Opinion

Claire Simpson: For mother and baby home survivors, apologies are not enough

The memorial to 222 children from the Bethany Mother and Child Home, at Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin. Picture by Brian Lawless, Press Association
The memorial to 222 children from the Bethany Mother and Child Home, at Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin. Picture by Brian Lawless, Press Association The memorial to 222 children from the Bethany Mother and Child Home, at Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin. Picture by Brian Lawless, Press Association

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” US novelist William Faulkner’s famous lines could have been written about our troubled history.

For the women who were sent to mother and baby homes across Ireland, and the children who were born in them, the past can never really die. One woman told me that she thought she had come to terms with her experience, only for a report published last week to bring it all back.

The report into mother and baby homes in the Republic confirmed what we already knew - that Ireland’s dysfunctional and frankly bizarre attitude to sexuality, unmarried mothers, and women in general, had irreparably damaged many women and cost the lives of 9,000 babies. Women who had children outside of marriage carried a stigma that was "almost impossible to shake”, the report found.

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Yet for many survivors the report did not go far enough.

Women were not forced to accept their children’s adoption, the Commission of Investigation found, even though the vast majority of mothers were given little other option. And as children’s minister Roderic O’Gorman pointed out, many survivors were “abandoned by their families” and pressurised by “local authority figures like clergy or doctors”. Many women were encouraged to believe that it would be better for their children if they gave them up.

Women were abused, the commission found, but said this abuse was emotional, not physical or sexual.

Yet survivors have highlighted a section of the report which found that 13 separate vaccine trials were carried out on children born in several of the homes, without their birth mothers’ consent.

The trials themselves were illegal and unethical, even given the standards of the time, and breached the Nuremberg Code - established after Nazi doctors were tried for conducting human experiments in concentration camps.

The commission found that there was "no evidence of injury to the children involved as a result of the vaccines”. But several survivors have already questioned this, saying they were unaware they had even been involved in trials as children and had received no follow-up care.

Claire Simpson
Claire Simpson Claire Simpson

The commission’s definition of abuse is, for some survivors, difficult to comprehend.

Several women I’ve spoken to over the years have talked of experiencing deep shame which they have carried through their lives. Some people who were born in the homes have never told their families, so overwhelming is their feeling that they did something wrong.

Archbishop Eamon Martin was right to offer an unreserved apology for the Church's involvement in a culture which "frequently stigmatised, judged and rejected" people.

And his acceptance that the Church needs to contribute to a compensation scheme for victims is also to be welcomed.

But his suggestion that the Church was expected to intervene “when the rest of society had basically banished these mothers” is not a true reflection of Ireland in the 20th century.

For decades, there was no separation between the Church and wider society, indeed, no separation between Church and state. The Church was the state and the state was the Church. “Oh Ireland my first and only love/Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove,” as James Joyce so memorably put it.

Harsher criticism came from parish clergy.

At a Mass in Dublin over the weekend, Fr Gerry Clarke put it best when he said: “I just wonder myself how a Catholic country seemed to go so far away from what’s really at the heart of the gospel.”

Church of Ireland Canon Patrick Comerford, the priest-in-charge of the Rathkeale Group of parishes in Co Limerick, criticised his own Church’s role in the Bethany home in Dublin.

He also hit out at a continued “obsessive and distorted attitude” to sexuality, including towards same-sex couples.

For all the huge changes Irish society has seen since the 1990s, we remain a socially conservative country. Having a child outside of marriage is still frowned upon; homophobia and transphobia are still rife, and our attitude towards sexuality in general remains deeply backward.

The treatment of thousands of Irish women and children should be a source of shame for us all. But those who were directly responsible need to be held to account, for the sake of all survivors. Contrition is an act which often needs to be repeated several times. Apologies, no matter how heartfelt, don’t go far enough.