"Significant" numbers of babies remains actually found

Grayson wrote: »

Because the British weren't Irish. And the British were proddy's. The definition of being Irish included being catholic.

Not sure about that tbh. You'd a protestant first president and plenty of protestants in the early days of republicanism and nationalism. There was an attempt to turn it into a catholic national identity but I think it ultimately and thankfully failed.

Also the protestant community had the Bethany Home scandal which was largely not addressed properly by the inquiries. The culture was national. Anyone who didn't fit into a narrow model of what was acceptable was thrown into an institution or if they had the ability and the means, emigrated.

Ireland had a lot of crazy and horrific stuff going on right up until the almost the 1990s.

You'd a highly conservative and fairly cowardly state that basically just allowed the religious organisations to get on with whatever they wanted while bending over backwards to facilitate and give them funding without any questions asked.

The state itself was all very focused on things like the ESB, rolling out telecoms, airports, semi state companies etc etc but left the social side of Ireland - health, welfare and education in the hands of the religious and wouldn't even countenance taking these roles directly in hand. All the state was focused on tended to be building national identity.

Third level education here became much more state orientated and liberal much earlier but for some reason everything else remained locked into that weird model of heavily state funded non profits.

It's also the reason why Ireland to this day has chaos in healthcare - umpteen "voluntary" agencies providing services from acute hospitals to long term care and rehabilitation services. We've seen massive scandals in terms of finances and also care provision.

It's all about an organisational culture of no accountability and a notion that they're alm houses doling out chairty to the poor when in reality, there providing paid for state services.

We've only picked at the surface of the kind of abuse that went on here. The institutionalising of an inexplicably large % of the population for example is still only barely being looked at in any serious way.

What was going on here wasn't really much different to the horrors of institutionalisation in parts of eastern Europe, we just tend to pretend it had nothing to do with the state which portrays itself as a passive operator that had no that anything strange was happening and seems to claim to have no involvement, despite committing people to these places using the legal system.

We've also got a legacy of an underclass who were largely the products of those institutions and we're often found basically cowering in very poor employment having fled abroad, usually to England as they aren't likely to have had the means to go to the USA or Australia etc.

They're usually the very screwed up, elderly Irish that you still encounter in England who worked in low paid and often manual labour etc etc. We seriously should be looking after their needs now in a much bigger way and not just financially. Many of them were single mothers who experienced forced adoptions, men who went through brutality in institutional care - they were basically flung out of their own society, isolated and ended up as a generation or two who were often the stereotypical undereducated Irish in England who just basically existed and were often very isolated, often single and sometimes very broken people.

We still aren't really dealing with the reality of what happened here. It was an extremely bad period of history.

They also have a history of creating poverty industries. If your raison d'etre is ministering to the poor and you've huge power over these people and you've an agenda of evangelising and pushing a particular belief system, of course you'll fight tooth and nail against the development of a social welfare system or provision of open and fair socially delivered services.

Actually improving the lot of the population would empower people, remove your influence, remove dependency on your services and undermine your ability to influence society's shape.

That's precisely why these institutions have always politically opposed decent state services. They basically killed Irish attempts at a public health system at birth by absolutely pillorying Noel Brownes Mother and Child Scheme.

It's never been in the Churches' interest to have the state provide services. We are still having this debate in education to this day in Ireland.

Graces7 wrote: »

No they were not. Priests more so as they had to be able to study but not rank and file Sisters.. they came from the back streets.

Yet again, that is not true. I'm sure you have known as many religious in Ireland as I have. None, in my experience were from 'the back streets'. Middle class, business people, farmers and shopkeepers at best.

Graces7 wrote: »

Didn't a lot of girls from the Homes take Orders? Poor things raised others as they had been raised, they knew no different.

No. If they were illegitimate or "sinners" there were eventually special "penitent" orders set up

The Anglicans were ahead of RC in that .

Also many orders had a two tier system. Claustral Sisters who were the leaders, and Lay who were the workers. While the top layer were well educated, the lower ranks were domestics etc. While the leaders were from better homes the lower indeed came from the back streets. Scrubbing floors and menial work . The Srs and priests within livng memory woudl visit every house in the parish for money and to ask which of their children were they giving to God.

I've heard from a relative who was a teacher that you had "lady nuns" and "worker nuns" who were often salt-of-the-earth types who were really looked down upon and quite downtrodden doing all heavy chores and cleaning duties while the "ladies" basically did a bit of teaching, some praying and went on a lot of trips to congregations in Italy, Spain, France, Canada etc etc

Also many of them were placed in rough schools due to internal politics and were very bitter about it, taking it out on students.

You're taking about an almost unreformed, medieval social structure so of course it has an internal class system and a rigid hierarchy.

You also had a situation where the more violent brothers and nuns got their tempers out on relatively poor students. While the children of influential politicians, professionals, lawyers etc etc all went to posher schools where you'd nuns, brothers and priests who were more in the 1950s Hollywood nun model. Somewhere between Mary Poppins and Professor McGonnagall.

The result is that often the movers and shakers of society think the religious orders were lovely people who did nothing but talk about philosophy in between making scones while the working class Irish had to deal with Sister Sledge and Brother Brutus.

Corben Dallas wrote:

If they're 70/80? ...tough, round them up. Lot of these vindictive evil Women have to be hauled in front of a court and do time.

Fully agree, if former concentration guards can be prosecuted no reason why members of the clergy here can't be. It just takes the will.

Deleted User wrote:

What exactly is the fuss about? the high death rate of the infants or the fact that they didn't have proper burials?

Did you take the time to read the cause of the deaths? Food has always existed yet children died of malnutrition, antibiotics existed since 1911 yet children died of infections one child's death being attributed to an ear infection. As for the fuss placing the bodies of children in a disused septic tank I imagine would have caused as much outrage in the 50/60's as it does now. I'm sure of course apologists for the church and the religious orders will seek to protray Tuam as no big deal, just as you are attempting too.

infogiver wrote: »

The parents of the children sent them to the Convents and seminaries.
There's no point now in pretending that the RCC sent around a "child catcher" van or something.
Having a child or children in Holy Orders lifted the mother in particular into a higher stratosphere then the other women.
You could die happy if you had reared a priest, and you could look down your nose at your sister or your neighbor who didn't.
Irish people were and continue to be almost horrifically snobbish. It used to be having a son a PP and now it's having all the kids at Uni.
It's only if you live somewhere other then Ireland that you realise this

My cousin was born to an unwed teenager in the early 1980s. My grandparents were very devout Catholics, my mother says her father could barely look at his grandson for the first few weeks. Their daughter was the first woman (girl really) who'd had the gall to stay living in the town after her 'bastard' was born, it was not easy for my grandparents to hold their heads up in the shop, go to Mass and so on.

Nuns did arrive at the house shortly after the child came home to try and take him, they couldn't have done it by force but they badgered my grandparents, talked about how it would be better to have the child reared by a 'decent Catholic family' and other such bollocks. A few weeks later on holiday in a different county, different nuns from the area arrived at the holiday house to have the same conversation.

Thankfully my grandparents, devout as they were and as hard as it was for them, held firm. They endured the stares and whispers and comments from their community, they held out against the manipulative guilt trip the nuns tried to lay on them and didn't send their grandson away (my aunt's input, you might notice, was totally irrelevant to the nuns, they came to talk to her father).

My grandfather after a few weeks would be seen lingering by the child's basket looking at him sadly. Eventually he started to pick him up and cuddle him. By the time he was a few months old he'd be picking him up and dancing around the kitchen, singing and happy. His human decency and natural paternal instincts, given time and because he had the strength to resist the cruel pressure from the representatives of the church, overrode the indoctrination and dogma that had been imposed on him since he was a child himself.

But if those nuns had had their way, he and my cousin would have missed out on that relationship. I'd be down a cousin, his mother a son, his siblings a brother. Those child-catching cunts, whether they took it on themselves or whether it was an official or informal protocol, heard of a young unwed mother and went to get the bastard. I think they were in a Ford car though so I guess yeah, not a childcatching van.

Deleted User wrote: »

If youre alleging that babies were deliberately murdered in Tuam, then thats certainly grounds for outrage.

But I doubt it. People forget how poor and ignorant and awful (by todays standards) Ireland was in the 1920s and 1930s.

I have a group photo of a country school taken in 1930, not too far from Tuam. The girls were dressed in ill fitting, obviously handed down clothes, maybe parcels from america, and the boys were mostly barefooted. Its very unlikely any of these would have received modern medical care and antibiotics if they were ill. Its just the way it was then. Sad but true.

The bodies found date up to the 60s.