Sir, – As an alumnus of Bessborough (1985), I remember vividly the screams of the institutionalised in the middle of the night, the old nun who said my baby would be fine in America and the girls who came and went without notice. But in that strange world of false names and shame there was also a strong and grim camaraderie between the girls, and some green shoots of humanity as I have a clear memory of the same nun helping me study for my Leaving Certificate French exam.
My daughter was adopted in Cork and, natural bonds rent asunder, we are now reunited and trying to piece together a relationship that has a beginning, no middle and an end to be determined. – Yours, etc,
CLAIRE GARVEY,
Killester Avenue,
Dublin 5.
Sir, – I was born six weeks prematurely in Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, in March 1965, and my birth mother, who was 21 at the time, died from a post-partum haemorrhage three days later. I was alive, thanks to the same nuns who may well have neglected my mother. No thanks to my grandmother, extended family or society, who had discarded me and my mother as an inconvenient truth.
There was a chicken-and-egg scenario in Ireland whereby the church fed societal fear and shame but society also accepted it. The valley of the squinting windows took easily to rigid Catholicism.
When I met my grandmother (more than 30 years later) she said that no one in the family would have had a future if they had taken me home. They would have been spat at in the street. The parish priest at the time didn’t want to bury my mother on sacred ground and my grandmother lied to neighbours about the cause of death.
The “culture” of the time was largely influenced by the Catholic Church.
On a recent visit to the abbey, I visited the chapel where the girls would have prayed daily. Over the altar is a stained-glass image of Mary Magdalene – the prostitute and sinner. But who was the real sinner? – Yours, etc,
Dr MARY MULLANEY,
Rowanbyrn,
Blackrock, Co Dublin.
Sir, – One line of thinking I have seen repeated since the dreadful Tuam story broke in the media is that the public must consider the tragedy in the context of the country’s economic and social profile at the time. Well I say this – no particular time in our history should be an excuse for what happened here. All our shameful history needs to be brought out in the open – corporal punishment in our schools, the dreadful industrial schools, the Magdalene laundries, clerical sex abuse, and now this latest news on the remains of 796 babies, who died at a religious-run and State-funded home for unmarried mothers in Tuam from 1925 to 1961.
We must not separate these dreadful happenings, and realise and accept, once and for all, that as a society we have no excuses whatsoever. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN McDEVITT,
Ardconnaill,
Glenties,
Co Donegal.