RUSH to Moralise over Tuam Has Run Ahead of the Facts

By Brendan O'Neill
Irish Times
March 9, 2017

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The site where the remains of children were found at the Tuam mother and baby home. Photograph: Aidan Crawley/EPA

There is something deeply disturbing, ghoulish even, in the media and political discussion of the Tuam mother and baby home.

No one, apart from a handful of Catholic extremists, denies that conditions in the home were grim, and that the women and children who lived and died there were gravely wronged.

But the mawkish discussion of Tuam, the transformation of it into fodder for tabloid outrage and ostentatious emoting on Twitter, is an ugly spectacle.

It seems designed not to work out what happened in the home, but to make it a symbol of evil that we decent people might contrast ourselves against.

It’s virtue signalling – an attempt to advertise one’s own moral rectitude by poring over the depravity of bygone eras.