Irish Examiner view: A reminder of our dark complicity and denial
This long-anticipated moment has been reached as Judge Yvonne Murphy, after six years of investigation, today published the report on what went on in these homes between the 1920s and 1990s. Picture: Larry Cummins
Belief, as last week’s events in Washington showed and as events this day week may show, can be a strange, disruptive, volatile thing. It can motivate people to do the most irrational things, sometimes veering towards the bizarre, absolutely cruel, and dangerous.
Belief can, and it need not be an extreme, uncommon belief, lead to the darkest outcomes, sometimes even death on a grand scale. This dynamic, this certainty that belief validates almost any behaviour is all too obvious in the bloody and recent history of this small island.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin is expected tomorrow to perform what has become a rite of passage for taosigh since 1999. He will offer a formal State apology in the Dáil to some of the victims of the belief system and its social and human consequences, banal brutalities too, that held sway in this country for far too long.
Mr Martin will, on our behalf, apologise to the former residents of Ireland’s mother and baby homes — or at least those still alive.
This long-anticipated moment has been reached as Judge Yvonne Murphy, after six years of investigation, today published the report on what went on in these homes between the 1920s and 1990s.
Her findings are so grim that they demand immediate attention but if our response is to be authentic it is important to see Mr Martin’s apology as part of a pattern that began in 1999 when Taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologised to all who suffered child abuse.
Fourteen years later, Taoiseach Enda Kenny apologised to those abused in Magdalene laundries. Just two years ago, in July 2019, in the wake of Louise O’Keeffe’s landmark European Court of Human Rights case, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar apologised to the victims of child sexual abuse in our schools.
That the author of this week’s report, Judge Yvonne Murphy, is also the author of the harrowing, benchmark 2009 report into the sexual abuse scandals abounding in the archdiocese of Dublin carries a significant echo too.
These apologies, and myriad reports, some convictions too, acknowledged a cancer so active, so deep in our society, that blaming those who acted as paid agents of this society would be delusional and dishonest.
Despite the high walls surrounding these institutions — as described in Murphy II — anyone with the perception of a crozier knew what was going on yet it continued, the screams ignored for decades. There is more than enough guilt and blame to go around.
Of 18 institutions investigated, Judge Murphy found that 9,000 children, out of 57,000, died in the 70 or so years considered. Around 900 of those died in Cork’s Bessborough.
Many are buried there in graves left unmarked for many, many silent years. This 9,000 is almost three times the death toll inflicted in the North’s three decades of terror and more than three times New York’s 9/11 toll.
It represents a death ratio far above anything experienced in wider society. These homes were generally run by nuns where women, or more usually girls who became pregnant outside marriage gave birth.
The majority of babies were adopted in return for donations, In effect, they were sold, sometimes to faraway, unvetted strangers. It does not demand a vivid imagination to imagine the potential for real horror in those transactions.
That this tide ebbed when an unmarried mothers’ allowance was introduced in 1973 says a lot too. It shows that if given the very barest support mothers, almost invariably close to poverty, would embrace parenthood.
The other side of that coin points to a baser, material motive behind the incarcerations.
The religious orders involved deserve the considerable opprobrium coming their way. But the women who found themselves in these places were brought there by fathers or brothers, sometimes a priest who acted as kidnappers and jailers rather than offering the support expected today.
It is undeniable too, unless you believe in immaculate conception, that the great majority of men responsible for these pregnancies faced no comparable consequences.
They were left free to sow their wild oats. This seems a perfect, if unacceptable, combination of institutionalised hypocrisy and the cruellest kind of misogyny. Vive la différence
The publication of the report is, at this stage, attended by a sense of familiarity. The responses and promises are well-rehearsed and all too familiar.
They will sting those who have had hopes of success in redress-scheme claims dashed. Just before Christmas, welfare advocate Dr Conor O’Mahony was scathing on the huge delays in handling abuse cases in schools when he cited a “culture of obstruction and denial”.
The publication also stirs memories of the Catholic orders' less than honourable discharge of 50/50 obligations agreed on redress schemes. Might it be different this time?
Maybe, but it is prudent to see that as a hope rather than an expectation.
Even the draw-the-sting leaking of sections of the report has precedence. In July, 1994 Fianna Fáil’s praetorian guard — many of them Mr Martin’s mentors, selectively leaked the sections of the unpublished Beef Tribunal report most pertinent to their questionable vindication.
They did so from locked Government Buildings while their coalition partners, Dick Spring’s Labour, were excluded. That sharp behaviour, that bully-boy breach of trust sounded the death knell for that coalition.
This week’s leaks might do so for another coalition.
It may be tempting, and because we have done it so often, to file these issues away as if they impose no obligations or truths on how we behave or might behave in other areas of our lives. One, there are many, simple example offers itself.
In the coming while, we will mark centenaries around achieving our independence. Yet, that achievement is the very reordering that facilitated the ascent of those of unquestioning belief who ran mother and baby homes and similar institutions.
Those events also led to the establishment of an education system, more an indoctrination system really, that made challenging these behaviours impossible until the relatively recent past.
Will that reality be reflected in those ceremonies or will it be, just as victims’ screams and accusations were for so very long, airbrushed out of our history?
Any reflection on the consequences of unfettered belief, such as this report, is also a reminder that every society at every point in history had a cohort of zealots determined to impose change, legally or otherwise. America got a glimpse of some of their fringe citizens last week but do we know, or care to know, who ours are?
This is another important, heart-rending report but we have had so many that it is time to face the reality they describe: No religious order, no matter how powerful or vicious, could hold hostage and abuse, vulnerable women, in the ways this report describes without the complicity of swathes of society.
Until that dark truth is faced these scars will not heal. After all, taoiseach after taoiseach can only make so many apologies before they sound hollowed out and hypocritical.
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