We should call in the UN to deal with the legacy of our mass graves, because we’re not up to the job ourselves
Victims of institutional abuse still being ignored
THIS country rings out the Angelus every day despite the appalling history of the industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes and now mass graves, which have for too long largely been ignored. If these children were found in a grave in Africa, the Balkans or Russia, the Irish bishops would be wringing their hands and asking their parishioners for money to help them.
It’s time to call in the United Nations, because it seems we’re incapable of dealing with this issue ourselves.
If 800 babies were found in a mass grave in any other part of the world, it would be global news – but not when it’s ourselves, here in Ireland.
The Catholic Church took these babies and dumped them into pits and yet it has the audacity to lecture us about high morality.
These children in Tuam are just another one of Ireland’s very public secrets, and secrets are about shame. What happened here was cruel and inhumane.
Someone dug those graves, someone put those bodies down there, so why are the institutions that allowed these burials not being held to account?
The landscapes around this country are full of trauma and conflict and we’re talking about the dead here – the unacknowledged are screaming out.
When I first heard of the mass grave in Tuam, I wasn’t one bit surprised.
I think we will find that there are similar sites around the country, which will eventually be uncovered either by accident or by the release of information by the institutions that hold their records.
It all mounts up to a dreadful legacy. And while there should be a national day for these babies and their mothers who died at the homes, I wouldn’t want the Irish state to do this, because it needs to hang its head in eternal shame. I want the UN to come in and do it.
IWAS locked up in St Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack for 18 months. I suffered sexual and physical abuse – and I was only 11. Anybody who was in one of these institutions would know already that there was no respect for human life. But the mass grave proves that there was no respect for the dead either.
I wrote about the lifelong impact of the abuse people suffered in such institutions in the play James X, and how the trauma was unending for the inmates of industrial schools.
The silence from the leaders of the Catholic Church has been deafening since this story broke last weekend.
No matter what you say, nowhere in the great religious works would this kind of conduct be justified, so why aren’t the brothers, nuns and priests coming out into the open to offer us some comfort?
We don’t know if the victims died lawfully or unlawfully, and no one has asked what happened to their mothers. These are the lost generations, lost and banished.
On the one hand, children were being sold off, and on the other they were being buried deep in the ground.
These events really need to be looked into and I’m not surprised that the Minister for the Environment (who has responsibility for graveyards), the Garda and the Church are silent and have made no effort to find out who the victims were.
These were dumping grounds, you cannot call them graves.
The other thing that deeply concerns me is, where are the files for the mothers of these children? Is nobody going to track these people down and offer them some comfort?
I think this failure is a really bad reflection on us and it will impact seriously on our reputation internationally.
Our image of a land and saints and scholars will come back to haunt us if we do not stand up and protest. We need real justice and real accountability without the involvement of the Church and those in power. I know this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is all going to leave a terrible legacy in its wake, especially when you consider the way that those who suffered abuse at the hands of the Church were treated by the redress board, by the various inquiries and the long drawnout nature of it all, and then by the way the religious groups were exonerated and exempted from paying compensation. Yet the good priests remain silent, and no one is standing up to say anything about this.
This raises chilling echoes of infamous regimes across the world who were responsible for mass killings. This was done carte blanche, and once you went in behind those walls, you vanished as a human being.
This is the reality. Tragedy is always about something that could have been avoided, and this could so easily have been avoided.
SO THE idea that we had of some squeakyclean country is now well and truly shattered. The Irish people need to wake up to the truth. We allowed babies to die and be dumped in a pit. We have completely destroyed a class of people – particularly women and children.
We need to hold those institutions responsible for this horror to account.
We let these children down when they were alive and we need to make sure we don’t let them down again in their deaths.