Men and the mother and baby homes

diveout

diveout wrote: »

Maybe children were viewed differently. Look at how much parenting has changed and what we expect from parents.

Look at how many people send their kids off to boarding schools.

You can't compare boarding school with laundries and industrial schools. There is no comparison.

Henry9

NordieSteve wrote: »

I cannot for the life of me, understand how or why people would allow their sons or daughters anywhere near these places. I mean, where people really that unashamedly needing to be a part of the furniture in catholic Ireland that they would allow their children to go to these places? I can't imagine anyone would escape with their lives if they laid a finger on any of my kids let alone shipping them off to christian brother schools or Laundries.

Men and Women are responsible for this abomination of an era.

Just the usual Irish deference, kiss up, kick down.
The church had control, and everybody else tugged the forelock and went along with it.

People talk as if it was so long ago and it doesn't happen anymore.
Everybody knew at the time what was going on and the churches were still full.

There's nothing that people won't try to blame on 'society'.
Bollocks.
If you allowed your children to be put in a place like that you are an appalling person and an appalling parent.

Pat Mustard

mariaalice wrote: »

You rarely hear from the men and as it takes two to get pregnant for every mother and baby in the homes there must have been a man who got the mother pregnant.

I've heard a number of these stories, first hand.

In most cases, the fathers were not asked for their opinions, and they had little control over the situation.

The pregnant women were often reasonably young and living at home with their parents. Their parents would contact a priest upon discovering a pregnancy outside of marriage. The priest would arrange for her to go to the mother-and-child centre. In many cases, the woman's father (or both parents) would bring her to the mother-and-child centre and hand her over to the nuns. In some cases, the priest would bring her.

In the stories that I have heard, the brutality was carried out by nuns, mainly. They beat these women. They locked them up in completely dark rooms for long periods. They cut their hair short. They made them sit in tubs of cold water and scrubbed their bare skin with hard brushes. They made them kneel on broom handles. They worked them in laundries and on farms from early morning until night time. Those who ran away were usually caught by Gardai and returned to the institutions, fairly promptly. The nuns punished them severely upon their return. There was other abuse as well.

In some cases, the fathers/boyfriends managed to get some of these women out of the institutions so that the couple could get married quickly. In other cases, nothing further was heard about the fathers.

Families were assured that these institutions were the best place for their daughter to go to have her child, that those institutions were decent places run by respectable religious orders. In 1960s and 1970s Ireland (and maybe even in the 1980s), this went absolutely without question. Any contact between the families and these women was strictly controlled. The families did not know what was going on.

I know a man who carried out work in one of the laundries attached to a former mother-and-child centre. There wasn't a woman in sight in there when he visited, apart from the nuns. The women were simply removed from view. Essentially, they were made invisible to the public.

There were other players in these stories as well; Gardai, teachers, social workers, etc. In the stories that I have heard, these people were mere functionaries. They played their part, but in many cases, it seems that they didn't know about the abuses, and in any event, they had no choice.

In any of the stories that I heard, nuns are to blame for the brutality.

Last year, the government announced a compensation scheme for victims of Magdalene Laundries. However, they excluded the possibility of compensation for women who were victims of mother and child centres, even if those institutions had laundries. It simply made no sense. If people should be called to account or held accountable now, this would be a good place to start.

I don't want to derail the thread, but I reckon that if it is a matter of funding, these former institutions should be sold off to provide the funds for compensation, after the Gardai check each of those properties for bodies in unmarked graves.

diveout

Candie wrote: »

You can't compare boarding school with laundries and industrial schools. There is no comparison.

Yes I can.

Ahem. Ferns.

And a male family member of mine was molested and beaten regularly in boarding school, as were the other boys and none of them are entitled to compensation because the school was private.

And these are people who were sent their by their parents.

ivytwine

No Pants wrote: »

Don't forget that back in those days and until quite recently, in my lifetime certainly, children were taken care of by women. If a mother died, it wasn't unusual for the children to be "redistributed" amongst relatives rather than be left with the new widower.

Haven't read all the thread but just wanted to chime in and agree with this. Even now there is a bit of an 'attitude' towards a man rearing a child solo.

I spoke to a survivor of an industrial school. Her mother died, her father was a fisherman. He fought tooth and nail to keep the kids but he wasn't strong enough to fight church and state. His children were taken away.

It wasn't only Ireland- I know a family in Wales where the father had to fight very hard to keep custody of his kids after his wife died, back in the 50s.

ivytwine

pwurple wrote: »

Handy you have it all tied up there. I think it was more a horrific crossover of victorian prudishness, mixed with De Valera staunch conservativeness (who, you recall, gave the church it's 'special' place in the constitution and in the running of the state). I wonder what the country would have looked like had Michael Collins not been shot...

I honestly don't know, but did this kind of thing, industrial schools, laundries, happen in other catholic countries, like spain and portugal? Or was it just ireland? I know there were workhouses and industrial schools in the UK... It's that almost protestant attitude of atonement and working off your sins which was being enforced here.

One of my aunts was a baby from one of these homes. She never knew who her parents were, even as she was dying, her adoptive mother would not tell her, even though apparently she knew the family.

I think it was obviously both women and men who took part in this. These women had mothers and fathers, and lovers and siblings... Women were brought to these places and left there with no money for board. Forced to then work off that debt by working the laundries etc. similar to what happened to boys in the industrial schools. Undesirables were simply removed from society, hidden away. Secrets were kept, fiercely.

And it is similar, as it was noted earlier, to what happened to those with any kind of disability or mental health issue. The cork mental institution is a MASSIVE building. The longest building in europe I think? How many people must it have housed? Thousands? And for what reason were they incarcerated? No doubt we will hear many scandals from those places in years to come as well.

On St Annes in Cork... my dad and my uncle were looking up the family tree and couldn't get any further than my great-granddad. They couldn't find anything, until they found out he died in St Anne's and was buried there. After that they hit a complete brick wall. My cousin found out he had TB, but that's all we know.

Only a century ago but it is as if he never existed. I have French and British roots and I could trace the French back to Napoleon at least, and the British back to Tudor times (if I were to sit down and do it :pac:) Whereas on my Irish side (and I know a lot of records were destroyed in the Civil War, but even allowing for that) a man who lived and died just over 100 years ago is as obscure as a 12th century serf.

THAT'S how good Ireland was at covering things up.

strobe

I think people forget that fathers were victims here too. There were men who had both the girl they loved and their child taken from them. That must be horrendous to go through.

Why don't we hear from them? Id imagine in part anyway, because they'd meet blame and criticism and abuse from a lot of quarters, rather than any understanding or sympathy. The whole discussion is framed by a lot of people as "look what bad men did to women", rather than a more nuanced approach of young people of all kinds being failed by all areas of the society.

There were obviously father's that were more than a willing participant or even the prime drivers behind what happened, but its pretty clear why we don't here from them.

It's a little too convenient for certain people with certain ideological motivations to pretend that was all or even most of them though. Which could go some way to explaining why we don't here from many of the others.

jackofalltrades

The Mustard wrote: »

Those who ran away were usually caught by Gardai and returned to the institutions, fairly promptly. .

I could be wrong on this, but I can't imagine there being a law that would allow the Gardaí to return a person to one of these homes.

Am I right in assuming that they were acting outside the law?

Pat Mustard

jackofalltrades wrote: »

I could be wrong on this, but I can't imagine there being a law that would allow the Gardaí to return a person to one of these homes.

Am I right in assuming that they were acting outside the law?

I don't know much about the laws which pertained at the time, so this is mostly conjecture.

If the mother was under twenty one, I think that she would have been a minor up until the law changed (in the 1980s?). I suppose that such a minor could possibly have taken into the care of a religious order, so perhaps returning her to a particular institution may have been done legally.

That said, I don't know if many of these cases were dealt with in court by way of care proceedings over the young mothers. If there was no care order in place (or similar court order for the relevant time) and if there was no other legal mechanism for detaining them in those institutions, maybe what the Gardai did in arresting them and returning them to those institutions was not legal. I don't know what papers were signed by the parents, when they handed their daughters over to these institutions.

In any case, people didn't know their rights, and authority figures tended not to be questioned, even if they what they were doing may have been illegal.

Kav0777

Here's a link to a series of articles from the Irish Times published in 1964, about the subject:

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/no-birthright-a-study-of-the-unmarried-mother-and-her-child-1.1827186

Found it really interesting to read the perspective from the time, and also quite shocking (particularly the case study in the first article).

One of the things that struck me was that it didn't seem to be an issue of poverty, as was suggested earlier in this thread. In the articles it is suggested that rural women who were pregnant were more likely to put their children up for adoption than city (in the article in mention Dublin women) women, and that women from working class city families were more likely to keep the children than middle class families. It always seemed to be a case of "what would the neighbours think".

The author visited a large Dublin hospital "where half of the unmarried mothers came from the country " 50 babies had been born, of the which, 23 were adopted, and 19 had been "kept by the mothers, all but one of whom were Dublin girls".

Also, in one of the articles the author mentions the high praise the industrial schools receive from most of the social workers he interviewed. I found this very tragic given what was published in the Ryan report.

pwurple

Great link above... Even the language used is illuminating in how people related to children. Can you imagine the irish times of today describing an adopted child as "mixed parentage coffee-coloured" or "slow".

Galwayguy35

My mother was in a boarding school in the late 1940s, it was run by the nuns and they also took in kids who's parents could no longer look after them.

She remembered one nun catching a toddler by the hair and lifting him clean off the ground.

Another time a man who's wife died for whatever reason had to leave his kids in to be cared for by the nuns, she said he was a broken man, chances are the priests talked him into making this decision.

SpaceTime

There are lots of stories of the authorities taking kids away from widowed or single dads too.

You'd also wonder if a teen in those days got a girl 'in trouble' would he have been despatched off to some hellhole of an industrial school?

It was a pretty horrendous period of very recent history.

Society also didn't really allow teen dads to stand up and take responsibility for their kids. They'd have been taken off them and the guy probably run out of town.

While there are undoubtedly rape cases and all sorts of nasty scenarios that would have lead to unwanted pregnancy, in a land where contraception was completely illegal, you can be 100% sure most of those babies were probably fathered by perfectly nice guys who given the chance may well have been great dads.

The whole thing was often hushed up and the father may not even have been notified.

I'm glad that things finally did move on though. At the end of the day people have babies... That's part of life! Sometimes they're not planned in ideal circumstances but, again... That's life - it's not anything that someone should be massively ashamed of.

laoch na mona

SpaceTime wrote: »

o.

You'd also wonder if a teen in those days got a girl 'in trouble' would he have been despatched off to some hellhole of an industrial school?

.

according to a lad I know doing his phd on stuff related to this it appears that me were not normally punished despite many women in these homes been underage.

also it was said on the news that most of the girls had been working in domestic service at the time they became pregnant, which suggests a fair proportion of them were raped. Remember this was a time when people went into domestic service after primary school (my grand parents all did)

Seriously?

laoch na mona wrote: »

according to a lad I know doing his phd on stuff related to this it appears that me were not normally punished despite many women in these homes been underage.

If there's a phd then there's research to back it up, care to provide some to back up the claim.

laoch na mona wrote: »

also it was said on the news that most of the girls had been working in domestic service at the time they became pregnant, which suggests a fair proportion of them were raped.

I'm not sure how you can conclude that a 'fair proportion' of these women were raped. Again perhaps some proof to back up this claim.

GalwayGuy2

How many women countrywide were put into these homes?

Henry9

Funny how the standard of proof required for speculative assertions has dropped a lot lately.
Not that any of those posters would require more evidence if they disagreed with the assertion or anything.

Pawwed Rig

Henry9 wrote: »

Funny how the standard of proof required for speculative assertions has dropped a lot lately.

It hasn't really. An assertion was made. A source was requested. I am sure LNM will post a source in due course.

Henry9

Pawwed Rig wrote: »

It hasn't really. An assertion was made. A source was requested. I am sure LNM will post a source in due course.

It's not the only assertion that has been made (not just on this forum).

Pawwed Rig

Henry9 wrote: »

It's not the only assertion that has been made (not just on this forum).

Different forums have different rules. Any queries please pm me as posting on thread is off topic. Cheers

SpaceTime

In general attitudes to sexual assault in those days were pretty backwards to put it mildly though.

Nothing about the era would surprise me.

I think though we need to be a little careful not to turn it into a gender war either. Both genders were treated abysmally by institutions.

It would seem thousands of men suffered severe sexual abuse, rape and extremity sadistic violence while in 'care' too and if they reported it they got nowhere either until relatively recently.

Also in a lot of cases the worst institutional abuses against women were actually carried out by nuns (who are also women).

Women definitely got a worse deal as they were directly caught up in the establishment's obsession with reproduction and wanting to keep them pregnant and in the kitchen at all times.

To me it looks like a horrible attempt at both social engineering and 'social cleansing' where anyone causing any degree of upsetting the ultra conservative social order was locked away or strongly coerced into exile.

There's a very strong overtone of classism or even a caste society to it too as if you were poor, you got the worst deal by a long shot.

Our economy collapsed and we sunk into deep conservatism. I think an awful lot of our best and brightest most liberal and entrepreneurial emigrated as the country was just so repressive and oppressive.

I'm also not convinced that your average Irish person was ever really that big a fan of the kind of puritanical regime that emerged here. There minute the oppressive establishment lost power, society became very much more open and liberal. There are almost exact parallels in Spain too after Franco disappeared.

That era definitely needs to be understood and lessons learnt from it.

There was a lot of very bad damage done to a whole load of Irish people. It needs to be absolutely never, ever repeated and it needs to be understood by the current generations much like the way Germans understand how bad their recent history was.

laoch na mona

Seriously? wrote: »

If there's a phd then there's research to back it up, care to provide some to back up the claim.


I'm not sure how you can conclude that a 'fair proportion' of these women were raped. Again perhaps some proof to back up this claim.

i haven't seen any of his research, we were talking about it and he said thats what it appears based on the documents he has looked at

if they were under the age of consent then they were raped, also there has to be questions asked as to why so many women working in domestic service ended up in these place's, considering domestic servants were often teenagers the logical conclusion is that many were raped.

unless girls working in domestic service had a higher sex drive than others I see no other way to explain away the correlation between working in domestic service and ending up in one of these homes then that this was how the state dealt with rape

Maguined

laoch na mona wrote: »

i haven't seen any of his research, we were talking about it and he said thats what it appears based on the documents he has looked at

if they were under the age of consent then they were raped, also there has to be questions asked as to why so many women working in domestic service ended up in these place's, considering domestic servants were often teenagers the logical conclusion is that many were raped.

unless girls working in domestic service had a higher sex drive than others I see no other way to explain away the correlation between working in domestic service and ending up in one of these homes then that this was how the state dealt with rape

What if the father was also under the age of consent? Was he then also raped? Would working in domestic services not have a higher frequency of interaction with men compared to other industries increasing the chance of sexual relations?

Pawwed Rig

laoch na mona wrote: »

according to a lad I know doing his phd on stuff related to this it appears that me were not normally punished despite many women in these homes been underage.

also it was said on the news that most of the girls had been working in domestic service at the time they became pregnant, which suggests a fair proportion of them were raped. Remember this was a time when people went into domestic service after primary school (my grand parents all did)

Mod note - if you are going to make claims such as this then a relevant source should be posted. Something your mate told you or your own conclusions with no evidence are not a credible argument. pm if any clarification needed.

laoch na mona

Maguined wrote: »

What if the father was also under the age of consent? Was he then also raped? Would working in domestic services not have a higher frequency of interaction with men compared to other industries increasing the chance of sexual relations?

obviously if a boy is underage it is rape as I have often said I don't get this man v women idea people have.

that could be part of it but as I said many domestic servants were only teenages so were not able to give consent

i've no link but in the letters to the editor in the irish times a week or two back there was a letter from a women who studied for a state exam in the home and again someone speaking on either rte or tv3 mentioned the fact these girls were underage

ancapailldorcha

The Guardian has weighed in as well:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jun/20/ireland-childprotection

Maguined

laoch na mona wrote: »

obviously if a boy is underage it is rape as I have often said I don't get this man v women idea people have.

that could be part of it but as I said many domestic servants were only teenages so were not able to give consent

You don't know the details but you feel strongly enough to assume that a "fair proportion" of the women were raped. You assume because a higher proportion of women worked in domestic services it means the pregnancy was caused by rape, you assume the father was automatically older than the mother so it is rape. You assume not that this meant some of these cases were rape but that a "fair proportion" of them are rape.

Why is it without any evidence your instinct is to automatically assume a fair proportion were rape?

iptba

laoch na mona wrote: »

I don't get this man v women idea people have.

You have expressed clear "man vs women" opinions of your own e.g. http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=86159926. All your posts I recall reading seem to come from a similar perspective to that post so I find your comment odd.