IRELAND
The Guardian
Tanya Gold
The Guardian, Friday 4 July 2014
There was a vigil outside the Irish embassy in London on Thursday. It was for the 796 children who died in a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway, which was operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961. There are death records but no burial records for these children. The location of their graves is a mystery, although it is probable that they are near the home, and that some of them, according to testimony from two local boys, who found skeletons in 1975 after disturbing a concrete slab, may be in what was once a septic tank in the grounds. When the story broke a month ago there was fury, and misreporting. All the missing children, it was said, were in the tank. This is supposition. No one knows precisely where they are. The site has not been searched.
I do not praise misreporting. It should not have happened. The New York Times and the Washington Post carried corrections. So did the Guardian. But the scandal – and here scandal blooms upon scandal – is how an initial error has allowed the fate of the mothers and babies of Tuam to be diminished and then normalised. It is similar to watching fabric fray. Tug at a thread and hope the whole collapses.
In a piece for Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill railed against the false headlines. He was right to abhor them, but then he lost his balance. He presented those furious at the needless deaths as a “Twittermob constantly on the hunt for things it might feel ostentatiously outraged by”. He was, it seems, more interested in what was misreported than what actually happened; the conditions in the homes, the stigma that took the women there and the question of how many similar graves there might be across Ireland were less important. What began as a polemic seeking fact swiftly became the opposite. In fact, he said, the “unhealthy obsession over the past 10 years with raking over Ireland’s past … has become a kind of grotesque moral sport, providing kicks to the anti-Catholic brigade and fuel to the historical self-flagellation that now passes for public life in Ireland”. Is that what the survivors of the Magdalene laundries, the industrial schools, and the sexual abuse by priests think is the result of their testimony? Hysteria? Kicks? Or, at last, an acknowledgement of what happened?
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