Call for genocide prosecution over mothers’ homes

By Justine Mccarthy
Sunday Times (UK)
April 9, 2017

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/call-for-genocide-prosecution-over-mothers-homes-7rnjbrjtv

A group of mothers formerly resident in mother and baby homes has written to Máire Whelan, the attorney-general, asking her to prosecute the state for genocide on the basis that their children were adopted without valid consent.

They have also asked the International Criminal Court to informally assist Whelan with such a prosecution.

Irish First Mothers, which says it represents 70 women, wants Whelan to rely on the UN convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. It defines genocide as the intended destruction of “a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” by means including the forcible transfer of their children.

In a letter to Whelan, Kathy McMahon, the founder of Irish First Mothers, accused religious congregations who supervised Ireland’s mother and baby homes of wanting to destroy unmarried mothers as an identifiable cohort.

“We assert that the perpetrators were malignly motivated by their own Catholic ideological characterisation of us as a religiously defined group: a caste of so-called ‘fallen women’,” McMahon said. “Irish society has a historic, deep Catholic veneration of the ‘virgin mother’ as a deity figure. Thus unmarried mothers were automatically deemed offensively faithless; viewed culturally by perpetrators as bereft of rights.”