IRELAND
Finfacts Ireland
By Michael Hennigan, Finfacts founder and editor
Jun 6, 2014
Every country is an Organised Hypocrisy to some degree. Countries have aspirations and stated principles, which more often than not, contrast with a grim reality – – at least in democracies today, there is an opportunity for some rebalancing.
Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and a cruel slave master, who had penned the line in the 1776 Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” fathered at least six children with his slave Sally Hemings but he regarded them as sub-human, while Karl Marx a German philosopher, who had seen the grim existence for workers in Germany and Britain in the first century of the industrial revolution, would not have expected to become the god of brutal dictatorships that crushed the human spirit in the twentieth century.
The revelation that 796 babies died in a facility run by a religious order in Tuam, County Galway over 36 years, is shocking even after the litany of stories of abuse in recent decades.
Two sectarian states had developed in Ireland from the 1920’s and in the South, behind the veneer of “republican principles,” conservative elites held power and brooked little opposition.
In the Irish Times in 2009, the late journalist Mary Raftery wrote on Mr Justice Seán Ryan’s report on decades of child abuse in Ireland: “It’s is quite simply a devastating report. It is a monument to the shameful nature of
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