Let’s say it’s 1952, or 1963, or 1945. You’re a 15-year-old girl, growing up in rural Ireland. Control of your life, that of your parents, neighbors, community; the parents, neighbors, community in the next town over; and indeed in every hamlet and city in Ireland is ceded in its entirety to the Catholic Church. You are a cog in the wheel of a society that lives by uncompromising strictures. Shame is quickly earned and hard to erase, guilt is a bedrock value, life is confined to a narrow set of principles, the parish priest is God, or nearly so. Of the many outcomes of this control, you are, at 15, an innocent, a naïf. You are ignorant about your body and how it functions. The taboo about such things is so deeply ingrained, the very concept so very dirty, that this society in which you live finds the matter literally unspeakable. Certainly your mother has never uttered a word to you. Maybe you are coming home from school one day, and a neighborhood man calls to you, lures you, does things you don’t understand. Maybe you have a boyfriend, and you think what he’s doing is just part of kissing you. Maybe there’s a family member you can’t get away from. When your belly starts to grow, you are terrified. Maybe you think you have a growth. Maybe you know instinctively that this has to be an outcome of that. In any event, you instantly feel in the wrong, living as you do in a society where anything out of the ordinary is reason for disdain. You wait, hide it with loose clothing, pray it will go away. But it doesn’t. It gets bigger. You tell your mother. Or maybe she notices, or a teacher does, or the priest does. Your mother, fearful of community shame, may call you “a prostitute and a whore.” Perhaps she says you “bring shame to the family,” that “nobody will want you now.” Maybe you have parents who believe you had been raped by a neighbor and want to care for you at home, but the parish priest says, oh no. She will bring shame on the community. Oh, no, you parents could be excommunicated. Or maybe your parents believe you, but they tell no one because the rapist is a successful neighborhood farmer and they, the parents, would be “ostracized in the community.” Police are never called, ever. Boyfriends disappear. Men, if told at all, disavow. The shame and guilt lies entirely with you and your family. And still you are naïve.

Having never left home before now, you are sent away at 15, by yourself, bewildered, scared, still not entirely sure what is happening to you except that it is bad, you are bad. The place to which you are sent is run by the nuns. The shame you felt at home takes on a new, if possible more sinister, form. Maybe you are crying when you arrive, and are punched in the back by a nun who tells you to get used to being there “until you get rid of that child.” Maybe you make a friend, maybe you don’t, someone who can help you process being called by the nuns “sinner,” “dirt, “Satan’s spawn.” You probably spend the rest of your pregnancy in physical labor. Maybe you are scrubbing floors right up until you give birth and then are back at it two or three days later. It could be that a passing nun deliberately upends your dirty bucket and orders you to “clean it again.” Maybe you are sent to the nursery to change unending nappies and tend to screaming babies. You live in a home meant for 40 pregnant females, but when you arrive more than 100 are living there in cramped and unhealthy conditions. Still, for all of it, perhaps you are one of the girls who find this place a haven from the groping hands of a father or grandfather, the cold stares of a mother who has no love in her heart.

Maybe you came to the home not only ignorant about how you got pregnant, but also how this baby gets out of your body. Maybe you are like many others who think it comes out of your naval, maybe through your nose, or out of your back. The nuns tell you nothing. So when the water gushes down your legs or the pain doubles you over, it comes as a shock. You may have been one of many girls who were thrown into a room, alone, with nothing but a mattress on the floor. There you writhe in pain. You are given no medication, no doctor comes to aid in delivery. The nuns, when they come to briefly check on you during labor, may say, “you had your fun, this is payment.” Or maybe, “you tasted the sweet, now taste the sour.” Some fun, you think, some sweetness.

After your baby is born, you may be among those who never see him or her again. Maybe you see the child for a day or two but then it is whisked away. You are dazed, you are tired, you have milk flowing from breasts and what is that about? The nuns are saying you are not fit to be a mother. You sign papers shoved under your nose. Maybe you can’t read those papers or maybe you can, but you are 15 and you are drained and you are told by an adult to sign, sign. You are perhaps among most who just acquiesce. Maybe you are one of those who deny signing anything, yet years later see your “signature” on those adoption papers. If you are lucky, and the fiction created by your parents about boarding school or a sister in the UK holds, you can go back home. Maybe you stay with the nuns, no longer welcomed to be part of your family. You keep your shame throughout your life, tell no husband if you have one, no friend. Maybe you get on with your life, but maybe you are destroyed, an empty psychological hulk.  

***

Earlier this month, the country’s Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes released its 3,000-page report, chronicling the conditions at 18 institutions for unmarried pregnant females between the years 1922 and 1998. During that time, about 56,000 females and 57,000 children were processed at these homes. The commission was formed five years ago, following the release of painstaking research undertaken by an historian near the town of Tuam, County Galway, where a home operated from 1925 to 1961. She documented that 796 children, mostly infants, were buried in an unmarked graveyard on the grounds – perhaps several hundred of them in what had been a sewage tank. That revelation started at first a trickle and then a landslide of first-person accounts from women and their children about life inside these “homes.” What emerged is a picture of collusion between a government and a church that worked to both their advantages — at the expense of the vulnerable women and girls who came there and the children born there. The government, sometimes in Dublin and sometimes the county council, wanted to get rid of this problem and were willing to pay to do it. One of several orders of nuns was glad to take the money intended for the female’s care during pregnancy, in many instances also making the girl undertake back-breaking work as well.

I wish with all my heart that even one word of what I wrote earlier in this blog was hyperbolic. It is not. I read a 196-page report by the commission’s Confidential Committee, which extrapolated the testimony of 550 people into a narrative. To be honest, I had to walk away from that report several times, filled to the brim as I was with sadness, anger and horror. I read countless newspaper articles. I listened to the radio, particularly to the afternoon show of one popular presenter here who continues to spend part of every program talking with survivors.  What I wrote is a compilation of what I heard and read. Quotes are verbatim from the report. I do not think I went far enough; I do not think my writing skills are up to the task, frankly. I can not imagine that Ireland. Even though, raised a Catholic, I encountered some twisted nuns during my American childhood, I can not wrap my head around the unbridled cruelty of these Irish monsters. Female monsters acting monstrously to other females, acting in collusion with an uncaring government that threw those teenagers and young women away, and paid to do so. Governments headed by men, families headed by men, a perverse church system run by men, youth picking up on their father’s vibe – Irish males from emboldened teenagers to pedophiles to sick adult men and incestuous rapists who got a free pass in a misogynistic society. The whole thing was rotten, from the inside out. And a terrified 15-year-old girl who thought babies came out of a naval was among the victims.

As I digest all of this, I have thought more than once about the blog I wrote last fall concerning my visit to the home parish of my ancestors in Northern Ireland. I spoke then about being descended from a minority clan, about Catholics there who were put down and vilified and make to feel like second-class citizens by a Protestant elite. It is instructive to consider the oppressed in the North were, just a stone’s throw away across the border, the oppressors in the Republic. Perverse human nature exposed.

It seems as if Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin appreciates the full scale of his predecessors’ actions in the halls of government. Although he is a politician and as such pretty much had to act horrified, I choose to believe he was coming from a place of contrition for the past.  You be the judge:

“We embraced a perverse religious morality and control, judgementalism and moral certainty, but shunned our daughters. We honored piety, but failed to show even basic kindness to those who needed it most. We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy, and young mothers and their sons and daughters were forced to pay a terrible price for that dysfunction. To confront the dark and shameful reality which is detailed in this report, we must acknowledge it as part of our national history.

“And for the women and children who were treated so cruelly, we must do what we can to show our deep remorse, understanding and support. And so on behalf of the government, the state and its citizens, I apologize… In apologizing, I want to emphasize that each of you were in an institution because of the wrong of others. Each of you is blameless, each of you did nothing wrong and has nothing to be ashamed of. Each of you deserved so much better.”

And yet mothers and their children said the report didn’t go far enough, that the bulk of it was largely statistical (it was), that it didn’t adequately convey the horror, that the Catholic church was not brought to account. They point to a quote in the executive summary as indicative of their frustration: “There is no evidence that women were forced to enter mother and baby homes by the church or State authorities. Most women had no alternative.” Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole says of these two sentences, “What does that mean? If you have no alternative but to do something, are you not ‘forced’ to do it?” In the days after the report was published, Archbishop Eamon Martin “unreservedly” apologized to survivors. One of the orders of nuns that ran a home, the Bon Secours, also was contrite. “We did not live up to our Christianity. We failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children. We failed to offer them the compassion that they so badly needed.” It appears the government is poised to move quickly on two pieces of legislation: one to open up all records, including adoption records, to children and mothers; and secondly, to create a fund to compensate the victims. In this, they call on the Church to be their partners, and the Bon Secours, for one, has said they will participate.

So maybe, slowly, now that it has been exposed to air, this gaping wound can begin to heal. I hope so. For the soul of my new adopted country, I hope so.

If you would like to read the report, visit https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/d4b3d-final-report-of-the-commission-of-investigation-into-mother-and-baby-homes/.