Past and Present: a Dark Pattern We Must Not Repeat

Irish Times
March 10, 2017

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/past-and-present-a-dark-pattern-we-must-not-repeat-1.3005643?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Feditorial%2Fpast-and-present-a-dark-pattern-we-must-not-repeat-1.3005643

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

It has been a harrowing week. The images that haunt us are of the bodies of hundreds of babies and toddlers buried in a dishonoured grave in the mother and baby home in Tuam, of “Grace” and other children with disabilities suffering years of abuse in a so-called foster home in the southeast, of three beautiful little children and a young mother consumed in an accidental blaze at a facility for victims of domestic violence in Dublin.

Each of these stories is distressing enough in itself. Coming at the same time, though, they are even more disturbing. For they strip away a layer of illusion with which we have comforted ourselves when confronted with dark truths about our society’s appalling treatment of vulnerable and marginalised children: that was then, this is now. We can no longer assure ourselves that all the horror is in the past and that we live in an entirely new Ireland.

In some respects, we have no right to be shocked by the Tuam story. It is, of course, appalling to think of all of those lovely human beings who did not matter enough during their short lives to be given proper care and who did not matter enough in death to be given a decent burial, even by a church that pretended to believe that every individual was equal in the sight of God and that every life was sacred. But the mother and baby homes were not a secret, and they were not isolated institutions. On the contrary, they were part of what we must acknowledge as a massive system of coercive confinement to which Irish society consigned its unwanted people, its human set-aside.

An empire of repression

The mother and baby home in Tuam was part of an empire of repression that had highly visible outposts in every major Irish town, encompassing industrial schools, Magdalene laundries and mental hospitals. The Catholic Church bears an enormous responsibility for the systematic cruelty and at times the savage violence of much of this system. It promulgated and imposed a twisted idea of sexuality that used shame as a weapon of power and used women and their children as the living exemplars of that shame. The church has never fully faced up to the consequences of this distortion. That it has contributed just ˆ192 million of the ˆ1.5 billion cost so far of the redress scheme for victims of institutional abuse speaks for itself.