Tthe Irish state has for the past few years demanded its fair share of apologies. In 1999, the then language seeker Bertie Ahern apologized to the victims of abuse by religious state institutions. Ten years and a report on institutional abuse later, his successor, Brian Cowen, apologizes again.
In 2013, a visibly emotional Enda Kenny beat his chest over the horrors of the laundries in Magdalene, where thousands of women were locked up and abused. In 2019, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, pulled the state bag and ash twice, first for the sexual abuse of children in day schools and then for the lies told to more than 1,000 women in a cervical screening scandal.
Two weeks ago, it was Michale Martin’s turn, and this time he apologized to the thousands of women and children who went through 14 mother and baby homes and four state-owned homes; their treatment the product of a ‘suffocating, oppressive and cruel female culture’.
My mother, Jane, and I were among the many who apologized for the language search. Pregnant at 19 and victimized by what Martin called ‘the profound failure of empathy, understanding and basic humanity over a very long period of time’, Jane appeared at the doors of St. John’s in January 1968. Patrick’s mother and baby house arrived in Dublin, signed the largest house in the country and signed a paper in which she stated that she wanted to place her unborn baby for adoption.
Four months later I was born; two days later Jane changed her mind and said she wanted to keep me. Too late, they said, you signed the papers and that was it. She stayed another three months but had no meaningful contact with me. It was better that way, they said.
It was also a lie. A terrible, life-changing lie. The Adoption Act of 1952 provides that consent is not valid unless it is given after the child has reached the age of six months.
By the late summer of 1968, I was adopted. Jane would never have other children. It would take 35 years before we saw each other again, the reunion led by Jane and mediated by the adoption agency, which allowed us to exchange several months before arranging a meeting. In the months and years that followed, we struggled to reconcile each other’s stories – and to reconcile the fact that life was determined by a lie.
At her most vulnerable moment, Jane was denied the dignity of the truth. Whatever compassion she received was wrapped up in a grotesque ideology presented as a moral code, one that treats vulnerable girls as guilty of intolerable sin and deserves reproof.
In the decades before my birth, sin was further exacerbated by a perverse belief that because a girl became pregnant out of wedlock, she passed on the seed of her transgression to her offspring, turning them into a life of depravity. condemned. The progressive notes of the 1960s changed the moral mood music somewhat, but Jane and all the other girls in St Patrick’s and beyond were still sinners – to perhaps feel sorry for, but also not to be agency and choice.
For an excuse to carry weight, it must be committed never to repeat again the horrific crimes that led to five successive prime ministers standing up in Dáil Éireann and asking the country for forgiveness.
Martin spoke of a “serious generational injustice” and acknowledged that it is the “duty of a republic to be willing to hold itself accountable. To be willing to confront hard truths and parts of our history accept what is deeply uncomfortable. ”
The hard truth is that the last century of Irish history has had a continuous line of cruelty and numbness against the innocent, the poor, the marginalized and the pregnant, committed by a state and its agencies and patience by a society infected. is with a suffocating, lustful Catholicism that has not compromised.
Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people went through the industrial schools, laundries in Magdalena, and mother and baby homes, and their suffering was rationalized by a moral barbarity that treated them as wicked, flawed obstacles to the march of a new nation with many other growing pains. .
Despite all the deliberate progress that Ireland has undoubtedly made in recent decades towards greater tolerance, a streak still exists, and we are not entirely removed from the stench of what Kenny described in 2009 as the ‘cruel ruthless Ireland which has a clear quality not of mercy’.
It commits in another form in direct determination, the purgatory system that Ireland uses to process asylum seekers, mainly colored people. Founded in 1999 – three years after the last laundry in Magdalena closed and only a year after the last mother and baby house closed – this network of private, lucrative accommodation centers has more than 60,000 people through an apparatus built in 2020 is described by the Irish Commission on Human Rights and Equality as a ‘serious violation of human rights’. Even Irish President Michael D Higgins criticized the system as ‘totally unsatisfactory in every way’.
Stories of overcrowding, abuse, sexual harassment, racism and depression are constantly leaking into the public domain, as well as the fear that if someone in the system were to speak out against any hardship, it could move them to a less popular place or even their asylum claim harmed.
The fear of a discipline being applied arbitrarily echoes the constant fear experienced by those in previous institutions and laundries, and their humanity has diminished by a system designed to “different” them. It is the same with asylum seekers, whose existence behind the walls of immediate provision is often ignored or dismissed without empathy.
A common refrain around the mother and baby home report is how could we make it happen? The answer is complicated and painfully simple. Yes, it’s all about history and the church and state power structures and systemic misogyny. But it is also because we have allowed a vulnerable part of society to be dehumanized.
The country did this with the laundries of Magdalena and the industrial schools. We do this with immediate provision. The time to put it right is now: otherwise we will see in the coming years that another language search makes another excuse.
• Fionn Davenport is the editor of the Irish Travel News Network. He is currently based in Manchester