Mary Kenny
“This inflated language is a signal of the anger. Our families did not commit ‘genocide’: they did, however, contribute to the social mores which produced Tuam and its ilk”, writes Mary Kenny
It’s understandable – and right – that most people are deeply distressed and desperately upset about the uncovering of the Tuam babies’ remains. It’s altogether a terrible story, and the grief of the mothers as well as the pitiful little lives of the infants and children can only be imagined.
It illuminates the fact that children really need families if they are to thrive. An institution – even a good institution – can never provide a young child with the care and love that requires a family setting. Children nearly always become more sickly and die in institutions, and infections spread like wildfire.
Paradox
Yet the paradox is that the exaltation of ‘the family’ (especially ‘the respectable family’) is often what condemns ‘unwanted’ children – no child should be unwanted, but some have been – to institutions in the first place. And abandons and stigmatises young single mothers for having the children, too.
The anger – as bitter as anything I have encountered – is hugely focused on the Catholic Church, and the Church, clergy and nuns, must take responsibility for having authority over a regime which allowed these tragedies.
But I know from my own family background – most people would probably share this – that the values which sustained these mother-and-baby homes and institutions were firmly upheld by the ‘respectable family’.
My mother, a Galway woman, was the kindest and most charitable person you could meet: but she thought that having a child out of wedlock was an absolute catastrophe. Anything to avoid it. And if it couldn’t be avoided, then anything to keep it hidden or secret.
There was a woman in her East Galway town who was an ‘unmarried mother’. This woman had kept her child; she wasn’t (according to my uncle, whom I later quizzed) cruelly treated, and indeed she and her daughter were given a caretaker’s job of some kind. But there was a terrible kind of pity. “Musha, the cratur.”
For my family, that fall from respectable status, and to be pitied as “musha, the cratur”, was never to be contemplated.
That’s the context of the Tuam story, although anyone who makes that point will be called ‘a scumbag’ and ‘an apologist for Church Nazis’ on social media.
There is currently a recourse to such extreme comparisons which devoid language of meaning. On Joe Duffy’s phone-in last Monday a woman compared the Tuam tragedy to “genocide”, and said the perpetrators were “like Dr Mengele”. (Genocide was the deliberate, planned extermination of an entire people. Mengele performed vivisection on living persons, without anaesthetic, as a medical experiment.)
This inflated language is a signal of the anger. Our families did not commit ‘genocide’: they did, however, contribute to the social mores which produced Tuam and its ilk.
There is another point to be made too. Irish society was punitive to ‘unmarried mothers’, but strangely lax about making the men face their responsibilities. In Ralph Glaser’s memoir about growing up in the Scottish slum, The Gorbals, he describes how the local community tracked down lads who had impregnated girls, and forced them to ‘do the decent thing’.
Sometimes these tactics veered towards the Mafiosi, but you can’t help feeling that the Gorbals enforcers were on the right track.
A model of efficiency
As a teenager, I was consigned to a Bon Secours hospital in 1960, with a primary TB, for three months. It was a model of medical efficiency, nursing care and spotless cleanliness. I suppose many people imagined that any institution run by these very capable nuns had similar standards.
Championing the Irish language
It was unwise of Arlene Foster of the DUP to seem to disparage the Irish language, during the North’s recent election campaigns. It showed poor judgement in communications, and an under-informed approach to cultural history.
A more canny politician might have pointed out that Irish Protestants were often in the vanguard of advancing and reviving the Irish language. The Bible was first translated into Irish by the Church of Ireland Bishop William Bedel, who died in 1642 – a revised version of his Bible was published in 1685, and it is a beautiful document.
Many scholars and champions of the Irish language were Irish Protestants, from Lady Gregory to Douglas Hyde. Edward Carson spoke some Irish and never rebuffed the language. (Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, had been a patron of the Celtic languages revival.)
In the 1900s, there were more Protestants than Catholics studying Irish with Belfast’s Gaelic League.
Mrs Foster showed she had scant grasp of how to manage information (leave aside the dodgy dossier on the ‘cash for ash’ controversy, which sparked the dissolution of Stormont), or to own part of a culture to which her tradition can validly lay claim. I say this as someone who supports an ecumenical approach to Northern politics and society.