Ireland has an underclass only because we look the ‘other’ way

WHEN my wife was a child, she was taken to mass every Sunday. Every Sunday, she noticed a small group of children, in what seemed to be reserved seats to the side of the church. They were always cold, pinched and blue. Dressed in khaki, they would troop in quietly at the start and troop out again, through a side door, at the end.

They were marshalled each week by a couple of nuns. The regular children would never look at them, nor talk to them. They looked hungry and miserable, but that wasn’t a reason to have anything to do with them. Quite the opposite.

They were the children of a local orphanage. More to the point, they were ‘others’. Or, as an academic said recently, they had been ‘othered’.