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Paddy Clancy: What happened in Tuam is horrendous but I believe it is only the tip of a deep-plunging iceberg
By Paddy Clancy
Hail, glorious St Patrick! How proud I was as a youngster to sing Ireland’s favourite greeting to the man after whom I was christened. What excitement raced through my boyhood mind as I chanted the next line in the hymn celebrating his name – “Dear Saint of Our Isle!” I was a bit puzzled when I reached “On us, your poor children; bestow a sweet smile.” OK, I got the bit about asking him to smile on us! After, all hadn’t he brought Christianity to us and the nuns and religious brothers who taught us and the priests who prepared us for Holy Communion and Confirmation made sure we never forgot that. But for a long time I couldn’t figure out why we were being referred to in the hymn as “poor” children. Of course, in my childhood mind I thought poor just meant financially not well off. When I realised before I reached adulthood that there were other ways people could be poor I was blind to many around me who were suffering distress, loneliness, terror, starvation, and a host of disturbing emotions. They were being cared for by the same nuns and clerics who were pumping prayer after prayer into our young minds. The scandal that has emerged in recent weeks about how teenage girls and young women and their infants were treated in a convent in Tuam is horrendous. I have no doubt that in years to come we will discover the 796 dead babies from still-birth to the age of three that were hastily buried over 36 years in a septic tank and other bunkers in the grounds of the Mother and Baby Home run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam is only the tip of a deep-plunging iceberg. Up to 180 secret graveyard sites where babies remains may have been buried will undoubtedly reveal more dreadful shame if a survivors’ group gets the excavations it is demanding. When my patron saint brought Christianity to Ireland he couldn’t possibly have imagined the isle he thought he was saving from hell would one day edge much closer to it. The Church and its priests, religious brothers and nuns have much to answer for. But the blame isn’t all theirs. As healing truths emerge – and truth does heal, eventually – civil society must face up to the blame it has to share. There are tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of occasions when ordinary citizens who believed they were decent people shared in distributing humiliation to orphans and other children in the care of religious orders. One example: youngsters cared for in a home in my native town would arrive in school in hobnail boots and be left sitting at the back of the class. The least disturbance by them would earn them a clout of a cane far more severe than was dished out to other pupils. Schools all over Ireland had such pupils in attendance. Does anybody remember inviting them to their own home so they could spend a few hours away from the orphanage they dreaded? I didn’t, and in hindsight it’s to my great shame. Of course, there were much more serious happenings. The worst, in my view, was our grandparents and parents, fearing shame and anger in their towns and villages, being somehow encouraged by the courts and other authorities to “dump” their pregnant teenage daughter or foolishly criminal boy-child into the care of religious orders. Many of the orders, with no special skills in childcare and little or no financial help from the State, were left to fend in a social wilderness. The crisis that has emerged won’t be sorted for years. The snakes that Patrick banned from Ireland were harmless when compared to the human reptiles in a society that abandoned thousands of troubled boys and girls. In this week of St Patrick, all Ireland, religious and lay, must dig very deep to find the truth he brought seventeen hundred years ago.
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