Ireland

Analysis: Shame over mother and baby homes lies with Catholic Church

Taoiseach Michéal Martin arrives for a live video call with survivors and stakeholders at Government Buildings in Dublin after the publication of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.
Taoiseach Michéal Martin arrives for a live video call with survivors and stakeholders at Government Buildings in Dublin after the publication of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. Taoiseach Michéal Martin arrives for a live video call with survivors and stakeholders at Government Buildings in Dublin after the publication of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.

THE shame for the appalling neglect of women and children in Ireland’s mother and baby homes lies squarely with the Catholic Church, who not only owned the homes but created a society where single mothers were deemed sinners to be locked away.

The long awaited report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes investigated practices at 14 mother-and-baby homes and four county homes following a five year investigation.

The report found Ireland locked away more single mothers than any other country in the world.

The average mortality rate for babies born in the cold industrial style institutions was 15 per cent.

However, in the 1940s only 40 per cent of the children born there lived to see their first birthday.

The report also found that as well as victims of rape, some women had mental health problems, while some had an intellectual disability.

The men who abused these vulnerable women were never held to account. Their lives carried on as normal while their victims were instead punished for their crimes.

The greatest number of admissions was in the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when the rest of the western world was already experiencing the second wave of feminism, with the thriving women’s liberation movement for equal legal and social rights.

Ireland was still treating unmarried women like a contagion to be locked up in case their ‘immorality’ would somehow infect the rest of society.

Around 9,000 children died in the institutions under investigation, Irish citizens who never got to achieve their potential, because of how society viewed their mothers. They were doomed before they took their first breath by a church-controlled state which had a tight control on many aspects of society.

This important report is not some history lesson to be viewed as though it happened so long ago it no longer has relevance. The report’s scope was from 1922 until 1998 with the last home closing its doors just 23 years ago.

Those still alive who had their babies taken from them and those now adults who were born in such cold and loveless conditions, deserve not just an apology but redress for the pain inflicted on them in the name of morality by a patriarchal and unforgiving society.