Irish Examiner view: Put Joanne Hayes’ story on curriculum

Joanne Hayes with her sister Kathleen (left) arriving for the hearing at the Kerry Babies Tribunal in 1985. File photo: Eamonn Farrell/RollingNews.ie

One of the responses from the far side of the Irish Sea to The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine, the wonderful TV documentary broadcast in recent weeks, is that “we didn’t know, the story we were taught was very different”. 

That reaction needles because it came from senior British academics who imagine they had a rounded education. But if something is not offered in school, it can only be found by the most curious and determined. 

It needles, too, but in a different way, because that deep ignorance helped drive Brexit.

The announcement that Joanne Hayes and her family are to be awarded €2.5m over their scandalous treatment by official Ireland during the Kerry Babies scandal in the 1980s raises that very same question on this side of the Irish Sea.

Just like the terrorist atrocities of that decade, the impact of that event and the cold patriarchal attitudes it revealed are fading from living memory. 

Unless this scandal and many more like it — particularly the Anne Lovett tragedy and the mother and baby homes history — are relayed to tomorrow’s adults before they leave school they will, like those decent but uninformed British academics, struggle to understand and appreciate the world they live in. 

Which, in turn, may lead to official attitudes as unacceptable as those seen 34 years ago.

No one will begrudge Ms Hayes her belated compensation but she, like most of us, must regret that it was ever necessary. Education can help ensure there will be no recurrence.