State barring the way to restitution for Bethany victims

I APPRECIATE Eric Conway’s reply to my criticism of his letter (December 23 and January 7).

He accused the media of blocking coverage of what happened in the Protestant evangelical Bethany Home. I pointed out that when evidence of large-scale neglect and child mortality was produced it was published and that politicians form all parties and none spoke out on the issue.

To take up Mr Conway’s general point, one reason why there has been more attention paid to Roman Catholic institutions is because the Catholic population is 20 times larger than the Protestant one. For historical reasons, there are differences in the socio-economic profile of the two groups, which possibly affected the number of ‘problematic’ Protestants coming to official attention. A smaller Protestant population meant that more from the Protestant community may have been amenable to internal management, something promoted by the state. It is clear that there are similarities in the experiences of groups such as unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children, irrespective of denomination.