Oral history of mother and baby home survivors must be retrieved
WITH three days to go until the Mother and Baby Homes Commission ceases to exist as a legal entity, we are being told that audio recordings of hundreds of witnesses which were deleted may not actually be gone forever. It is another usual twist in a most emotional saga. For decades, survivors of mother and baby homes have been denied a voice and denied autonomy. When they fell pregnant, many through rape and abuse, they were marched to the doors of religious institutions.
They may not have had shackles on their arms or legs for the duration of their stay, but they were captives nonetheless. Prisoners of misogynistic social stigma and perverse notions of respectability. Once they gave birth, their babies were ripped from their arms and they were callously told to get on with their lives.
They had no counselling and no one to talk to. They were expected to just forget. Blank the memories of their ordeals, and their children, from their minds. Many left the country, eager to get as far away from the location of their trauma as possible. But they could not outrun it. It stayed with them, casting a long shadow over the rest of their lives.
The final report of the commission, in many ways, is a hugely impressive body of research which runs to 3,000 pages. It records the horrifying mortality rate in these institutions, clearly states that babies born in these “homes” had a significantly reduced chance of survival and details the contemptuous disregard of the State, over many decades, for the plight of the tens of thousands of women and children banished to these grim places.
But, for survivors, the report is not a dispassionate historical or legal document which can be read with disquiet and then filed away to be used as a research tool. This is about their lives – their lived experience – and they are still living with the horror they endured decades ago.
When aspects of the report do not concur with their memories, their first-hand experiences of what went on behind the closed doors of these institutions, their anger is understandable. Having been silenced and excised from Irish society when they were young, they now feel the State is attempting to silence them again.
According to the Department of the Taoiseach, the commission was established in 2015 to give a “full account of what happened to women and children in these homes during the period 1922 to 1998”. There is now a dispute about whether this aim has been achieved, given the contested nature of some of the findings.
For instance, the commission found “little evidence” of forced adoptions, when it sifted through documents. However, it also notes that in 1967 an incredible 96.9pc of children born outside of marriage were put up for adoption. Is it credible that nearly every single woman who gave birth that year voluntarily gave their child up for adoption without some element of compulsion being applied?
There may not be a paper trail, implicating religious orders or State bodies in the forced adoption of children, but it is clear that an almost 100pc adoption rate is indicative of a deeply troubling coercive force. Women didn’t keep their children because they felt they couldn’t, not because they wanted to give them up.
The failure of the commission to join the dots is not surprising. As a Commission of Investigation, it is a creature of statute and can only report facts it has definitively established. The clear inference of coercion vis-à-vis adoptions – which can be derived from the almost universal number among births by unmarried woman, together with oral testimony from some women – was not deemed sufficient to make a finding.
While there have been complaints about the manner in which the commission operated, it is the process – not the members of the commission – that is to blame. Commissions of inquiry, by their nature, largely take place behind closed doors and witnesses are not cross-examined. This is supposed to lead to faster and less expensive investigations than tribunals, but the final report is inevitably constrained by the process.
While the commission’s report is a valuable document that has collated an enormous amount of information about a dark chapter in Irish life, it should not be considered the authoritative version of every aspect of history from that time.
This is why it is so important that the oral histories, collected by the commission and initially thought to have been deleted, are retrieved if possible. 549 survivors, many of whom are frail and elderly, attended a confidential committee of the commission to speak about their memories of mother and baby homes. For some survivors, giving evidence was the first time they had ever spoken about their experiences to anyone. The commission, in its report, noted the “depth and honesty of what witnesses revealed” and praised the courage it took for survivors to make that painful testimony.
Given the genuine confusion that has arisen about the decision to delete those recordings, and the emergence of a backup file that seems to contain that data, it is imperative that efforts are immediately made to determine what each survivor now wishes to happen to the tape of their individual interview.
The Government cannot retrospectively change the terms of reference of the commission, but there is nothing stopping it from further investigating the history of that time in a more expansive way. As long as the confidentiality of witnesses who wish to remain anonymous is respected, it may be possible to use the recordings of those who opt in to further that extended research. Ireland has a long history of investigating abuse at the hands of Church and State authorities. Instead of legalistic tribunals or commissions of investigation, it may be time for a truth and reconciliation commission to finally excise the demons of the past.
The failure of the commission to join the dots is not surprising