Irish leader apologizes for cruelty to unwed mothers and babies at homes run by the state and Catholic Church

IRELAND
Washington Post

January 13, 2021

By William Booth and Karla Adam

In a signal moment, to mark Ireland’s “dark, difficult and shameful” treatment of unmarried women and their babies over the 20th century, the republic’s prime minister, Micheál Martin, rose in the Parliament in Dublin on Wednesday and formally apologized for the state’s complicity in “a profound failure of empathy, understanding and basic humanity.”

Martin spoke after the long-awaited release of a 3,000-page report from the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes, which investigated conditions for the 56,000 unmarried mothers and 57,000 children who passed through the system — at 18 homes run by the state and by Catholic charities — from 1920 until 1998, when the last facility was shuttered.

The unmarried mothers, often destitute, desperate and young, with nowhere else to turn, sought last-ditch refuge in the homes or were shoved into them, having been cast out by their families.

Infant mortality at the institutions was in many years double the national average. Some 9,000 infants died — 15 percent of all those who were born in the system — a statistic the investigators call “appalling.”

Most of the babies who survived were offered up for adoption, often without full consent by the mothers.

Martin said: “We treated women exceptionally badly. We treated children exceptionally badly.”

The Irish leader said his society had suffered from a “warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy,” with a “very striking absence of kindness.”

“We honored piety but failed to show even basic kindness to those who needed it most,” he said.

New details of what happened to the women and their babies still have the ability to shock — though testimonies, novels, films and news reports have told of the homes for years.

The release of the report has dominated the conversation in Ireland, even as the country faces the world’s highest rate of coronavirus infections.

The Irish Times called the findings a condemnation of Irish society in past days, “its rigid rules and conventions about sexual matters, its savage intolerance, its harsh judgmentalism, its un-Christian cruelty.”

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