If we’re playing the blame game, let’s get it right

WHEN we need leadership, the Taoiseach reverts to type and seeks the blame game. As the report into the mother and baby homes lays out the carnage, the usual suspects are named: the Church, the nuns.

Let’s blame those really responsible for impregnating hundreds of thousands of women in Ireland from 1922 to 1992.

Let’s blame the real culprits: the horny, cowardly males of the nation.

Let’s blame WT Cosgrave’s first government that set the moral bar so high it may have well been for hanging the Irish population.

Let’s blame the Garda Síochána, and the mainly male doctors who knew this was going on and did nothing about it.

Let’s blame the shopkeepers, farmers and wealthy elite who used the children from those homes as slaves.

Let’s blame Aer Lingus, which flew babies to America to be sold to the white rich.

Let’s blame Middle Ireland and its sick, slick machine that until recently played down this stain on our society, pretending it didn’t happen, blaming a Famine-era grave site for the evidence unearthed in Tuam. And, yes. Let’s blame the Church.

But first blame successive male-dominated governments who handed education and hospitals over to the religious because they hadn’t the guile, wit or balls to run those institutions in the image of a new republic.

Finally, unseal the recently sealed records disgracefully signed into law. And keep the apology simple.

It’s the men that are to blame. This time show contrition and shame.

John Cuffe

Dunboyne, Co Meath