"Significant" numbers of babies remains actually found

08-03-2017 07:14PM

smurgen wrote: »

Okay.if we're not to let something similar happen again I think the church needs to be removed from all of the states operational activities.at the end of the day it's a religion and these people weren't qualified to teach or provide medical treatment in the first place.

Sigh. Way to miss the point....

So, will we also remove all teachers from teaching, because some of them abused kids back then?

How about stopping Banks operating, because they screwed up, too?

Or developers - I mean, who needs houses, right?:rolleyes:
Some of them cost the citizens of this Country very dearly - so, let's eliminate them all...

Or, we could, y'know, try and do something useful to try and prevent similar happening again.

Oh, and as to the farmers - and the rest - no, of course they didn't know anything, or have minds of their own - except for the ones who did. Inconvenient, that!

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 07:28PM

ScumLord wrote:

These people are in their 70s now aren't they. I've met the teacher who made my life in national school a living hell, constantly getting hit and kept in during breaks. But he's a doddering old fool now. He could barely tell you his own name.

I remember seeing a former concentration camp guard before the courts he was 85. Justice doesn't have an age limit.
I'm in my 40's now I still remember being beat senseless with an armchair rest at the age of 4 because I had the audacity to use my left hand to right. The Nun who did this to me is in her 60's. I would gladly see her on charges for assault.

The Rape of Lucretia · 08-03-2017 07:41PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

I remember seeing a former concentration camp guard before the courts he was 85. Justice doesn't have an age limit.

It doesnt. But similar to the point raised about slavery, there was no wide societal consensus that concentration camps were a good thing. War was waged to stop it.

nhunter100 wrote: »

I'm in my 40's now I still remember being beat senseless with an armchair rest at the age of 4 because I had the audacity to use my left hand to right. The Nun who did this to me is in her 60's. I would gladly see her on charges for assault.

But what was widely sanctioned by society is a different matter. People cannot be blamed for what was the accepted, standard, widely if not outright universally known and condoned, behaviour, after the fact, and deciding, retrospectively, that having once considered it OK, we have changed our mind and will condemn and punish it. The injustice is outrageous.

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 07:53PM

The Rape of Lucretia wrote:

It doesnt. But similar to the point raised about slavery, there was no wide societal consensus that concentration camps were a good thing. War was waged to stop it.

Actually there was a wide societal acceptance about the camps. People felt the Jews were safer inside. Also war was not waged to stop the camps. The allies for example were well aware of the existence of Auschwitz bit allowed it continue in operation . It was never bombed or even the train tracks to it. I'm not derailing this thread further.
The abuses that took place under the clergy in this country were always against the law. The 37 constitution made no distinction on the value of one's life. All were equal, yet the religious orders felt they had a right to treat the vulnerable anyway they wanted. How much proof, how many victims do you need for you to acknowledge this?

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 07:57PM

The Rape of Lucretia wrote:

But what was widely sanctioned by society is a different matter. People cannot be blamed for what was the accepted, standard, widely if not outright universally known and condoned, behaviour, after the fact, and deciding, retrospectively, that having once considered it OK, we have changed our mind and will condemn and punish it. The injustice is outrageous.

It was never ok to beat a child senseless. The evil b*stards in the church had the power and people knew that, not that they condoned the behaviour they knew the priests and nuns were untouchable.

jobbridge4life · 08-03-2017 08:11PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

It was never ok to beat a child senseless. The evil b*stards in the church had the power and people knew that, not that they condoned the behaviour they knew the priests and nuns were untouchable.

And what made them untouchable? The support and complicity of at least a significant proportion, if not an overwhelming majority, of the population.

I get the urge to focus all the blame on the Church, to want to burn down every church in the country frankly, but if we don't honestly assess what happened then we are not facing the truth, we are not properly acknowledging the suffering of the women and children and we are limiting the lesson we can learn from this horror.

Apportioning an appropriate degree of blame onto people other than the Church does not reduce or limit the blame on the Church, for surely and sorrowfully there is more than enough to go around.

Akrasia · 08-03-2017 08:11PM

ScumLord wrote: »

Plots cost money and would have pissed off the locals if all their plots were filled.

If they had to pay to Bury them they might have tried a bit harder to keep them alive....

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 08:17PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

And what made them untouchable? The support and complicity of at least a significant proportion, if not an overwhelming majority, of the population.

No actually, indoctrination a very powerful tool. The Catholic Church was and is an insidious organisation. The church placed itself as being the moral guardian of the people, a role they enforced with absolute authority to the extent that even politicians and law enforcement deferred to them.

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 08:21PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

Apportioning an appropriate degree of blame onto people other than the Church does not reduce or limit the blame on the Church, for surely and sorrowfully there is more than enough to go around.

Are you trying to apportion blame to society for the behaviour of the religious orders inside of these homes? The abuses the religious orders carried out were not done in public. The bodies of children were not disposed of in broad daylight any thoughts to why? Maybe because even they knew in their warped minds that what they were doing was wrong.

jobbridge4life · 08-03-2017 08:28PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

No actually, indoctrination a very powerful tool. The Catholic Church was and is an insidious organisation. The church placed itself as being the moral guardian of the people, a role they enforced with absolute authority to the extent that even politicians and law enforcement deferred to them.

All churches claim to be the moral guardian of the people. In this country the people decided to award the Church with an incredible amount of power. People went along with it. Some went along with it because they were 'true believers', some went along with it out of fear of judgement from their neighbours, some went along with it for even more sinister reasons. These people had agency, they had choices, denying that in an effort to place all the blame on the Church is deeply ahistorical and irresponsible.

We as a country need to face up to the fact that for a large proportion of the 20th century we were a very dark place with very dark and awful secrets. Industrial schools, county homes, the list goes on and on. Portraying the Church as some sort of almost supernatural super villlain with virtually unstoppable powers to manipulate and control the population is a gross oversimplification and reductive.

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 08:31PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

All churches claim to be the moral guardian of the people. In this country the people decided to award the Church with an incredible amount of power. People went along with it. Some went along with it because they were 'true believers', some went along with it out of fear of judgement from their neighbours, some went along with it for even more sinister reasons. These people had agency, they had choices, denying that in an effort to place all the blame on the Church is deeply ahistorical and irresponsible.

Let's not deflect by mentioning all churches. The dominant church in Ireland is the RCC. People did not award the church with power. Do you understand what indoctrination means? It started at the baptismal font.

jobbridge4life · 08-03-2017 08:32PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

Are you trying to apportion blame to society for the behaviour of the religious orders inside of these homes? The abuses the religious orders carried out were not done in public. The bodies of children were not disposed of in broad daylight any thoughts to why? Maybe because even they knew in their warped minds that what they were doing was wrong.

I'm not trying. I'm doing so, for it lies there just as it lies in the Church. To different degrees and in different ways but it is there nonetheless.

I also utterly dispute your assertion that this information or the means to discover this information was not available. There are reports from the 1930s of the appalling death rates in some of these homes. Families sent their women in, families got their women home (sometimes).

I'm reminded of the words of Traudl Junge:
'Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.'

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 08:36PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

I also utterly dispute your assertion that this information or the means to discover this information was not available. There are reports from the 1930s of the appalling death rates in some of these homes. Families sent their women in, families got their women home (sometimes).

I didn't say the information was not available, I said their abuses were not carried out in public. There was also reports about how well the homes were even though the mortality rate of the same homes were double and sometimes triple the national average.

jobbridge4life · 08-03-2017 08:41PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

I didn't say the information was not available, I said their abuses were not carried out in public. There was also reports about how well the homes were even though the mortality rate of the same homes were double and sometimes triple the national average.

So it is clear that the information was available. Individuals did know and could have known even more. They could have stopped it. They choose not to. That is on them. You don't get to say, 'the Church made me'. The Church encouraged you and you agreed.

What about all the other institutions of the time, some run directly by the State. All with the agreement and oversight of the State.

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 08:50PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

So it is clear that the information was available. Individuals did know and could have known even more. They could have stopped it. They choose not to. That is on them. You don't get to say, 'the Church made me'. The Church encouraged you and you agreed.

Again you choose to ignore the power the church held in society. Exactly how could someone stop them. When a young woman escaped from these homes often they were dragged by the Guards. Do you have any idea how deeply entwined in state affairs the church was? To the ordinary person the state and the church was the same. The clergy were able to act with impunity unless they behaved too outrageously and when they did it usually involved an overseas stint in the missions.

jackboy · 08-03-2017 09:00PM

jobbridge4life wrote: »

I'm reminded of the words of Traudl Junge:
'Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.'

This is key. What standards do we want to hold citizens to. High standards mean ignorance and passivity is no excuse. Lots af us are aware of battered women who won't report the husband. We do nothing about it. Therefore we are complicit. However, what could we do about it? Realistically, nothing.

jobbridge4life · 08-03-2017 09:01PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

Again you choose to ignore the power the church held in society. Exactly how could someone stop them. When a young woman escaped from these homes often they were dragged by the Guards. Do you have any idea how deeply entwined in state affairs the church was? To the ordinary person the state and the church was the same. The clergy were able to act with impunity unless they behaved too outrageously and when they did it usually involved an overseas stint in the missions.

I haven't remotely ignored the power of the Church, I've clearly acknowledged it and in fact place the overwhelming bulk of the blame on the Church.

You on the other hand have consistently diminished, or outright denied or ignored the agency of the 'ordinary person', in spite of the fact that people did have the information and capacity to resist and in fact many people did so but the majority of people were content enough with the situation to continue to feed their 'fallen' daughters to the Church.

It baffles me that you cannot accept that ordinary people had a role in this too and that we must acknowledge this if we are to face the full truth of that time. I just don't understand it.

jobbridge4life · 08-03-2017 09:02PM

jackboy wrote: »

This is key. What standards do we want to hold citizens to. High standards mean ignorance and passivity is no excuse. Lots af us are aware of battered women who won't report the husband. We do nothing about it. Therefore we are complicit. However, what could we do about it? Realistically, nothing.

We as a society tell ourselves that all the time. I just don't accept it anymore.

jackboy · 08-03-2017 09:09PM

jobbridge4life wrote: »

We as a society tell ourselves that all the time. I just don't accept it anymore.

Easy to say that but what are you going to do about it. Are you going to batter all your bad neighbours? I doubt it.

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 09:09PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

You on the other hand have consistently diminished, or outright denied or ignored the agency of the 'ordinary person', in spite of the fact that people did have the information and capacity to resist and in fact many people did so but the majority of people were content enough with the situation to continue to feed their 'fallen' daughters to the Church.

I haven't actually I have mentioned indoctrination several times.Indoctrination is a very powerful form of control. Anyone who spoke out against the church found themselves castigated by their own community for doing so. A price most people were unable to pay.

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 09:10PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

It baffles me that you cannot accept that ordinary people had a role in this too and that we must acknowledge this if we are to face the full truth of that time. I just don't understand it.

So what abuse did the ordinary people engage in that went on in the homes/institutions?

jobbridge4life · 08-03-2017 09:16PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

So what abuse did the ordinary people engage in that went on in the homes/institutions?

They condemned their daughters to the Magdalene Laundries, they often discriminated against unwed mothers in their private lives (my mother was evicted from her accommodation in 1987 when she became pregnant with me, she traipsed the streets of Dublin looking for accommodation she was refused again and again once people discovered she was pregnant, until eventually she was forced into the Mother and Baby home in Donnybrook in 1988... 1988!). They financially supported the Church. They voted again and again for conservative policies.

The horrors of what the Church and what Irish people supported must be unearthed and dealt with in a fulsome and holistic way if we are to truly honour the lives and suffering of the victims.

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 09:22PM

jobbridge4life wrote:

They condemned their daughters to the Magdalene Laundries, they often discriminated against unwed mothers in their private lives (my mother was evicted from her accommodation in 1987 when she became pregnant with me, she traipsed the streets of Dublin looking for accommodation she was refused again and again once people discovered she was pregnant, until eventually she was forced into the Mother and Baby home in Donnybrook in 1988... 1988!). They financially supported the Church. They voted again and again for conservative policies.

I asked you what abuse ordinary people engaged in inside of the homes/institutions. Did they physical and mentally abuse the women and children. Did they rape them, did they kill them? We do however know the clergy engaged in those activities in the homes /institutions. So answer my question please, what ordinary people carried out these activities?

08-03-2017 09:39PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

I asked you what abuse ordinary people engaged in inside of the homes/institutions. Did they physical and mentally abuse the women and children. Did they rape them, did they kill them? We do however know the clergy engaged in those activities in the homes /institutions. So answer my question please, what ordinary people carried out these activities?

What about the abuse ordinary people engaged in outside the homes?

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 09:41PM

Deleted User wrote:

What about the abuse ordinary people engaged in outside the homes?

Start a thread on that subject matter if you wish, this thread is about the mother and baby homes. Tuam to be specific.

volchitsa · 08-03-2017 09:43PM

Deleted User wrote: »

What about the abuse ordinary people engaged in outside the homes?

Sheer whataboutery.

08-03-2017 10:16PM

nhunter100 wrote: »

Start a thread on that subject matter if you wish, this thread is about the mother and baby homes. Tuam to be specific.

Indeed. And God forbid that anyone should actually want to understand what caused the whole sorry mess, when it's much easier to narrow the focus on those who were guilty of abuse in Tuam - and exonerate/ignore all the other players.

volchitsa wrote: »

Sheer whataboutery.

Aye, right!

I've just listened to a man who was fostered out of Tuam on the radio. Funny enough, he could see the connection to society as a whole. But, of course - he must have been engaging in whataboutery, too - because you say so!

Look up Highland Radio - today's Shaun Doherty show - before accusing me of whataboutery. Thanks.

please helpThank YOU · 08-03-2017 10:43PM

jobbridge4life wrote: »

They condemned their daughters to the Magdalene Laundries, they often discriminated against unwed mothers in their private lives (my mother was evicted from her accommodation in 1987 when she became pregnant with me, she traipsed the streets of Dublin looking for accommodation she was refused again and again once people discovered she was pregnant, until eventually she was forced into the Mother and Baby home in Donnybrook in 1988... 1988!). They financially supported the Church. They voted again and again for conservative policies.

The horrors of what the Church and what Irish people supported must be unearthed and dealt with in a fulsome and holistic way if we are to truly honour the lives and suffering of the victims.

Very Well Said Ireland is full of narrow minded Men and Women who love doing this stuff to people its called Power makes them feel good by make poor people small

nhunter100 · 08-03-2017 11:03PM

Deleted User wrote:

Indeed. And God forbid that anyone should actually want to understand what caused the whole sorry mess, when it's much easier to narrow the focus on those who were guilty of abuse in Tuam - and exonerate/ignore all the other players.

Were the other players in the home? I realise you are seeking to spread the blame.

maryishere · 08-03-2017 11:11PM

Graces7 wrote: »

I logged on to Catholic Answers for the first time in months. They had picked up on the "it is a hoax" news item only. Then they tried to classify the bodies as aborted baby remains

I posted the news items in three places on the forum and left. I am quite sure from past experience that they will have deleted my posts.

Actually nothing to do with Pope Francis. Poor man.. wonder if he will still come here next year....

He does not deserve an audience if he does, for what his organisation did to this country.

"Significant" numbers of babies remains actually found

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