Sir, – For the past week I have been reading the many hundreds of letters and comments on your website regarding the mother-and-baby homes scandal. In most cases the tone is understandably one of outrage and the general theme is that if the writers had been alive back then, those children’s lives would have been very different.
It is striking, therefore, to look back at the recent reports in The Irish Times about the suffering of the many children whose families are currently homeless in Ireland and about the miserable lives led (often for years) by immigrant children living in the direct provision hostels currently being operated by private companies on behalf of the Government. None of those reports evoked much outrage (or even comment) from your readers and, in the case of the direct provision hostels, those who did choose to comment were more often inclined to justify the manner in which those children are being treated than to object to it.
A cynic might observe that it is easy to be outraged about abuses in the past but taking note of abuses in the present might actually require us to do something about them. – Yours, etc,
ANN HIGGINS,
Monterey,
Massachusetts.
Sir, – It seems that we are about to spend a substantial amount of money on a statutory commission of investigation into mother-and-baby homes. I wonder what the commission will achieve. It cannot undo the tragic results of an insular collusion involving the State, the churches, the Garda Síochána, the fathers of the infants carried by the pregnant women and the parents of these women.
We are hearing that the files relating to these events are readily available in county council and other archives throughout the country. They have been available for many years. There was nothing to stop professional researchers, historians and journalists from accessing them. But an international media story reporting “800 infants dumped in a septic tank” triggered a frenzied national response calling for an inquiry from a smug, self-righteous, sophisticated society where we consider ourselves different, wiser and more compassionate than our forebears.
Sinn Féin’s Caoimhghín Ó Caoiláin has said it is a dreadful fact that women and children were “treated as outcasts and non-people” in these institutions. He is right, of course. But it is a dreadful fact from a wretched past that no inquiry can undo.
However there are dreadful facts in our present society that can and should be addressed. There are homeless people sleeping on the streets of our cities and towns, the life expectancy and general health of our Travellers is seriously below the national norm, there are over 4,000 asylum seekers who have spent years living in the inhumane conditions of “direct provision” and there is the daily spectacle of old and sick patients on trolleys in our hospitals.
Our country should be directing scarce public funds at current societal problems. Investigations culminating in results such as the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report can have positive and worthwhile outcomes. In those cases, greatly strengthened procedures protecting children from abuse were put in place. But an investigation into the history of mother-and-baby homes will achieve little, other than to create increased calls to phone-in radio shows and to provide another stick with which to beat the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. – Yours, etc,
JACK MORRISSEY,
Acorn Road, Dublin 16.
A chara, – The recent disclosures about the Tuam babies, unearthed by local historian Catherine Corless, brings home to us again the importance of coming to terms with our past.
The English historian EH Carr observed that history is a dialogue between the past and the present. Here we have a case of the sad facts of our relatively recent past clashing violently with the perceptions we cherish of ourselves in the present.
The task of the local historian is a particularly difficult one. In every community there are taboo areas, subjects which are just too close to the bone for many people. But unless we understand and acknowledge where we have come from, how can we decide where our futures should be? In digging beneath the surface in Tuam, Catherine Corless has done her own community and all of us some service. – Is mise,
JOHN GLENNON,
Bannagroe,
Hollywood, Co Wicklow.