IRELAND
Irish Examiner
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Yesterday’s Magdalene report joined a litany of eviscerating documents detailing our past of neglect, abuse, and harrowing inhumanity.
And though we, as individuals, can sidestep the burden of guilt those horrors bequeath us, we cannot avoid the responsibility of making amends or belatedly showing some simple humanity to those so long denied it.
There have been so many reports — Ferns, Cloyne, the Murphy report on the diocese of Dublin, Raphoe, and too many others — that we might prefer to look away, to consign the horrors of the past to the past, but we cannot. We cannot, if we want to imagine ourselves a moral and decent people, pretend again that we do not know that there are hundreds if not thousands of women in our society who have been misused and betrayed in the name of cruel, medieval mores.
Thousands more died before we finally acknowledged that their lives, or at least a good portion of them, had been denied them, that they had been held against their will in a peculiarly self-righteous Irish gulag.
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