IRELAND
Irish Times
Jacky Jones
Wed, Aug 6, 2014
Following the recent revelations about mother-and-baby homes, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: “It is about the kind of country Ireland was.” I wish he was right.
In 1933 George Bernard Shaw wrote: “It is amazing how the grossest abuses thrive on their reputation for being old, unhappy, far-off things in an age of imaginary progress.”
The concluding observations in Ireland’s fourth report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee show that Ireland is the kind of country that ignored women’s rights in the past and continues to do so in the present.
Sir Nigel Rodley, vice-chairman of the committee, referred to a litany of human rights abuses, including the practice of symphysiotomy, Magdalene laundries, and mother-and-baby homes as “quite a collection” and “there was nothing about accountability in anything we have heard”.
I beg to differ. Women were, and are, held accountable whereas men were, and are, not. Between 1922 and 1987, when the concept of illegitimacy was abolished, 145,073 illegitimate children were born in Ireland.
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