Do not condemn all the clergy

■ I agree with the argument of Michael Kelly, writing in the Irish Independent of August 17 (‘It’s not fair to blame the majority of Catholics out there for the sins of a few’).

The good works of the nuns, in particular, is lost in the maelstrom of abuse they receive for the sins of the few in their duty of care for the needy in the institutions which were under their control at that time.

It should be remembered that these various institutions were the only place that offered some care for the young women who were ostracised by both families and society in our sorry history of unchristian attitudes to what were then described as “fallen women”.

A study of the history of the institutions that existed prior to the nuns – particularly the Foundling Hospital – provides evidence of the inhumanity that existed in Ireland when it was a part of the United Kingdom. This was despite the fact that the Act of Union of 1800 had held out the promise of the same kind of society that existed in Yorkshire or Somerset.

Unfortunately, our new State was no more humane and its first action in the drafting of the new Constitution was to eliminate two provisions of Griffith’s 1918 constitution.

The first was the provision by the State of healthcare and food from birth and the second was free secondary education.

These exclusions were on the advice of the State’s legal officer that the provisions threatened “to push the new party to treacherous ground of State-sponsored medicine and welfarism”.

Though they were not accepted, the proposed social clauses indicated that somewhere in the treatyite party’s precincts there was a semblance of original and progressive thinking, which was not in accord with the party’s elite – or what was called by Todd Andrews “the first 11”.

One of their first actions to accentuate any shade of welfarism in the State was to abolish the Widow’s pension in 1925.

Hugh Duffy Cleggan, Co Galway