ministers for children closely were frankly aghast that Enda Kenny saw fit to appoint James Reilly as the third minister for children in under seven weeks. We know that Dr Reilly has ‘skin in the game’. While covering for his absent colleague Frances Fitzgerald in June 2011, he told Socialist Party TD Clare Daly that the scale of illegal birth registrations and illegal adoptions facilitated by mother-and-baby homes was “unknown”.
He added that “the issue of historical documentation” was a matter for “these private institutions” and his understanding was that, where such documentation existed, “the nature and secretiveness of the process means that any correlation of data is extremely difficult”. Hardly the response of a man you would want drafting the serious areas for investigation.
I am not talking about a little irregular paperwork here. The questions to which we as a nation need answers include but are not limited to why, in this State/Church oligarchy, it was decided that mainly unmarried women and girls could be detained without leave? Why were these women and girls subjected to cruel and degrading treatment? Why were the ‘illegitimate’ children of these unmarried mothers allowed to die at rates almost 10 times greater than the general population of ‘legitimate’ children? Why were the children allowed to be sold for profit to the US? Why were any surviving children and all of their off-spring denied all knowledge of their birth-rights and origins? Why were these children allowed to be routinely used as guinea pigs in illegal vaccine trials?
What profit did the religious orders make from this cruel industry? Why (as the untiring Catherine Corless asked in Tuam) were these children so disposable that. three months after the international outrage broke around mass graves dotted around the country, no one in the State machinery can say were these children are buried? Finally, will we ever discover who was responsible for all of this barbarity?
To return to Ms McGettrick’s question, will the State finally do the right thing by the tens of thousands of its most vulnerable citizens it has debased and trampled into oblivion? I believe it will not.
I believe the incredibly narrow Interdepartmental Report, which will form the basis for the terms of reference for the Commission of investigation into the homes, already reveals this Government’s intention to underplay the State’s role in these killing homes and that those instructions were issued ahead of the Dáil holiday recess.
We can expect further crocodile tears from Mr Kenny or whoever is occupying the role of Taoiseach when the inevitable State apology is made, but nothing will have changed; we as a nation will have merely moved onto a new prey, a new group of society that we can debase and despise.
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