Mother and baby homes: Where are the men?

For every imprisoned woman in a mother and baby home, there is a corresponding man, and their voices, their guilt, their fault, their shame, and their torment is nowhere to be found.

Plaque remembering the babies, women and girls on the Greenway between Rochestown and Blackrock near the walkwalk over the Southlink motorway at back Bessborough house in Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Around 57,000 women were incarcerated in Ireland's mother and baby homes in the period covered by the report released this week. 

It can be assumed that for every woman who entered these shame-conversion camps as a result of the heady, beautiful intimacy of young love, there is another woman who was there because of a man's overwhelming belief that women have no right to their own bodies, and that it was the right of men to use and abuse these bodies how they saw fit — and society backed them to the hilt.