IRELAND
Irish Times
Sinead Pembroke
On hearing the reports in the media about the discovery of a mass grave at the site of the once mother and baby home in Tuam, it nearly feels as though we are discovering abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Ireland, in State-funded institutions for the very first time.
Yet, this isn’t the first time, and as the daughter of a survivor of a Christian Brother institution, it feels like we’re back there again, when these abuses started to emerge in the media for the first time.
There have been numerous inquiries into institutions that were State-funded and run by Catholic congregations, and the type of revelations we have been hearing recently about mother and baby homes were already being told by survivors of these institutions, yet were largely ignored. Why is this information only coming to the forefront now? And why wasn’t this investigated properly before, along with the other institutions?
Reluctance
This comes down to the great reluctance of governments (both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) and the various public sector departments involved, in establishing these inquiries and redress schemes, in the first place. Usually they were established after years of campaigning from survivors, survivor groups and individuals.
For example, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) was only established after Mary Raftery’s documentary series for RTÉ called States of Fear. The Magdalene Redress scheme was only set up after Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) went to the UN Committee against Torture (CAT) to make a case of State involvement with the Magdalene Laundries.
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