IRELAND
Mayo Advertiser
Noel Campbell
In a little under five years time, Ireland will roll out the red commemoration carpets for a year long celebration to mark the centenary of the Irish Free State. In the decades preceding the independent state, unionist politicians and their constituents vigorously, and even militantly, opposed any form of self-determination for Ireland as they believed Home Rule under a Catholic majority would mean Rome rule. The fears of those unionists were realised. The Free State, like the British state before it, inadequately supervised Catholic institutions tasked with caring for sections of Irish society and thereby put at risk the very children of the nation that independence was destined to cherish. The Free State’s successors were equally culpable of neglect as each fed its own citizens to an ultra conservative, practically unregulated, system of 250 Church-run industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages, hostels and homes from the 1920s up until the 1990s. Since the 1990s, criminal cases and inquiries have established that thousands of children were abused by hundreds of priests and several Catholic religious orders were found to have participated in or concealed child abuse.
The utterly disturbing find of 796 human remains on the grounds of the mother and baby home run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam raises questions of that order of nuns and the State, which surely require answering through a Garda investigation. Questions too need to be asked in Mayo. In the 1920s, unmarried mothers and their babies were housed in the Mayo County Home in Castlebar. They were isolated from other ‘inmates’ and occupied with work for little reward. In 1926, debate at a sitting of the Poor Law Commission turned to congestion at the County Home and how the inmate numbers could be reduced. It was suggested that the 41 unmarried mothers could be removed to another institution. Men like Dr PD Daly immediately fought this suggestion as replacing the cheap labour supplied by the unmarried mothers with extra staff members would cost the ratepayers. Instead, the removal of 51 children and 12 unmarried mothers from the County Home was put forward. Management at the County Home were aware of the stern, if not hostile, reputation of some institutions. On the reporting of two troublesome unmarried mothers to a Mayo County Board of Health meeting by the matron of the County Home, the meeting decided to experiment and send one of them to the Magdalene Home in Galway to teach her discipline. Should she refuse, she was to be prosecuted.
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