Campaign grows to teach history of baby homes in our schools
Call to put scandal of mother and child institutions onto the second-level curriculum
IRELAND’S incarceration of women and children in homes and industrial schools should be put on the secondary school curriculum as soon as possible, according to ‘a growing community’ of academics, survivors and activists.
Mary Harney, 73, a PhD candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and a mother and baby home survivor, said it is ‘also the voice of the ordinary person who knows our story. We hope it will become a national voice that says, “Yes, this must be taught in schools.”’
Ms Harney is part of a team that designed and is trialling a module on institutional mistreatment aimed at Transition Year students.
Earlier this month she also led a day of talks held to advance the conversation at NUI Galway, organised by the Irish Centre for Human Rights.
Ms Harney said the transition year module ‘can be used to teach almost any class, whether you’re teaching history, or drama, or music’. She stressed it was important for students to ‘see what human rights violations look like in their own country’.
‘Every country has a dark chapter,’ she told the Irish Mail on Sunday. ‘We look at Germany, America with slavery, other regimes that had dark histories. We teach those
‘The module has reached over 200 students so far’
but we don’t teach our own dark history. I think it’s time we did.
‘We look at the Famine, the [1916] Rising and everything else about the State, but we don’t look at this history at all, and yet it went on until 1998. We took it over from the British and we refined it and developed it, and we don’t teach it.’
The module, one of several similar ones being trialled by different groups around the country, has reached over 200 students so far, and concludes with a visit from a ‘person with lived experience’.
‘They talk to the students to bring it home that this is not a dead history. Living people are still experiencing the trauma of what the Irish State, in collaboration with religious orders, put their own citizens through.’
As well as providing future generations with ‘a grounding in what Ireland is’, Ms Harney said adding this ‘dark history’ to the curriculum would ‘fulfil the request of survivors’.
She was one of a subcommittee of survivors who put the notion forward in 2018’s Mother and Baby Home Collaborative Forum, set up by then Minister for Children Katherine Zappone.
‘The longest legacy we can give people, and the best memorialisation so that survivors are not forgotten again, is through education,’ she said. Sarah-Anne Buckley, a historian and lecturer at NUI Galway who also spoke at the recent event in the university, said the Transition Year modules should be mainstreamed and the topic put on the curriculum.
‘I would argue it also needs to be on the Junior Cert History curriculum. You can no longer teach the history of modern Ireland without including the history and experiences of those directly affected by these institutions.’
Dr Buckley said gender had to be considered ‘because that was a big factor, and also the treatment of poverty which was also a factor’.
‘There’s a narrative there that can be told [in History classes] for the 19th Century, how these institutions were established, who ran them, the thousands of people affected by them, what the treatment was and the role the State played in not always facilitating discussions around the abuse,’ Dr Buckley said.
She added that the main takeaway from the day of talks and workshops was ‘that we are all going to be collectively approaching [Education] Minister Norma Foley and all the many departments... to urge that this is progressed.’