Suffer the Little Children: Church Cruelty in Ireland

By Sadhbh Walshe
New York Times
March 31, 2017

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TUAM, Ireland — Last year, during the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising that led to Irish independence, the writer Colm Toibin pointed to the fatal mistake the British made when putting down the rebellion. It was not just the swift execution of the movement’s leaders, which historians often point to as a defining moment, but the burial of their bodies in quicklime without coffins.

“Anyone Irish will understand that whatever you do, don’t do that,” he said, adding that it “mattered in Ireland in a way that it might not have mattered in some other country.”

We have a thing about respecting the dead here, you see, drummed into us in part by the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, Ireland’s self-appointed moral authority. It follows, then, that the discovery of the remains of a number of children up to age 3, in what may have been the sewage tanks of a former home for unwed mothers run by Catholic nuns, should be another “quicklime” moment. Watching this scandal unfold here, though, it’s sadly apparent that the Irish state is not ready to free society from the church’s yoke just yet.

The investigation into suspected abuses in the network of Ireland’s mother and baby homes is only beginning, but some pertinent facts are already known. While death certificates exist for at least 796 children who died in the home in Tuam, in the west of Ireland, in its years of operation from 1925 to 1961, burial records have been found for only two of them. The religious order that ran the home, the Sisters of Bon Secours, received government funding for the children in its care, and death rates were described in an official report as “undesirably high.” (On average, a child died in the home every two weeks.)

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A public outrage, you would think. But as the historian Mary McAuliffe recently told me, “The pushback is already underway to obliterate the idea that what occurred was systemic and ideology-driven.”

When Catherine Corless, the local historian who in 2014 uncovered the story behind the burial site, began her research, she found that neither church nor state authorities were in any rush to uncover the truth. The Bon Secours order told her “they knew nothing about any grave.” It seemed that the Irish government, too, didn’t particularly want to know, at least until the story made international headlines.

By the time the state eventually established a investigatory commission in February 2015, the nuns were already on the offensive. They had hired a P.R. guru, Terry Prone, who stuck with the denial theme, sending a startlingly callous letter to a French reporter in October 2014 in which she wrote, “If you come here, you’ll find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried.”

The commission’s report this month proved otherwise. Now that the existence of a mass grave of babies can no longer be denied, we have entered the bargaining phase. The order of nuns has “no comment” to offer (and, of course, no apology). And while there is much hand-wringing among the upper echelons of the church in Ireland, there is a blame-deflecting edge to it. The Archbishop of Tuam is “shocked” and wants answers. Tellingly, though, he wants the government inquiry into the homes to look at “society generally” rather than focus on the religious orders that ran them.

This idea that the sins of our past are a byproduct of some general societal failing, rather than being the inevitable outcome of a church-run, state-supported policy of punishing women for out-of-wedlock pregnancies also finds an echo in the highest levels of government. In his speech following the commission’s disclosures about the burial site, the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, waxed lyrical about the Tuam grave as a “social and cultural sepulcher.” Yet he tactfully gave the religious order that was paid by the state to care for the babies who lie in those graves a pass.

“No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children,” he said. “We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what you call respectability.”

This notion of the church as a benign actor amid society’s rush to banish illegitimate children and the mothers who bore them is hardly supported by witness accounts. On Irish TV recently, Peter Mulryan, whose baby sister is believed to have died at the Tuam home and may be buried there, spoke of how the local priest personally transported his mother, seven months pregnant at the time, on the crossbar of his bicycle for the 20-mile journey to the Bon Secours home, after telling her parents that their daughter was causing a scandal.

I spoke to another survivor of the home, P. J. Haverty, who told me that his grandparents also got the priestly visit instructing them to surrender their pregnant daughter. She spent 12 months at the home breast-feeding her baby. Then, after she was ordered to leave him so no further bonding could occur, she returned almost every week to beg the nuns to give her back her child. She gave this up only after he was placed in a foster home at age 6.

Of course, when one realizes that in Ireland today about 90 percent of primary schools and many hospitals are state-funded and church-run, just as the mother and baby homes were, the desire to establish collective guilt begins to make sense. But the effort to deflect blame from the church also involves an unsavory business interest.

In the early 2000s, the government decided to establish a mechanism to compensate victims of abuse in state-funded, church-run institutions. The sexual assaults and savage beatings that took place were inflicted by priests and nuns, but the state accepted 50 percent of the blame for its oversight failure. After much wrangling, some 18 Catholic religious orders agreed to contribute $138 million to the compensation fund, then estimated at $270 million, in return for indemnification against lawsuits.

Better still for the church, its contribution was capped at that level. Later, in 2009, when an investigation known as the Ryan Report detailed the abuses, the Catholic orders offered an additional $378 million, only for it to be reduced by more than a third of that amount in 2015. So when the demands for compensation outstripped the initial funds, as they quickly did — rising to about $1.6 billion — the Irish taxpayer was left to pick up the tab.

So here we are, nearly a century into this self-rule thing, and the Irish state, which is, of course, an expression of Irish society, is still hellbent on protecting an institution, the church, that has repeatedly failed to live up to the moral code it imposes on others. We have a high tolerance for guilt here, but babies in a mass grave is a new low. The Irish public is right not to accept this latest moral burden. Nor should it have to pay the church’s debts of dishonor.