Paul Keenan
Soul-searching on our dark past is overlooking some key points
“If the full story proves true, that would be savagery. But I, no more than anyone else, don’t know the full facts.”
For Dr Finola Kennedy, both in relation to the current reports on Tuam’s mother and baby home and for the Ireland in which the home operated, facts are key.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic this week, the former UCD economics lecturer – and author of Cottage to Creche: Family Change in Ireland – Dr Kennedy contends that the national soul-searching now underway has underestimated the overarching fact of crushing poverty as it existed in the early years of the fledgling State.
For her, the cold reality of economics played a major part in the scandal now re-emerging in 2014. (The national record shows clearly that this is a ‘re-emerging’ as against the dramatic ‘uncovering’ portrayed in media both national and international.)
“We had the Civil War and the cost of damages on top of poverty as the new State began,” Dr Kennedy points out. “What funds we had were spent on rebuilding.”
It was into such a reality that the nuns were so warmly received, she adds, “including, let’s not forget, those nuns who started the health services still benefitting Ireland today”.
“Mother and babies homes were part of a whole system of containment at the time and look sad and painful places now,” she adds.
Only too aware of the minefield of emotions currently lying before anyone willing to contribute to the current discussion on Ireland’s treatment of unmarried mothers and their children, Dr Kennedy is at pains to stress that she is in no way seeking to downplay what has yet to be fully excavated both physically and psychologically in Tuam and perhaps in other homes around Ireland.
Contemplation
Coming to the issue as a mother of six, Dr Kennedy is keenly aware that “the notion of having to give up a child is beyond contemplation and pain. And it is a pain that can never be repaired”. But, as “a mother and a godmother to unmarried mothers”, Dr Kennedy is also cognisant that “even now it’s not an easy thing to bring up a child alone”.
“Now cast your mind back 50, 60 years,” she adds to her perspective on the historical issue. “The challenges faced were incredible. People today don’t realise how poor we were then.”
Returning to the concept of ‘re-emergence’, it is important to point out that the issues of single parenthood and mother and baby homes were examined, discussed and countered, too, at the time. Those who may not know Dr Kennedy’s work on family change may yet know of her biography of Frank Duff, Legion of Mary founder and the man who worked to establish the Regina Coeli hostel which provided for homeless women, including single mothers and, Dr Kennedy stresses, kept mothers and babies together.
“He had a visceral feeling that mothers should not be separated from their babies,” she states, having known and worked with Frank Duff.
Worthy of note, too, she adds, Duff was a very faithful Catholic. Current observers might argue that in this, the man stood against the Catholic consensus on unmarried mothers, but in the eagerness to judge the Catholic Church in Ireland, Dr Kennedy says, it must be conceded that “England was also harsh on unmarried mothers” and leaves the obvious implication unspoken.
Co-incidentally, that ‘broader than the Church’ argument is one offered too by another UCD academic. On June 7, Marian Finucane welcomed Dr Lindsey Earner-Byrne of UCD School of History and Archives to her show and listened as the scholar pointed out that “Tuam did not happen in a vacuum”.
Serious problem
Notably, Dr Earner-Byrne also expressed her discomfort with the story being characterised as Ireland’s “hidden history”. The author of Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Ireland 1920s-1960s went on to demonstrate that “the discussion was being had at the time” regarding single mothers. For example, she ‘revealed’ that every year in the 1930s and 1940s the number of deaths of ‘illegitimate children’ was published.
Further, the Registrar General had, in 1923, introduced the category of ‘illegitimate deaths’, leading to discussions at the highest levels of “a serious problem” which saw a death rate six times higher than the wider community.
Crucially for current arguments, Dr Earner-Byrne also revealed that when challenged by Britain to deal with the phenomenon of Irish single mothers reaching its shores, the State’s Department of External Affairs decided that the Church should take on the necessary remedial role, with the department’s Secretary Joseph Walshe (1923-1946) quoted as stating: “We need to place it on their [the Church’s] shoulders.”
Echoing, too, Dr Kennedy’s contention regarding ‘Catholic Ireland’, Dr Earner-Byrnes challenged observers to “look at the Bethany home. This was not just a Catholic consensus. It was societal.”
None of which detracts from the tragic, painful and scandalous experiences endured both by mothers and their babies deemed worthy of little in an Ireland given to terms such as ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’.
Dr Earner-Byrne summed it up succinctly: “If the women had been treated properly, these institutions would not have existed.”
