A dark country for women and children who had no voice
EVERYBODY knew. Of all the horrors we’ve unearthed from the 60-year history of our mother and baby home regime, that’s probably the one that’s hardest to credit and easiest to discount.
Everybody knew the work, purpose and reputation of these so-called ‘homes’.
Everybody knew that these were the places to which families and communities banished their unmarried, pregnant daughters.
Everybody knew that girls rumoured to be ‘in trouble’ disappeared into these institutions and, if they emerged again a year later, nobody asked what became of their children. Instead everybody knew, as Joan Burton said her adoptive mother told her, that babies were ‘dying like flies’ behind their forbidding walls.
It is easy, and reassuring, to blame the evil Catholic Church for the massacre of the innocents that the ‘ mother and baby homes’ perpetrated. Some 9,000 infants, or one in seven of those born i n just 18 i nstitutions, perished in the care of religious orders. They were considered less than human, products of sin, their treatment mirroring that meted out to their shamed mothers, who were often taunted during the agonies of childbirth that they were paying for their fun.
Neglect
Their babies were taken from them, sometimes kept in separate areas of the same institutions and maliciously denied their mothers’ love – others were offered for adoption like commodities. The weaker ones died of malnutrition and illness and, according to survivors, sometimes of deliberate cruelty and neglect. Many were not so much buried, we now know, as dumped like garbage in the grounds of these places. But we should not forget, as we review this era with 21st- century disbelief, that the Church did not perpetrate this atrocity alone, nor in secrecy. Everybody knew.
The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation report starkly records this discomfiting f act: neither the Church nor State forced women into these homes. They were brought there by parents or family members, seeking a discreet and cheap solution to a shaming inconvenience. For every one of the 56,000 women who passed through these places over half a century, there was a family who put her there. For every one of the 57,000 babies born in one of these homes, there was a father who had walked away. No doubt some of these men would have stepped up to their responsibilities, if the society of the time had been prepared to tolerate unmarried parenthood. But for most, it is probably safe to say, these homes were, quite literally, a Godsend. Their problem had been passed to the Church, with the imprimatur of the State: they were off the hook.
Of all the players in this awful saga, though, the role of the fathers is probably the easiest to relate to modern experience. After all, we still have no child support agency, as in the UK, to compel men to contribute financially to the children they’ve fathered and, as 86% of Irish single parents are women, many still clearly exercise their freedom to walk away. But, from today’s perspective, the behaviour of the families and the so-called carers is harder to fathom.
How could religious men and women treat defenceless infants so wretchedly? How could grandparents, aunts, uncles simply turn a blind eye to the reality of the ‘solution’ the homes offered? How could the towns and villages that held these institutions ignore the parade of misery through their streets, the poor children i n their rags being farmed out as unpaid labourers to locals, the shamed women being spirited in their gates?
If these questions stump us, then it is because we forget that childhood is a relatively recent, late 20th-century concept. Infant mortality was high in the early years of this State’s existence, there was no contraception and large families came with the assumption that many babies simply wouldn’t survive. So hardpressed parents couldn’t afford to invest emotionally in their infants.
Children were born to be farmhands and cheap labour: our long school holidays are predicated on the need for children to save the hay and the harvest in summer. As soon as they could work, they earned their keep, and there was no room for indulgence or mollycoddling. Our grandparents’ generation would have been baffled by the notion of ‘parenting’, a clear product of affluence, and to the idea of children having a voice. They were to be seen and not heard. And sometimes never seen at all.
The complicity of families and the conscious indifference of society does not absolve the Church and State from primary responsibility for the sufferings of these women and babies. But let us not deny that it certainly facilitated that suffering: the blame lies far wider than we might care to admit.