Mother-and-baby homes: It’s time for the State to realise de Valera’s ideals

Will Ireland do right by all those it has failed? asks Claire McGettrick.

ON St Patrick’s Day in 1943, then taoiseach Éamon de Valera made an address in which he shared his dream of an ideal Ireland.

His vision for women and children described “happy maidens” and “the romping of sturdy children”.

In truth, Ireland at that same time could not have been more different, at least not in places such as the Sacred Heart Mother and Baby Home in Bessborough, where the infant mortality rate was a staggering 68% as revealed in today’s Irish Examiner.

There were no happy maidens and no romping of sturdy children. Instead, the bleak reality — which can be linked to de Valera’s own policies — is that women and children were suffering, and in many cases dying, in Ireland’s mother-and- baby homes, while other women were being treated as slaves in the Magdalene laundries and county homes.

The State’s dependence on the Church for the provision of social services and its deference to Catholic doctrine has left a shameful legacy. And yet, instead of acting honourably and doing the right thing, since the 1990s, successive governments have had to be embarrassed into action.

The apology and redress for industrial school survivors was tainted by the exclusion of the Magdalene laundries, the vaccine trials, the mother-and- baby homes and so many other institutions where Ireland’s vulnerable were confined.

It then took over a decade of campaigning to achieve an apology for Magdalene women. Moreover, it took almost two years to drag that State apology out of the current Government, which is comprised of several politicians who were tireless in their support for survivors while in opposition.

Instead of apologising first and then launching a full investigation, the Government decided to commission a limited investigation. The result was a thousand-page report which is an inaccurate and misleading narrative of the lived experience of the thousands of women and girls who were incarcerated in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries.

Wanting to draw a line under the matter, Taoiseach Enda Kenny called the McAleese Report a ‘document of truth’ but, as previously reported in this paper, serious doubt has been cast on this assertion.

The basis for government resistance is clear — there is a fear of opening the floodgates because what happened in the industrial schools and Magdalene laundries is merely the tip of the iceberg.

The appalling conditions in mother-and-baby homes have been exposed on a grand scale this year and because of the bravery of women such as Philomena Lee and the many adopted people who have spoken out, many more are standing up and demanding justice for what happened to them.

The current Government has committed to a Commission of Investigation on the mother-and-baby homes and there were hopeful signs from former children’s minister Charlie Flanagan, who promised a wide-ranging inquiry.

The report of the interdepartmental group on mother-and-baby homes poured cold water over such hopes, however, and ruled out any investigation of institutions such as infant homes such as Temple Hill and Stamullen, while the county homes and Magdalene laundries were relegated to a historical survey.

It was shockingly inadequate in the area of adoption, completely ignoring the Adoption Board/Authority on one hand and, on the other, suggesting the shambolic information and tracing legislation that is currently being drafted as a satisfactory response to our calls for an investigation into Ireland’s system of closed, secret, forced adoption.

Today’s revelations about Bessborough and the county homes show the need for a comprehensive truth-finding investigation which focuses on all issues relating to children born out of wedlock since 1922.

De Valera hoped to inspire his fellow citizens to create a “noble future for our country”, but much suffering and misery lay behind this façade.

The opening of the floodgates is inevitable and the truth will eventually be known.

Is it too much to ask for the State to take the more honourable route in the hope of a more noble future?

* Claire McGettrick is co-founder of Adoption Rights Alliance