Mother and Baby Homes

dereko1969 said:
But the shame and scorn was set by the Roman Catholic church for the most part with some support from the Church of Ireland.
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No doubt they had a lot of influence, but to give them sole credit suggests the entire population were sheep incapable of independent though. People have judged each other against societal norms since long before the formation of the RC church.
 
Leo said:
No doubt they had a lot of influence, but to give them sole credit suggests the entire population were sheep incapable of independent though. People have judged each other against societal norms since long before the formation of the RC church.
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We were sheep. How else could we be described?
Our deeply held religious beliefs were grounded in nothing more than fear and ignorance. I don't think too many of us were reading Thomas Aquinas, St. Therese of Lisieux or St. John the Mystic. We were just tugging the forelock to whatever the local Paris Priest said.
 
The way the population numbers were kept down after the Famine was a combination of emigration and at home, few marriages & late marriages i.e. when the eldest son inherited the farm. This left a lot of bachelors and spinsters, and people in the prime of their life without sexual outlets.
I think this had something to do with the extent of church and societal control over such matters, and the numbers involved in these 'scandals'.
Such power inevitably leads to abuse of it and cover-ups.
Pre-Famine the Church here had a much more relaxed attitude to such issues.

* The book was Hair of the Dog by Richard Stivers, it was an attempt to explain Irish drinking habits as a result of social bonding by these bachelors and the persistence of the 'rounds' system in Ireland
 
We've certainly come a long way. 36% of births in Ireland today are outside marriage (I hate wedlock). Impossible to hide 36% of the population.
 
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These homes owe their existence firstly to Victorian morality and really were just carried on from the poor houses and workhouses of the time. Did they exist because of the Church which perhaps allowed the state to abdicate it's responsibilities or did the Church step in when the state failed to do so is a discussion that will never be answered, Perhaps it is both. We're not unique in Ireland in having these homes, most Anglo countries had similar and I'd imagine they existed elsewhere also.

There is also the fact that a lot of the nuns and priests in question never really had a vocation but were forced into it because Mother wanted a priest or nun in the family (Mother's vocation's) and these people were totally out of their depth. It's not excusing the behaviour of many of them but they were the wrong people in the wrong place who got a bit of power and abused it and were allowed to do so by their superiors and the state with no consequences for them. Perhaps some of them thought they were doing the right thing by letting a child be raised by a middle class married couple as opposed to being raised by a single mother with no state support? It still doesn't mean they were right in their thinking but I can only assume that was their logic.

What I find fascinating in this is why some mothers ended up in the homes and other's didn't?. In my case, both my grannies were pregnant when they got married (incidentally, an indicator that even back then, young people were only paying lip service to the church's moral teaching). Certainly some woman were the victims of rape, incest or abuse of a vulnerable person. I do wonder how many of the fathers were married men.? I also wonder how much of it was a social thing, the son of the bank manager not being allowed by his parents to marry the daughter of a farm labourer for example?.

What I cannot understand (as the father or 2 girls myself) why some parents turned their back on their daughters and dumped them in these homes. Everybody in the parish knew where they were so it's not as if the "shame" was hidden. I grew up in the country and can tell you now what families in the parish had daughters in Bessbourough or an industrial school or "had gone to England". If one good thing has come from the report it calls out this behaviour by the parents of the woman but it does reinforce the fact that they were abandoned by society, the state, their Church and their own families. A sad and bad period but at least it is out in the open.

I do wonder in 50 years time what society will think of some of our current behaviour around things like homelessness . Will there be a report on the impact on all the kids we as a society are being left raised in hotels and B&B's for example?
 

If you like back at my earlier post re: post Famine and the effect of fewer and later weddings, there were a lot of younger sons and unmarried daughters about, with few prospects of being able to establish their own households unless they emigrated. The priesthood and convent was an outlet for them.
 
A further communication from me to the Three Unwise Men and Sir Roderic the Gormless, emailed today:

"I wrote to you previously about the above matter. I await any meaningful response. An auto-reply from your email server is not a meaningful response. Multiple replies are even more meaningless. While awaiting your PR to compose a suitable "party-line" reply, I would like to draw the following to your attention:
  1. This is the first large (2,865 A4 pages) document I’ve ever accessed where the table of contents or “Contents” in the language of the Report, contains no page numbers. In hard-copy documents this is a given, a standard to ease reading, navigation, and referencing. Any piece of software capable of producing a document of any size has this facility. Why wasn’t it used? Why, given the presence of an IT consultant, an IT manager, and staff in the Commission membership, is this basic navigation facility missing?
  2. In 1980, 40 years ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, began the development of the hypertext language that lead him to invent the World Wide Web by using addresses embedded in the text to lead to documents located on a network. This same capability exists today in facilitating the navigation of large documents by embedding hypertext links to passages or content with the document itself. The PDF format in which the Report is presented supports this form of internal or external navigation or linking. It has been used to link to sites and resources outside the Report, why was it not used for intra-document navigation?
  3. The page-numbering scheme I mention above has been ignored by the Commission. Each new major section of the Report begins its own numbering at “1” again so there are no unique numbers for any page in the Report. Even if the sections of the Report were produced as standalone publications, once they are being consolidated into a single document, the embedded numbering scheme can be dispensed with, giving each page in the final Report its own unique number. What did the Commission fail to do this?
  4. Each paragraph in each section has been allocated a sequential number, but the paragraph numbers are not prefixed by the section number, e.g 1.48, a unique ordered pair, referring to paragraph 48 in section 1. Paragraph numbers repeat across sections making navigation or searching the Report an unnecessarily onerous task. Why did the Commission find this necessary as a numbering scheme?
  5. In the index to the Report, the unique numbering scheme referred to above is used to refer to items in the body of the Report. However, as paragraphs within the body of the Report are not numbered this way, the index is next to useless and appears to be used just to fluff out the Report. Why did the Commission fail to prevent this major careless oversight in the published report?
  6. Given that the Report sat for some 3 months gathering dust, did no-one think to make the content more accessible and readable for the most important audience of all, the survivors and their families? Why not?
Given access to the sources used to compile this Report, I, using my skills for free could produce a very useful and user-friendly version of the Report in a matter of days, provided you deduct all the costs and all the payments made to the Commission members, staff and contractors in producing this final Report and make it available as part of the compensation fund you owe the survivors.

I wonder too about the version of the report available to the public and cannot help but speculate that another version of the report exists containing the ease-of-use facilities listed above. Was the version of the Report available to me from the government website deliberately down-graded to make it difficult for me and others to navigate and digest?

Please pass on my comments to the Commission members and staff. Shame on you all."
 
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An elderly relative once said to me "I don't know back then if we went to mass to worship God or the Priest"?

There was an element (in fairness) of the priest being the only educated person in the parish in rural Ireland, probably until O'Malley brought in free secondry education. If I look at that generation where I grew up, I can't actually think of anyone who got a 3rd level education, it was virtually unheard of. Some priests did great things via the co-op movement, Muintir na Tire etc but some were just downright clowns and worse, were led by clowns. The ability to be able to push back on them just wasn't there.
 
The Social Democrats are bringing a motion to the Dail on Wednesday to #ExtendTheCommission - survivors need more time to get answers as to how and why their data was deleted and why the report doesn't reflect their testimony #MotherAndBabyHomes

Their testimony, their life stories, was treated abominably by the State and their servants and agents, including the Commission members and employees.

I'm not a Soc Dem but as Catherine Cooney said, either we believe the survivors or we don't. If we don't, why launch the expensive Commission? Is it just to be another expensive job for the boys and girls with no worthwhile outcome, like other inquiries, still "running" 40/50 years later?
 
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