Honour Corless

…If anyone ever deserved an honorary degree, that person is Catherine Corless. She singlehandedly exposed the mass graves in Tuam.

She did it painstakingly by procuring death certificates for each of the deceased infants at a cost to her of €4 for each one.

Dermot Fitzpatrick, …The Tuam scandal (so admirably covered by the Irish Mail on Sunday) and the Citizens’ Assembly, have one thing in common: unwanted babies – and what society did, and proposes to do, with them.

The unwanted babies of Tuam were given over – with their mothers – to the nuns, with the not-so-happy outcomes that we have been reading about.

The unwanted babies of the present age are likely to suffer an even worse fate if reports that the Citizens’ Assembly favours legalising abortion come to pass.

We hear many expressions of shock and horror at the treatment of Tuam’s unwanted babies, yet many of the same ‘horrified’ people are pushing hard to condemn the present generation of unwanted babies to death.

It makes me wonder, which is the more civilised era: the 1920s, the 1960s or the 2000s?

If the abortion lobby gets its way, it won’t even be a close-run race. Seán Ryan, Dundrum, Dublin 16. …My late mother often reminisced about her childhood in her native Co. Cork town in the 1930s. She spoke frequently of the maltreatment and social discrimination exercised by the nuns at the local convent school.

At the top were the children of the shopkeepers, guards and teachers, who would be the nuns’ pets and received special privileges; next came the kids from poorer backgrounds, who would be treated far less kindly, and at the bottom of the heap were the unfortunate children from the local industrial school (widely known as ‘the orphanage’).

The nuns who ran both the school and the orphanage treated the ‘orphans’ abominably. The children were malnourished, badly clothed and neglected, and would be brutally punished for the slightest infraction or, indeed, often for no reason at all.

Right to the end of her long life, my mother reserved a bitter disdain for these cruel nuns. It just shows that the gruesome practices uncovered at the former Tuam Mother and Baby Home, though horrendous and disturbing, should not really surprise us.

The Hidden Ireland? More like the Ireland Hidden in Plain Sight.

John O’Sullivan,