IRELAND
Irish Independent
Published 06/06/2014
David Quinn
Other countries are able to be nostalgic about their past. Britain can have the ‘Darling Buds of May’, which romanticises rural life in England in the 1950s. ‘Call the Midwife’ is also set in the 1950s, this time in east London, but it is still fairly nostalgic about the past.
America has lot of films and TV shows that romanticise the 1950s. I don’t think we have any. Instead we have lots of films that do the opposite and I think a huge part of the reason is that we are still haunted by the fact that we put so many people into mostly church-run institutions that were often inhuman and dehumanising.
Britain also had its institutions and they were also terrible places. But we seemed to have more of them, we put proportionately more people into them and we kept them open until closer to the present day.
Another example of the awfulness of many of our institutions has just come to light, namely the fact that almost 800 children and babies may have died at a Tuam mother and baby home run by an order of nuns between 1925 and 1961.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.