IRELAND
Slugger O’Toole

Mick Fealty, Mon 9 June 2014

Whenever a society attempts to impose without exception an impossible abstraction on fallible human beings, such cruelty will always be necessary.

Andrew Sullivan on the Tuam Mother and Baby home…

Now we understand that the high mortality rates at Tuam may have been the norm for such homes across the post independence state. A few years back similarly high rates at the evangelical Protestant Bethany Homes were reported in detail.

And there was (to our modern eyes) a remarkable consensus on the pretty awful way unwed mothers should be treated. Shane Harrison reporting one remembered experience:

“I grew up with starvation, was treated more or less as a dog,” he said.

“I was that hungry that I remember going into a farmer’s field and picking spuds so that we could have a meal and putting the roots back in….