Alive at the time

mariaalice

I often wonder what the generation who were around at the time make of the report in to the Laundries.

I was born in the very early 1960s, so grew up in the 1960s and 1970s..my parents were great and more or less let us do what we wanted, I do remember people who though their granny was their mother and it turned out one of their sister was their mother or other people who took in "unmarried" mothers for a few months before they had the baby which would have been adopted, this was in the 1970s.

My mother who grew up in the 1930s often tried to explain how poor people were then.... we though some of her stories were hilarious and she often tried to make us understand how lucky we were, but thinking of some of her stories now they are horrifying, for example she grew up on farm so they got new boot each winter but went barefoot in the summer however some people were so poor couldn't afford shoes and went barefoot all the time ( can you imagine going to school bare foot in the winter in Ireland:eek: ) or the fact that even though they had hens they only got an egg now and then because the eggs had to be sold to pay the rates or her stories of poor people coming out to ask for free skim milk when they were on the way home from the creamery.

Its very hard for us now to conceptualise what life was like then and why people made the choices they made.