Ireland’s sorrow and our shame
And what we have read over the last two weeks.
The Irish Government gave the Catholic Church the right to decide that women, babies and children that were born out of wedlock and born in the Bethany homes were less then subhuman, and decided women who wore a habit and swore an allegiance to God were the best people to look after babies and children.
These women’s births, deaths, baptism certificates are all missing.
They were used in vaccine trials.
Children were charged and sentenced, sent through the courts for a bounty to the industrial schools for up to 16 years, where their welfare was never checked.
Children were sent to Magdalene Laundries and mental homes.
Then we have Éamon de Valera in 1939 bring out his own starving order, re-enacted it again after the war in 1945 with venom.
People who joined the British forces suffered an emergency order made by the Irish Government to penalise certain named deserters from its armed forces.
Their children were then sentenced to the industrial schools. The Government gave the British Government the bill for the children and the British government paid.
This information went on to your committal papers when children were sent to the industrial schools, and that you were illegitimate like it states on mine. But no country of birth.
There were also a lot of foreign children put into these industrial schools. Yet there are no details for the above mentioned about this in the child abuse commissions report.
Operation Shamrock was the name of a plan to bring German children to Ireland from post-Second World War Germany. Between 1945 and 1946, the Irish Red Cross Operation Shamrock resettled over a 1,000 from Germany, Austria, France, and England.
Most were later repatriated to their homelands, but some were adopted by their Irish host families. None were to be put into the industrial schools.
This happened while our own were rotting in these institutions, dying, starved, beaten, abused, working hard labour, year in and year out and still nobody cared.
I also wonder if the women in the Magdalene Laundries were allowed to vote at the elections. If not why not?
Because even after Ireland joined the EU in 1973 people were free to travel freely to EU countries.
If this same right was denied to the Magdalene women they were prisoners. So you had a state within a state, where the Government allowed this to happen and gave the religious orders the right to do what they wanted and not be accountable to anyone.
