Dogs and Cats Got Better Burials Than Babies As the Church Deemed Their Mothers Were Doing the Devil's Work
By Pat Flanagan
The horrors of the Tuam cesspit cast a long shadow over any International Women's Day celebrations. And the Taoiseach added to the gloom by appearing to defend the nuns who may have dumped the bodies of up to 800 children in a disused sewer. Enda had another one of his “we all partied” moments by claiming “no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children” adding “we gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care, and so on”. What Enda is saying is how could anyone possibly know when women were incarcerated in these homes their babies would end up in a septic tank or be sold to rich Yanks? He seems to be suggesting there is some affliction affecting the Irish psyche which prevents us from seeing horrors that are taking place in plain sight. It’s much simpler than that, the Irish people were led up the garden path by their governments and an evil organisation that called itself a church. Make no mistake about it, if ever an organisation deserved the title death cult, it was the Roman Catholic Church in the decades after Independence. There you are, I’m falling for it, saying there was independence when after the Brits departed what passed for government was a really conspiracy against the people by the Church and State. The Church hated women with a passion and governments down the decades used the organs of the State to facilitate that loathing. Just as the German public were brainwashed to believe that Jewish people should be in concentration camps, the Church deemed the best place for unmarried mothers was in their gulags for girls. The similarity doesn’t end there – the death rate among children in the mother and baby homes was often higher than the camps run by the Nazis. But who was counting at the time, or even now? So effective was the collective blindness that despite the grinding poverty many people here thought this was the beginning of a Gaelic golden age.
In 1943, the year Eamon de Valera made his notorious “the Ireland that we dreamed of” speech – often referred to as his Dancing at the Crossroads broadcast – glorifying Ireland’s language and achievements since Independence, the Bessborough Mother and Baby home in Co Cork had an almost 70% infant mortality rate. So what if young women who became pregnant were enslaved in laundries and their babies might die from disease and malnutrition, at least it was done as Gaeilge. A few years later a Fine Gael Taoiseach, John A Costello, who had a soft spot for Hitler and Mussolini, sums it up better than anyone as to how these atrocities could take place. In 1951 he said: “I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first, and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the Church to which I belong.” How could a young woman and her baby expect mercy from such a man who, by his own admission, was merely a puppet of a Church that detested women? These young women and their children and their babies were not seen as people, they were considered sins and had to be to be treated as such by the State and the public. That is why families that would mark the grave of a beloved dog or cat with a headstone did not recoil at babies being dumped in pits. You’d like to imagine the conspiracy between Church and State no longer exists but when the religious institutions are allowed to get away with reneging on agreements to compensate sex abuse victims that is clearly not the case. A few years ago, Enda Kenny said he could not make the Magdalene monsters pay compensation to the women they enslaved but his Government was on for cutting off the water supply to families if they refused to pay their water charges. Also, why has our police force been so slow to investigate what went on at Tuam and the other homes? If there was one body buried in someone’s back garden the law would be around in a flash but it appears acceptable for the nuns to dump hundreds of babies in a pit and there’s no questions asked. Not only did the gardai not investigate the scene at Tuam, they claimed there were no bodies there except remains that might date back to the famine period. Things change, things stay the same… Reason for our national inquiries... The US has the National Enquirer but we are a nation of inquiries, with a total of 14 statutory and non-statutory probes under way. You’d imagine a country of little more than 4.5 million souls would have to be endemically corrupt to generate so many investigations. The explanation as to why we’re a country of commissions and tribunals is simple, it’s because in other places these would be police investigations.
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