We should look closer to home for answers

Re the Tuam babies, while it’s appropriate to focus on the role of the Government and the institutions concerned, perhaps we can look closer to home, and specifically to the grandparents who, for reasons of little more than quasi-Victorian social propriety, bullied their children into handing over their grandchildren to uncaring strangers with the implicit instructions: "do as you wish with them".

No institution and no government would have sent round a hit squad to seize the child. The consequences of celebrating the new life in their midst would at most have meant being tutted at or ostracised by mostly elderly bigots. “Consequences” such as those are neither an excuse nor a reason for what they did. The greatest irony is the howls of indignation from the pro-abortion lobby — presumably, if they’d have had their way in the 1950s, the outcome would have been much the same, except that the little ones would have been dispatched sooner.

Seán Mac Cann