Suzanne Harrington: We're repeating historical wrongs day in and day out

You’ve probably heard this already, but here’s the current Taoiseach on mother and baby ‘homes’ (where, in this instance, ‘home’ is Irish for ‘gulag’): "We must learn the lesson that institutionalisation creates power structures and abuses of power, and must never again be an option for our country in any circumstance.” Spot on. God forbid we would ever again make any marginalised group suffer alienation and dehumanisation via institutionalised power structures that leave them open to abuse. That’d never happen anymore, would it lads?

He goes on: “The shame was not theirs: it was ours. It was our shame that we did not show them the respect and compassion that we owed them. It remains our shame.” Indeed. Not showing respect and compassion to those who need it most would be deeply shameful. Wouldn’t it lads?

He's not finished: “As a nation, it is important to understand and accept the failings of our past — important, but not sufficient. We must also learn from them. We must always seek to create a more just society, grounded in respect, diversity, tolerance and equality.”

Ah, lads, that sounds lovely. Learning from past ‘failings’ — as though decades of institutionalised, state-sponsored, church administered brutalisation of women and the stealing and killing of their small children was something of an error, a growth opportunity from which to learn, a prolonged blip. 

As though Ireland’s embedded, structural hatred of women — think ‘Islamic’ State, except with old fashioned clothes and a lot more rain — was a socio-cultural hiccup. A prolonged one, but still just a hiccup; a knee jerk colonisation of the most vulnerable in some unconscious response to all the colonisation over the previous centuries. That might not stand up in court, but it’s as good an excuse as any, right lads?

Never mind. It’s all behind us now. Instead, we can pat ourselves on our benevolent Irish backs now that we are all brimming over with shiny 21st-century equality legislation. We lucky ladies are allowed to have sex with whomever we desire without being jailed for it, and allowed to have babies without them being stolen from us, or murdered by the church/state machine. We are all free to be ordinary humans.

But are we though? What about all the mothers and babies — and fathers and children and teenagers — in Ireland’s contemporary versions of mother and baby ‘homes’. Being held captive in one of these current places requires you not to be Irish, female and pregnant, but to be not-Irish and in need of sanctuary. Once again, we have contracted out the dehumanisation, except this time it’s principally grounded in racism and ‘othering’ rather than homegrown misogyny.

Direct Provision, openly condemned by the UN and Amnesty International, is a modern term for the same idea that the Taoiseach says Ireland must never repeat. But guess what lads — we’re repeating it. Day in, day out, right now. It’s a deliberate conscious decision, upheld by the very people now banging on about respect, compassion, equality. It shames us all.