Light shed on surveillance by official Ireland

Opening the records goes far beyond this report and shows how survivors were silenced, writes Barry Houlihan

WITHIN the nearly 3,000 pages of the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes is Part V — 97 pages listing for the first time the archives consulted by the inquiry.

Survivors, historians and legal experts have not had access to the majority of these records, which are still held by government departments, religious orders or other authorities. Large quantities remain uncatalogued.

Access to records is key for informed challenge or reaction to the commission.

The report presents a narrative of the past — an approved narrative — told largely from official documentation, collected and created by the State, local authorities and religious orders.

A self-curation of the State’s memory.

The vast quantities of files must be studied to understand the huge body of knowledge collected on the operation of homes and of adoption processes.

It is a record of State and religious surveillance on women and children.

Some file names indicate how official record keeping reflected attitudes of the time and perpetuated stigma — “Illegitimate Children”, “Scandal in the Parish”, “Confidential Irish Adoptions”.

Euphemisms such as “arrangements”, “sorted” and “sent away” are a sleight of hand for the dismissal of pregnant women from their homes and communities into various institutions.

In Castlepollard, the “Records and Particulars Book/ Birth Register” for St Kevin’s Maternity Hospital recorded details of the mother and child. Information about fathers was deliberately left blank.

The Admission Books for Tuam recorded detailed data on women and children. A column for ‘Spouse’ was left blank, apart from exceptions when details of the relevant parish priest were entered — another symbol of the clergy’s power over the powerless.

This gendered recording of information presents a skewed version of the operation of the homes, where only the women and children are visible.

If mothers admitted to Tuam had other children living elsewhere, they were also not recorded — ensuring siblings would struggle to know of each other, or of their father, should contact ever be sought.

Archives and records of various homes and institutions were tools to effectively manage the separation of families and of mothers and children.

The files also reveal the immense detail that existed in the civil service. The commission lists files, reports and correspondence from inspections of homes and inspections of children ‘boarded out’ to foster families in practically every county.

If society in general knew and facilitated the atmosphere of shame, as the report is at pains to state, then the records reveal that government departments also clearly knew. Not only did they know, they documented it all.

Government shelves groan under the weight of reports in the last decade, yet the lack of access for survivors to personal and adoption records is an ongoing institutionalisation.

We should also be wary of seeing the commission’s work as a form of archive in itself. It is a record of some of the brutal treatment and stigma towards women and children in society, at all levels, and some of this is carried within the survivors’ testimony, but it is not the final say.

The commitment by Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman to establish a national records centre related to institutional trauma, in dialogue

‘The most important archive and record belongs to survivors’

with survivors, archivists and historians, is to be welcomed.

The centenary of the shelling of the Four Courts will be marked in 2022. Centuries of records from Ireland’s past were destroyed. The ambitious Beyond 2022 project is digitally reconstructing those lost records and conserving archives still charred and fused together.

The Republic was founded without a complete national memory. We risk the records of survivors suffering the same fate today — once again fused into silence.

Let’s not wait for another anniversary before beginning the vital work of establishing a new national repository of records that puts survivors at its centre, not in the periphery.

The most important archive and record belongs to survivors themselves — their testimony and their experiences.

We need to listen to them and let them guide us into their story.