|
|
Post by Wasp on Aug 30, 2009 19:52:46 GMT
Deafening silence over deaths of Irish babies
By Eddie Holt
Published Sunday, August 2, 2009
A 2004 memorial which was built at Mount St. Laurence Cemetery, Limerick to honour those who died in the city's Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry
I wrote an extended feature less than two weeks ago on known and unknown deaths in industrial and reform schools, Magdalen laundries and mother and baby homes. The story required soul-searching because of its gravitas. I am glad the story has done well for Irish Central but chilled at the silence from Ireland. It is an Irish story, after all.
There are a few possible reasons. Perhaps nobody from Ireland surfed onto Irish Central. That’s extremely unlikely, as the site attracts almost a quarter of all its hits each week from people outside the United States. Ireland, by definition, is high up there. It might be the timing: the forthcoming report on the Dublin Archdiocese is consuming media here. There’s a ‘softening-up’ process preparing the public for shocks.
But maybe it’s “too big” to contemplate: nuns, priests and Brothers, because of their religious convictions, killed babies and infants. It’s monstrous. One piece of feedback, I received was “infants tainted with the shame of illegitimacy did not deserve a commemoration or a Christian burial. Wasn't that the idea? The disgrace of their circumstances trumped all pretence at humanity or Christian compassion”.
In fact, the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (who ran Bessborough, Sean Ross Abbey and Castlepollard) ought to have loved mothers, babies and infants, twice over. Instead, large numbers are buried, in a manner contrary to the laws of the Church and State in mass graves. Nuns meanwhile, were buried in a separate area with individualised headstones.
I listed the death rates – the infant mortality rate – for children born within marriage and outside marriage. In the 1920s, it was five times as high for children born outside marriage. Ten out of 33 such children died before their first birthday. The equivalent figure was two out of 33 for children born within marriage. In the 1930s, more than four times as many babies and infants born outside marriage died before they reached one year of age.
In 1948, the rate of mortality among babies born inside marriage was 47 per 1,000 live births. The rate for babies born outside marriage was 149 per 1,000 births. These figures were quoted by John Cunningham the former Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at University College Dublin. He said at UCD in March, 1951 that “this area does not necessitate state intervention”. Still, it’s more than three times as high.
There was infanticide, of course. Mothers or other relatives ‘distraught’ by the birth outside marriage – sometimes birth-fathers and fathers of mothers grieving lost ‘respectability’ – undoubtedly killed babies and infants. Such people valued a rule, encouraged by the Catholic Church, to relegate the Fifth Commandment – ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – in favour of Church hatred of babies born outside marriage.
Either the Catholic Church caused deaths or it didn’t. (Excepted, of course, are the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, aiding of Nazi war criminals, witch-burning, ‘just’ wars, and heaps of sundry careerism. That’s not on offer. Violent times, you know!) There’s an argument to say that in withholding painkillers, stitching and antibiotics they, at least, hastened deaths. Some mothers and babies were sure to die without these essentials. Otherwise, it was the death rate for the 18th century from childbirth.
Mind you, the Catholic Church had a bad attitude towards the French Revolution in 1789. Ten per cent of land, owned by the Catholic Church – about the size of Ireland – was confiscated. The Church was the First Estate and with the loss of their land, they went apoplectic. In fact, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMIs), who ran Daingean and Glencree reformatory schools, were founded “to undo the damage wrought by the French Revolution”.
I mentioned that in High Park, in Dublin’s Drumcondra, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge ran Ireland’s largest Magdalen laundry. In 1993, the nuns were forced because of losses from an aerospace company, Guinness Peat Aviation (father of Ryanair) to sell a portion of convent land to the state. It emerged that 133 graves – a further 22 were later discovered – existed on this land. The graves held the remains of women interred anonymously between 1866 and 1984. The Irish public went apoplectic.
The nuns did likewise in mother and baby homes. Very few names of children or their mothers are on headstones. Granted, individual headstones might be prohibitively expensive. If so, the nuns could have erected a communal headstone with, at least, the Christian or first names of babies inscribed. There is simply no way to estimate the numbers of mothers and babies buried.
Until the Catholic Church makes records available, there has got to be suspicion. The money certainly did not go into the care and welfare of the mothers and infants. If High Park is repeated around the country, who knows the number of children buried in what appear mass graves? Obviously there are hundreds – possibly many more. I would venture there are thousands. But is the story too big to contemplate?
Yet if even one killing – whether murder, manslaughter or misadventure – of a baby or mother is suspected, the Gardaí should investigate the place. Then again, it was a very cowed Irish society that handed over children to be raised or sold by the religious. Perhaps there is societal guilt. Most people knew – alright, not the details of individual events – of the state of Catholic Church-run institutions. Most forgot too.
So, there is a societal link. Such people were raped and killed by Church and State with the State refusing to accept responsibility. In fact, the greater the degree of ‘respectabilty’, the arguably more profound was the deception. Perhaps it goes back to the Famine of 1845-50 – when to have a baby outside marriage was seen as the height of irresponsibility. The Catholic Church merely piggy-backed on this attitude and the devastation we know followed.
We may be looking at Ireland’s massacre of infants. Magdalens and Madonnas deserve apology, recognition and compensation.
|
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 2, 2009 21:43:45 GMT
Although the matter remains practically taboo there are questionable deaths in industrial and reform schools, Magdalen laundries and mother and baby homes. “I remember lots of children dying,” said ‘Marion’. She told it to "Suffer the Little Children," the book by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan published in 1999.
Marion was placed in St. Joseph’s industrial school, Summerhill outside Athlone, County Westmeath in 1937. She was only a baby. She recalls “a girl who had her appendix out." The nuns made the girl get up to work, despite the fact that when she came back from hospital she was ordered to rest. “A few days after they forced her to get up, she died. She was a lovely girl and she was only 15 years old.” There are similar reports from most of the industrial schools.
In a Dáil debate on the Ryan Report on June 12, Martin Mansergh of Fianna Fáil said: “There are a number of unexplained deaths in the Irish situation.” He was, perhaps unknown to himself, talking about something much more shocking than the dreadful physical violence or even sexual abuse. He was discussing dying as a child.
Mansergh was presumably referring to industrial and reform school deaths dealt with exclusively in the Ryan Report. In the early 1930s, two Christian Brothers were hanged in Canada for child-death so his thoughts were prescient. Mansergh was referring to deaths such as those of Bernard Kerrigan, Michael McQualter, Marian Howe, Patsy Flanagan, Bernard Young and others, who are known to have died contentiously.
However, in writing the life story of the only psychologist to have been to Letterfrack industrial school, something graver has arisen.
He was born in St. Peter’s, Castlepollard, County Westmeath, run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary; transferred, aged four, to Tullamore county home, County Offaly; brought to Letterfrack, County Galway at age seven and transferred, at 10, to Salthill industrial school, County Galway. He was there until he was 16.
Naturally, he is quite sketchy on remembering Castlepollard. After all, he was only four when plucked from there. In order to see for ourselves and get the book underway, we called there in June 2007. The former mother and baby home is now a residential center for intellectually disabled adults and adolescents of both sexes. Run by the Midland Region of the Health Service Executive (HSE), it caters for people with moderate, severe and profound handicaps.
What we found was disturbing and repeated in other mother and baby homes run by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. They ran these others in Bessborough in Cork city and Sean [pronounced shan, the Irish word for ‘old’] Ross Abbey, Roscrea, County Tipperary. Bessborough opened in 1922; Sean Ross Abbey in 1930 and St. Peter’s, Castlepollard in 1935. It struck us that the number of dead infants or mothers – at least for the casual observer – was impossible to measure.
The cemeteries have been renovated, mostly as ultra-twee “memorial gardens”. Angels and cartoon dogs, bears and cuddly toys now adorn them. There are however, very few names of the children or mothers who died in these places. Nuns however (or ‘sisters’, given that in correct usage, ‘nun’ refers to a female religious, who leads a contemplative life) are all given their own plots with their names inscribed. They, at least, have a proper Christian burial.
History
History professor at Warwick University, Maria Luddy, said that 60 out of 120 babies died in Sean Ross Abbey in its opening year. Had that rate been maintained – and, in fact, the unit expanded – it would have meant 2,400 deaths until 1970 when the mother and baby unit closed.
Considering that 60 babies died in the opening single year of Sean Ross Abbey, it is safe to assume that deaths, at least in their hundreds (being utterly conservative) if not greater, occurred. Remember, Sean Ross Abbey was just one of three mother and baby homes operated by the order in the state. The sisters sold babies and infants to the few wealthy in Irish society and American people.
Between the end of World War II and 1965, more than 2,200 Irish infants were adopted out of the country. It was mostly by parents in the United States. That’s 110 on average, every year, or more than two a week. Meanwhile, their birth-mothers had to work without wages – unless they could afford to pay – for two or three years. They wore uniforms, had their names changed and their letters were vigorously censored.
Writing of her nine months in Bessborough during 1951 and 52, June Goulding has said in her 1998 book "The Light in the Window" that women tarred roads: “. . . about eight to ten girls, all in varying degrees of pregnancy . . . and a roller that took three pregnant girls to pull”. They also plucked lawns – by hand – and polished, polished, polished.
They were routinely worked until well into labour; got no painkillers (even over-the-counter brands, such as Aspro and Anadin). They weren’t given sutures (stitching) or antibiotics (after 1928 when they were invented). She recounts they had to give birth in chromium commodes, in order not to ‘soil’ their beds. (Fundamentalist Catholics sometimes referred to such babies as “the spawn of Satan”, a designation that encouraged the more rabid literally “to beat the devil out of them”.)
They were routinely given babies other than their own to breastfeed and had the joy of ‘Sister’ whispering to the women – especially those in labour: “was the five minutes pleasure worth all this?” Goulding also describes the “cruel custom” of compelling mothers surrendering their babies to carry them along a corridor before handing them over. “I had witnessed the horrific ritual that would be repeated for each and every mother and baby in this hell-hole.”
In 1928, for instance, ‘illegitimate babies’ (henceforth people born ‘outside marriage’ because of the pejorative phrase) suffered ‘infant mortality rates’ five times higher than children born within marriage. In other words, 10 out of 33 babies born ‘outside marriage’ died before their first birthday. That’s greater than 30 per cent. The equivalent for those born within marriage was two out of 33.
In the 1930s, it was more than four times as high. The rate of infant mortality for children born within marriage was, at the time, between five and six per cent. So, roughly a quarter of all babies born outside marriage died before the age of one. These were death rates for childbirth in the 17th century.
In 1948, the rate of mortality among babies born inside marriage was 47 per 1,000 live births. The rate for babies born outside marriage was 149 per 1,000 births. These figures were quoted by John Cunningham the former Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at University College Dublin. He said at UCD in March, 1951 that “this area does not necessitate state intervention”. Still, it’s more than three times as high.
There was infanticide, of course. Mothers or other relatives ‘distraught’ by the birth outside marriage – sometimes birth-fathers and fathers of mothers grieving lost ‘respectability’ – undoubtedly killed babies and infants. Such people valued a rule, encouraged by the Catholic Church to relegate the Fifth Commandment – ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – in favour of Church hatred of babies born outside marriage.
It’s clear that the reason the Church was so totally against babies born outside marriage was it meant a loss of control. Between 1870 and 1970, the average Irish rate for birth outside marriage was less than three per cent. Today, 32 per cent of Irish and 44 per cent of British people are born outside marriage. Demonising those born outside marriage was the most effective means to ensure the vast majority of marriageable people had a Church wedding.
Hidden graves
The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge owned the High Park Convent in Dublin’s Drumcondra. There they ran the largest Magdalen laundry in Ireland. In 1993, the nuns were forced because of losses from an aerospace company, Guinness Peat Aviation, to sell a portion of convent land to the State.
It emerged that 133 graves – a further 22 were later discovered – existed on this land. The graves held the remains of women interred anonymously between 1866 and 1984. These graves were for Magdalen women and girls who had worked in the convent laundry and as maids: cooking, cleaning and caring for nuns, many of whom were elderly. In 1997, the unmarked graves of 27 women were discovered on the grounds of a former Good Shepherd convent in Cork. Indeed, unmarked graves exist in almost all former Magdalen laundry sites.
It appears the nuns did likewise in mother and baby homes. There is, in Castlepollard graveyard, only five headstones. Two are for deceased nuns: Sr. Alphonsus Ryan, who died in October 1957 and Sr. Brigid O’Keeffe, who died in November 1964; one for a lay person, Margaret McGrath (a benefactor?); one five feet tall marble structure requests people to pray for the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
The fifth headstone is more recent. Most of the graveyards received an updating in the 1990s. It is just 18 inches tall, about three feet wide and made of limestone. “In Memory of God’s Special Angels Interred in this Cemetary” (sic) it says. There are no names of children buried there nor is there any indication of their number. I had the eerie feeling I was standing and walking on a mass grave of babies and infants.
It’s the same in Sean Ross Abbey and Bessborough. Unlike St. Peter’s, which has only the graves of two nuns, the nuns’ cemetery at Sean Ross Abbey has 24 small headstones. These mark deaths from 1942 to 2004. All the graves are on one side of the small graveyard, which is scarcely wider and considerably shorter than the one in St. Peter’s. It does however have a five feet tall marble cross, identical to the one in Castlepollard.
The children’s cemetery is about one hundred metres away from that of the nuns. Tall, dense trees surround it. It measures about half an acre. Carved on an obviously recent but undated headstone is the following: “The Memorial Garden is dedicated to the Babies and Infants who died in Sean Ross Abbey and are buried here.” At the edges of the cemetery, there are reminders of four children and one adult buried there.
In the middle of this half acre of sorrow, there is a nameless, faceless and weathered cross. It was to do for all those buried anonymously in the children’s graveyard before the sanitising of the place as a ‘Memorial Garden’. Walking on the grass in the cemetery gave me the same, eerie feeling I had experienced in Castlepollard. How many tiny bodies were buried there?
Dozens, scores, hundreds – perhaps even greater?
Bessborough House was sold with its 210 acres, in 1921, to the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. There’s a Lourdes-like grotto and acres of bluebells, some white. There are 25 nuns buried in the little cemetery. Babies Ellen, William, Patricia, Maura, Patrick, Mary, Teresa, Geraldine, Richard, Anne, Cathleen and Nellie died here – among many others – in 1931. Their Christian or first names are written in biro on plasticized paper plates pinned to the wall of a keep (built as a folly) on the grounds.
There is a sign in front of the keep: “In remembrance of all babies who died before or shortly after birth.” Behind the keep on which babies’ names are pinned, there’s a circle of roughly twenty metres. This circle, with grass at it centre, has rocks, lilies, trees, reeds and white bluebells around its perimeter. It also has an extraordinarily cheap-looking wooden cross – it looks like tea-chest wood and is uneven.
Penance
Until the Catholic Church makes records available, there has got to be suspicion. One inmate of Castlepollard told us she was reminded she “was there to do penance”. Yet doing ‘penance’ is one thing; withholding painkillers, stitching and antibiotics from expectant mothers is another. A number of them will die.
Fundamentalist Catholics might be against the giving of painkillers, stitching and antibiotics. The women must be reminded they are there to do ‘penance’. The best analogy is of a Jehovah’s Witness or a Christian Scientist refusing a blood transfusion to save their child. Despite their religious convictions, courts regularly override them and insist on the blood transfusion.
Irish courts conspired however with the religious. The State is as guilty as the Church on the matter. It’s not only the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. There are a number of other orders which ran industrial and reform schools, Magdalen laundries and mother and baby homes. They require investigation.
If High Park is repeated around the country – and it appears that it is – who knows the number of children buried in what seem like mass graves? Certainly there are hundreds, possibly many more. After the Ryan Report the matter has lost some of its taboo. “I remember lots of children dying,” said ‘Marion’.
Where are they? Are they to be lost forever, without even a name (a Christian or first name to save detection of those with unusual surnames)? Bereft in life, they were treated similarly in death. Meanwhile nuns lavish money on maintaining and improving their own graves. If even one killing of a baby or a mother is suspected, the Guards should cordon off the place and investigate it.
That, at least, is what the State should do. It has spectacularly failed these children in life. It’s about to compound it by failing them in death. Between them, State and Church hastened death. For instance, 58 ex-industrial school pupils and former Magdalen women committed suicide between 2000 and 2005.
That’s way in excess of what you might expect from a relatively small population of 130,000 or so. It seems like there’s 10 times as many suicides among those whose fate was to attend Catholic Church-run industrial and reform schools and Magdalen laundries.
Society demanded it though. It was Holy Ireland against Pagan England as the Church of England waned, certainly after World War II. I can remember my own mother talking about “pagan England . . . heathen England . . . godless England”. Morality was the only way then that Irish people could feel superior to English people. The English, for their part, felt commercially, militarily, financially superior to the Irish. They had reason to.
It’s difficult to believe but these people have individually raped or gang-raped an unwilling child-victim. People who do that will do anything. As to the Church and State: let them hang their heads in shame. There are some excellent people among the religious and clergy. It really should be in their interests to weed out rapists, liars and people who take a perverse pleasure inflicting pain and, at least, hastening death on children.
Instead, they moved them from parish to parish to protect the Roman Catholic Church.
|
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 4, 2009 21:44:33 GMT
‘It was murder of the soul’
A terrible legacy is born. What emerges from the publication of the Ryan Commission’s report on the penal system in which thousands of Irish children were incarcerated for long periods of their lives, is that Church and state are still one, still arm in arm, and that they will protect each other, no matter what.
There are many ways in which violence is perpetrated on humans by humans. As Oscar Wilde said, some do it with a kiss, some do it with a sword.
The Irish state does it with a report. Silence is violence, because in that silence is the hurt and the stress caused by denial. The unacknowledged impact of what happened to the children of Ireland will not rest and we will further traumatise generations to come with what the Irish state has done by failing to honour the universal code of natural law.
People will frenzy obsessively, as they have in the past, around the sordid details of sexual abuse. They will look for extreme examples to measure the extent of its brutality.
Sexual assault is merely a term employed to describe parts of the human body and human biology. It belittles, to some extent and, to another extent, sexualises violence for the onlooker and the reader. But for the victim there is no sexual aspect; there is just the extreme violence of the act perpetrated on them. The act is immeasurable, as its impact ebbs and flows and bashes against the coast of the individual’s life, gnawing away at personhood and spirit forever.
When I hear the words sexual abuse, it betrays what happened to me and to countless thousands of other children and adults. I believe it is now time for the phrase ‘sexual abuse’ to be dropped and replaced with a much more realistic definition, more befitting the actual crime, which is an act of extreme violence and murder of the soul.
The report confirms to me in its entirety the overwhelming willingness of the Irish state to offer protection to the perpetrators of inhuman acts on the most vulnerable in our society, children.
These acts were perpetrated, by and large, on one class within Irish society, a class or a community of people regarded as ‘‘God’s unfortunates’’.
The perpetrators convinced themselves of a great untruth: that people in a lower socio-economic group needed their intervention, their charity and their moral guidance. They endlessly sought to corral, close down, disempower and render voiceless this whole section of society.
It is enormously difficult to find your voice in a society that wishes to overwhelm you with the way it wants you to live its version of your life.
For many years, my struggle for a place in Irish society was based on the false principle that, somewhere out there, someone in the state cared and was going to bring truth and honour, justice and consequences, and so give me and others our rightful place as equal citizens in this society.
We looked to the great white hope of the Ryan Commission, and those hopes have been dashed. What is the point in deliberately building a car that won’t work? This was, in effect, the process the Irish state set in train. Thousands of statements of fact were taken, vital evidence of collaboration, of crimes against humanity were gathered by Mr Justice Ryan’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and, instead of being handed to the law enforcement officers of the state, they were rendered impotent, null and useless.
What is printed now - the horror stories - will go down in history as a sort of pornography, the black diaries of the Irish state and its ruling classes and how those classes protected their henchmen and women, those who ran for them a series of what can only be described as inhumane labour camps and child prisons.
All of this was done under the state’s legal system but, in real terms, it had no basis in law. Here, the state has failed to probe how it contained and incarcerated 150,000 children. Before the children arrived in any of these institutions, all their legal, civil and human rights were stripped from them by the state. Throughout their detention, they were violently stripped of every other asset, right down to the core of their humanity.
In the place of the innocence that all children carry was instilled an experience of extreme violence, fear and terror that they would carry throughout their lives and that would permeate down through the generations to their family and community.
What this report has ensured is that the next generation of innocent children will inherit from the Irish state a legacy of brutality and cowardice in place of courage. The world will look and acknowledge that this state, when faced with a choice of bringing criminals to justice, chose to protect them, because those criminals were, after all, its very own.
The state protected itself, its agents and servants; the Church protected itself, its agents and servants. Both combined and conspired to protect hideous, monstrous, violent men and women at the expense, not only of those who, as children, were placed into the hands of the merciless masquerading as the merciful, but of Irish society as a whole.
This report is a further act of violence. I can only look now to the Human Rights Commission to set up a complete independent inquiry as to how the Irish state betrayed all of its citizens and in doing so betrayed the human race. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was trampled on last week by the failure of the Ryan Commission report to use any of its witness statements to bring to justice the perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
Rest assured that this was no mistake and, as the saying goes, this report did indeed do the state some service. Let’s see what the UN has to say about that.
Author and playwright Mannix Flynn spent two years in the late 1960s at Letterfrack Industrial School in Galway.
|
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 5, 2009 16:48:44 GMT
State refused to overturn Jim Beresford's criminal conviction
Justine McCarthy
Beresford: 'beaten unconscious' A former inmate of Artane who is preparing to formally renounce his Irish citizenship will not be among survivors attending today's reception at Áras an Uachtarain for victims of abuse by religious orders. Jim Beresford (61), who lives in Huddersfield, west Yorkshire, has instructed his solicitors to draw up a declaration of alienage after years of requesting that the Irish state revoke the criminal conviction that sent him to the industrial school.
The college lecturer from Co Meath, who signs his correspondence "former Artane child prisoner 14262", and has written extensively about the industrial schools' culture, has not been invited to this afternoon's gathering being hosted by the president in response to the Ryan report. President Mary McAleese envisages the event as a forum to recognise survivors' "tremendous courage and great suffering".
Beresford, who phoned Áras an Uachtaráin last week in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire an invitation, says: "Whilst in Artane and as punishment for my many sins, I was often put to scrubbing floors whilst the other inmates were taken to the movies. Looks like I'm to play Cinderella again – and at my age."
He has consistently refused overtures to apply for monetary compensation from the Redress Board, saying all he wanted was a piece of paper from the state acknowledging his wrongful detention. He was chosen for incarceration by an ISPCC 'cruelty man', the inspectorate, who the Ryan report says, operated on a bounty scheme for rounding up children.
The child of a Catholic mother of Irish descent and an English Protestant father, Beresford was sent to Artane at the age of 13 with his younger brother on foot of what he contends was an illegal order handed down by Dunshaughlin district court in September 1961. The case was heard in open court and reported, including the names of the children, on the front page of a local newspaper. His appeals to have the order rescinded have met with a stock reply that to do so would be a breach of the constitution.
Beresford has discovered documents under the Freedom of Information Act showing that Department of Ed*ucation inquiries into his case, sparked by his mother's application to the then minister and future president, Patrick Hillery, to have her sons returned to her, culminated in a written report critical of her "moral conduct".
"There was not a blot on her character whatsoever," Beresford said, adding: "At that time, mixed marriage was a hot topic in Ireland."
When his father was dying from cancer he requested that his sons be released to visit him. His re*quest was turned down. The children were finally let out to attend their father's funeral, three years after they had been sent away. The legends on their Artane files read: "Absconder – released to attend father's funeral, didn't return."
Beresford, who claims he was "beaten unconscious" after he and his brother tried to escape, says: "We never knew about our father's condition. Our mother's letters were intercepted."
For the past decade, he has petitioned state leaders, including former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, justice minister Dermot Ahern and President McAleese to have his detention order rescinded. Speaking in Trinity College Dublin last Thursday night, the president said that the Ryan report demanded "a fresh focus from all of us as a civic society on what we need to do to truly cherish the children of this nation equally".
Beresford says: "I would like to be able to go back to my home village without being regarded as some kind of sub-human. There are people there to this day who quite justifiably think I was sent to Artane because I was a *criminal."
|
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 22, 2009 19:59:04 GMT
Saturday, September 19, 2009
PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent
MINISTER FOR Education Batt O’Keeffe has been strongly criticised for his description of women committed to Magdalen laundries as “employees” of those institutions, and for his rejection of their eligibility for State compensation.
Head of the Women’s Studies Department at UCD Dr Katherine O’Donnell said yesterday that, where news of spending cuts in sensitive areas is concerned, it was increasingly the case that “Batt O’Keeffe is turning out to be the big thug of this Government it’s a role he seems to relish”.
A spokesman for the Minister said he did not wish to comment on what he described as a personalised attack.
Dr O’Donnell was speaking in advance of a celebration of women who had been in the laundries, as well as psychiatric hospitals, and institutions investigated by the Ryan commission, which takes place at the Student Centre in UCD from 1pm this afternoon.
She pointed out that “an employee voluntarily gives his/her labour; is properly rewarded; and has a right to represesentation /free association with a union.” None of these were available to women in the Magdalen laundries, she said.
The State had “a responsibility to all of its citizens”, she said, including the many referred by its courts to the laundries. Of added relevance in the context was that for much of the 20th century “the special position” of the Catholic Church was recognised in the Irish Constitution (1937 to 1973).
She said that, anecdotally, indications were that the survival rate of women who had been in the laundries was “extremely low,” while their suicide rate was high. There was, she said “an obligation on the part of the citizens of this State” to look after such people.
Following representations by Tom Kitt TD, acting on behalf of Dr James Smith of Boston College, Mr O’Keeffe responded by letter that “the Magdalen laundries were privately-owned and operated establishments which did not come within the responsibility of the State. The State did not refer individuals to the Magdalen laundries nor was it complicit in referring individuals to them.”
He referred to the women as “former employees of the Magdalen laundries”.
Dr Smith has since pointed out that “the Irish courts routinely referred women to various Magdalen laundries upon receiving suspended sentences for a variety of crimes”. He can support this with documentary evidence, he said.
He also took grave exception to the use by the Minister of the word “employees” in the context.
The Irish Times
|
|
|
|
Post by Republic on Sept 22, 2009 20:55:49 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by Jim on Sept 23, 2009 0:37:45 GMT
i wonder if there is a uk equilivent. ive certainly no intention on being counted as a member of the congregation |
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 23, 2009 15:07:17 GMT
i wonder if there is a uk equilivent. ive certainly no intention on being counted as a member of the congregation I don't know Jim, but my own partner who left her church years before meeting me had no problem joining my church. It was mentioned about writing to the priest of the chapel she attended, we didn't write anything although our minister may have but I dont think so. Her family know she is a Presbyterian, our children are presbyterians so I really dont see why anyone needs to ask anychurch for permission to leave. The only time she sets foot in a chapel outside marriage or death is say a family members confirmation etc, but she does not take part in the mass, nor does she take communion or anything like it. She sits with the Prods while the rest partake in the actual mass. ;D Personally for me anychurch asking for a letter so I can get permission to leave can go fuck themselves. |
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 24, 2009 17:29:28 GMT
Unpaid Employees Sounds Better Than Slave Labour Friday, September 18, 2009 The legacy of the industrial schools is forever an ugly stain on Ireland's history. For decades, children were taken from their homes and put in the dock, to stand trial for whatever crime would serve the purpose of the State and the Catholic Church. Largely the crime came down to being poor, or to having a widowed mother who was being courted. Church and State, working hand in hand, went about the business of stamping out immorality, and thousands of children were emotionally destroyed in the process. Disgusting yet the silence is deafening and unbelievable from those who protest at everything they can, well that is if the British are in someway involved. The cost of lawsuits and financial settlements is astronomical. Then there were the women, untold numbers of women who were guilty of being pretty. Guilty of being pregnant outside of marriage, even if that pregnancy was the result of rape. Guilty of being a risk to men, to inciting lustful thoughts in men's minds. Thousands of women were put away in Magdalen laundries, to slave away for the Sisters of Mercy or the Good Shepherd Sisters. Hard, backbreaking labor, without hope of pay. Without a set term of incarceration, without a fixed date of release. Break one of the rules and a woman would have her head shaved as punishment, humiliation on top of cruelty. The nuns who ran the laundry would decide when a girl had sufficiently made amends for her crime. Agian unbelievable silence from the thousands who took to the streets demanding rights for terrorist prisoners, what about the rights of these people?  ?? Uncounted numbers of women died behind the high walls of the Magdalen laundries, their identities unknown because the nuns took away not only dignity, but names. The mass graves were discovered many years after the laundries had shut down. Unarmed terrorist is shot dead with the likelyhood that they could have very well been armed but weren't (if that was the case), years of demands for enquiries, unlimited protests, memorial services etc etc yet nothing for all these women who died and died in a horrific brutal and abusive regime. Is the State not responsible for them as well? By what right could the Catholic Church incarcerate women without some regulation by secular law? Minister for Education Batt O'Keefe has stated that the women who were locked away for failing to meet the high moral standards of their parish priest have no standing with the Residential Institutions Redress Board. They can't come to the government and demand financial compensation for their suffering. The laundry-prison does not "come within the responsibility of the State," he said. "The State did not refer individuals to the Magdalen laundries." Mr. O'Keefe looks on the former "employees" as a separate class, since some of the women were brought to the laundries by their family. The State had absolutely no control over that. Except for the part about regulations dealing with fair employment practices and workplace rules, but that's not the Department of Education's mandate. However, there were plenty of women, guilty of being illegitimate and not fit to walk Ireland's streets, who went from the Magdalen laundry's nursery to an industrial school and then back to the laundry. They do fall under the aegis of the Redress Board, having been fortunate enough to spend a few years in a government-run institution. Decades of protests, riots and killings over alledged mistreatment of catholics due to the likes of gerrymandering (which affected all working class) yet nothing for the brutal treatment of these people and they are irish by birth not by wishful thinking or aspirations. The former Maggies could go to the nuns for their past-due wages, but the religious orders are hurting financially and have nothing to offer. Except their prayers, of course. The nuns are doling out their prayers, but divine intervention won't do much good to a woman who was abused, incarcerated and institutionalized into a shell of a human being. |
|
|
|
Post by Jim on Sept 24, 2009 18:24:03 GMT
WASP I find it unbelievable that you try and accuse people of ignoring this because they supported the fecking IRA. Where were you? Surely you should be highlighting en-mass the wrongdoings of the catholic church and not just on an internet forum if you feel so strongly about it.
Rather than thinking catholics have forgotten about this or are purposely being silent over it, perhaps the "silence" is due to not being told about it. Sure, everyone knows it happened, few people know the true extent of it until told so. As a Northern ex-Catholic I'd not have been aware of much that went on apart from the very basics, until I done my own reading. Most people don't do that.
So, lets try and not blame this on the big bad IRA, heard it all before. The IRA are hardly loved by the Catholic church anyway.
|
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 25, 2009 0:06:12 GMT
Jim you know as well as I do it took very very little for republicans to pur out onto the streets in protest against the British over things that do not even remotely compare to this, things republicans claimed were against irish people etc etc. Yet where are these republican protests now??? As I have already said if one minute particle of what happened was caused by anything British, Protestant or Unionist we would never hear the enmd of republicans on the media demanding every enquiry under the sun whether it was known for a long time or only came to light recently.
|
|
|
|
Post by Jim on Sept 25, 2009 11:13:37 GMT
Jim you know as well as I do it took very very little for republicans to pur out onto the streets in protest against the British over things that do not even remotely compare to this, things republicans claimed were against irish people etc etc. Yet where are these republican protests now??? As I have already said if one minute particle of what happened was caused by anything British, Protestant or Unionist we would never hear the enmd of republicans on the media demanding every enquiry under the sun whether it was known for a long time or only came to light recently. Eh no, you're trying hard to find something else to blame Republicans on. Why arent you protesting it? Nevermind the "because its in the Republic" nonesense as this type of thing happened in the North as well, as the catholic church is organised on an all-Ireland basis, i would not be surprised if the same things happened to some extent in the north too! Republicanism is a political idealogy to protest the British military and political presence in Ireland; it is not there to protest over everything and anything. Simply put it is not their role, it is the role of those who were victims of such punishment and their families. If they don't protest then why will anyone else? Lets remember that Republicans have no love for the church, so your attempt to lump them in with the church and somehow protect it falls flat on its face. Furthermore this was not an Ireland-only problem, the church has been doing the same thing around the world, if you want Sinn Féin to protest it, call their offices and request it, don't gurn to us that they arent doing anything when I assume you're doing nothing as well. While you're at it, give the UUP and DUP a call and ask them to protest it, lets see how long it takes before they hang up on you and wipe their hands of it. Infact I would argue that the "silence" over this is more damning TO the church and the current party in Government in the south than people protesting; the church is dying quickly in Ireland, the silent protests against the church consist of empty seats and the churches own intolerance to others, its strangling itself. |
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 25, 2009 12:48:31 GMT
No not at all, I am posting facts Jim, undeniable facts and these same facts disturb me at the mindset of the republican community, by that I mean its leadership. We have been told here that the republican leadership listened to the community and acted on that information, yet on this nothing. For starters I am not a catholic, secondly I do not belong to the community that musch of this abuse was aimed at, thirdly I have never took to the streets in protest at the irish gov, the irissh security forces, irish politicians etc etc, but republicans have took to the streets when the words British/Protestant/Unionist are concerned and you know it. They took to the streets concerning wrongful arrests, the use of plastic bullets and alledged wrongdoings against the catholic community. Yet absolutely nothing concerning the horrid abuse against the most vulnerable in irish society including blind and disabled children. You know as well as I do if there had been a single Protestant institution backed by the British government that done 0.00001% of what has actually happened then republicans would be all over the news and organizing protests, yet with the catholic church being involved there is nothing. Dont give me that crap jim and you know fine well your talking crap here. The list is endless at what republcians protest at and have done for decades and much of this involved the most pettiness of complaints. Republicans have no love for the church? ?? There silence speaks volumes along with the various priests who were heavily involved with the ira, recruitment and purchasing weapons. Dont give me that. The reason republicans are not shouting from the rooftops is because the words irish and catholic are involved in this abuse, Protestant and British are not so hey why do anything. Jim your points are useless and feeble. The proof is there, we have decades of proof of republican protests, often violent protests yet on this nothing. Doesnt sf/ira claim an ireland of equals, dont they speak out at alledged abuse of prisoners such as wrongful arrest, being beat up, poor conditions etc etc? ? Dont they complain about catholics being harrassed on the streets and being picked on by the police etc etc etc? ?? Yet nothing concerning irish women and children. Why are republicans not protesting against this government and church the samweway they would if it was a British government and a Protestant church? |
|
|
|
Post by Jim on Sept 26, 2009 12:22:32 GMT
Wasp its getting a bit pathetic trying to blame everything on Republicans. If the four horsemen of the apocalypse came tomorrow you would blame republicans for summoning them ffs, sort it out mate.
I'm not catholic either, does that matter? Many Republicans are not catholic, infact pretty much every Republican i know is an athiest. So rather than gurn about us not protesting; get off your hole and be heard, it doesnt matter if you'r from the other side of the world, they're still people.
Republicans took to the streets because we believe that British government is occupying the North, what has that got to do with priests buggering boys and other atrocities being committed by a church that most of us don't even follow?
You're implying very strongly that we're protecting the catholic church from something. We arent, simple as.
And lets be honest here, I do think SF should be speaking up; what I do not accept is that its somehow the fault of Republicans, as you are implying. Hence my argument. This is another point scoring mission for you, and I cant be arsed with it.
|
|
|
|
Post by Wasp on Sept 26, 2009 16:36:40 GMT
Total difflection from the thread Jim and the valid points I have made, Collina has made similar points to myself.
Jim dont try and turn the tables to avoid the truth of the situation, the factys are republicans are mainly catholics and republican areas are catholic areas and where there are mainly catholic areas these same areas are mainly republican areas. Republicans made up of the catholic community in certain areas poured onto the streets when they were gurning about police harrassment or wrongful arrests, you said yourself people getting their doors kicked in during the early hours etc were a major recruitment for the ira. These searches were looking for weapons, some of which was following poor intelligence, but it was a reason according to you that catholics joined the ira. Yet with this purposeful abuse going on for decades against the most vulnerable then these same catholic neighbourhoods are doing nothing, the same neighbourhoods where people flocked to join the ira over dawn raids etc and pour out into the streets in protest. But nothing with all these abuse cases, infact many still flock to church.
Jim republicans poured into the streets over alledged harrassment of the catholic community, they done same concerning a wrongful arrest and considering these things are nothing compared to the abuse that has taken place isnt it strange that these same republicans are not coming out in protest at the absue that catholics from their community has suffered, and not forgetting we are not only talking about adults we are talking about children. So please Jim spare me you excusing the double standards
You are not doing anything about itm either, where are the protests outside catholic churchs in republican areas, where are the protests to the head offices of the catholic church, where are they Jim??
To accuse me of point scoring Jim is all to easy for you to try and avoid this topic. I am not point scoring and the fact you have accused me of it only proves that you know I have points to score with. My points are valid.
|
|
