Taoiseach urged to retract part of apology given to mother and baby home survivors

The daughter of a mother and baby home survivor has asked Taoiseach Micheál Martin to retract part of the apology he gave to all survivors in January.

The daughter of a mother and baby home survivor has asked Taoiseach Micheál Martin to retract part of the apology he gave to all survivors in January.

The section she wants retracted is where Mr Martin said that what happened was a result of how “society” had acted at the time.

Laura Murphy, a marketing executive whose mother Mary gave birth at St Patrick’s on Navan Rd, Dublin, says this is wrong.

The retraction she is asking for is, she says, being made “on behalf of Mná na hÉireann”, the women of Ireland.

Her mother, now aged 63, was told by her family’s parish priest when she fell pregnant at 17 that she had to leave home before she “contaminates the morals of other girls”.

The family’s GP also told her parents that the teenager would bring shame on her entire family if anybody was to find out she was going to give birth outside marriage.

As a result, her parents — much to their lifelong regret — felt they had no choice but to send her away to St Patrick’s.

In his apology after the publication of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report in early January, Mr Martin said the appalling treatment of women and children was the direct result of how society had acted.

He said “we”, both State and society, had also “embraced a perverse religious morality and control, judgmentalism and moral certainty, but shunned our daughters”.

“We honoured piety, but failed to show even basic kindness to those who needed it most," he said.

“We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy, and young mothers and their sons and daughters were forced to pay a terrible price for that dysfunction.”

In her open letter, Ms Murphy tells the Taoiseach: “These are the words that turned what should have been a watershed moment of healing into a whitewashing of trauma.

“An expounding of truth became a distortion of history. An unequivocal assumption of responsibility descended into a dispersal of blame.

“The society you speak of was the remnants of one invasion after another from the beginning of our history.”

She writes that while women played a key role in both the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, they ended up “largely excluded from political, economic and societal life”.

Church and State were merged, she writes, and “a terrible beauty was born”.

“Under the constitution, women had no autonomy over their own bodies,” she writes. “Marital rape was not a crime, contraception was.

“Women were prevented from working after marriage, banned from divorce, access to information was censored and there was little support from the State.

“Our ‘representative’ government was dominated by the male-led Catholic Church. The Church and State colluded to write the constitution.

“Therefore responsibility for the ‘perversion of society’ lies with the Church and State regime, and not the Irish people.

“We, as a society, were coercively controlled by Church and State. (The) perverse religious morality of the Church meant the men who impregnated women out of wedlock got off scot-free whilst women were shunned and shamed.

“We call on you, as Taoiseach, to retract these sentences from the State apology."