‘We cannot say we didn’t know’

I refer to the latest revelations concerning the appalling discovery of a mass grave in Tuam, and the cruel and humiliating treatment of young women and their babies in Bessborough.

It would appear that a well-rehearsed response is already beginning to swing into action.

That well-worn, and oft-uttered phrase; ‘But sure what could we do?’ is already tripping from lips. This phrase implies that back then, things were different and people were powerless in the face of Church and State collusion into the cruel and inhuman treatment of the vulnerable, within our society.

I beg to differ. That this Irish Gulag Archipelago flourished for so long, and with such immunity can only be attributable to the tacit support of a people, who concurred with the existing belief system that sex was a punishable crime, committed solely by women.

The weak, the helpless, and the vulnerable, in Irish society, those unable to defend themselves, became the chattels of Church and State. No one can claim that they were unaware of what was happening in our reformatories, hospitals, schools, and ‘homes’. Threats issued by parents in those days would have included mention of sending wayward children to reform school or ‘down to the sisters’.

Tyranny in any shape can only operate with the approval of a population. Voices did speak out in protest. Irish writers from James Plunkett to Brinsley McNamara, Walter Macken to Frank O’Connor, all attacked the bleak system of repression that existed. But the people continued to hand their pregnant children into the hands of the church-run homes.

People accepted the treatment of their daughters, their grandchildren, as something sullied and soiled, tainted by some imaginary sinfulness, and worthy only of disposal at the hands of a church obsessed with the inherent dangers of female sexuality. And what of the nuns who ran these institutions? They themselves were often victims of the same system. Young women handed over by their families to a life of harshness and obedience. Those nuns who witnessed the torture of young, frightened women, that had been abandoned by their own families. What did they do to help?

Bring in the United Nations investigators to examine what happened in Tuam. Let us, as a country, face up to this abhorrent part of our collective history and not shy away from the truth.

Concentration camp survivors carried a number tattooed on their arms for the remainder of their lives. Irish society bears that tattoo on its soul. Most of all, let us not be like those Germans who, as the ash of burning bodies fell on their heads, said, ‘we didn’t know!’

Jim Dwyer

Kilbrittain

Co Cork