Ireland is regarded by many as a proud, historically conscious nation.
That could not be further from the truth however.
It is not particularly proud of its own existence and its historical consciousness is one that more often than not informs its self loathing rather than its pride in itself.
The current narrative of Irish history that prevails in the minds of the public, particularly in relation to religion, is one that erases the wrong doings of Britain and erases the charity and triumphs of Catholicism.
Many Irish people believe that Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries emanated out of a dark room in the Vatican, invented to punish Irish ‘fallen women’.
In reality, they were an invention of British Protestants. The first such institutions were created in Ireland in the 18th Century, at a time when the Penal Laws meant that the Catholic Church had no role in public life in Ireland of Britain. By the time that we saw what is known as ‘Irish Independence’ in the 1920s, the high death rates of impoverished children and the societal discord of widespread poverty meant that the state was keen to keep such institutions in operation. To be more accurate, the Irish people were keen to keep such institutions in operation, with many such buildings even housing women who were in fact married with a child.
In a popular tweet this week that illustrates the sheer ignorance of their own history, one Irish woman boasted of berating members of the Legion of Mary about the church’s record on women in Ireland.
Apparently the death of Sinead O’Connor was a particular trigger in this instance. O’Connor herself best illustrated this historical illiteracy and ignorance in 2015 when she said that she wished that Britain still ruled Ireland, evidently unaware of their role not just in bringing Magdalene Laundries to Ireland, but in enslaving countless Irish women to being disease stricken prostitutes for British soldiers. O’Connor said:
Frankly, I wish England had never left Ireland.
I think we would be a lot better off. We were going to be colonised by someone, and as it happened the coloniser who took over was the church and that was disastrous.
If the Brits hadn’t left that wouldn’t have happened.
There are two illustrative examples of this.
One is the case of the so called ‘Wrens of the Curragh’, women who were orphaned during the famine and turned to being abused as prostitutes by British soldiers. The situation and exploitation were so prevalent that a hospital had to be built nearby just to treat the sheer scale of those suffering from diseases transmitted sexually by British soldiers. Marriage records from the local area also show older men, some in their late 30s or 40s, marrying local girls in their late teens or early 1920s. For love, it is unlikely.
Another example leads us directly back to the Legion of Mary.
The infamous area known as the Monto in Dublin sprung up also in the post Famine era, where British soldiers again exploited Irish women and turned them into prostitutes. This continued even in post ‘independence’ Ireland, into the 1920s. No one showed kindness to these women quite like Frank Duff, the founder of the Legion of Mary.
Duff did not inherit a Protestant manner of treating vulnerable women, instead he applied a Catholic way of treating them.
You can hear his humanity here. It is a humanity and masculine virtue that we cannot find in any current public figure in Ireland. Duff went right into these areas and rescued these women from despair and he did so with compassion and in an effort to keep their dignity intact.
You can hear The Dubliners here mocking Duff and the Legion of Mary to their British audience in a song glorifying the infamous area.
Even the typically anti Catholic and West British newspaper The Irish Times have been glowing in their praise of Frank Duff.
In 2017, they wrote of his ‘kindness unmarried mothers’. It must be said that his kindness was unusual in all of wider Irish society, not merely in a religious setting.
In the 1930s, Duff opened the Regina Coeli hostel in order to help women in need, specifically those with children. Duff and the Legion of Mary helped to retrain these women so that they could seek employment to support their children, their children would be cared for in the hostel while they attended various courses as secretaries or something similar. Is there any similar example from this period? Is there one now?
The article then says:
The object, Duff said, was “to create “a home-life feeling about the place”. Duff stressed that the surroundings should be as beautiful as possible as “the silent influence of beautiful and artistic surroundings is incalculable”, Dr Kennedy recalled.
“He said that the ‘conduct of the women will in great measure be governed by their surroundings’. The women should be encouraged to take an interest in their appearance and one legionary suggested the introduction of several panel mirrors.”
The Regina Coeli still houses hundreds of women in need while the neighbouring Morning Star Hostel houses and feeds hundreds of men in need.
The Legion of Mary visits the sick in hospital, visits the elderly with no one else to do so.
It is the most successful Irish organisation of the past one hundred years, arguably more so than even the GAA. The latter boasts 500,000 members worldwide, the Legion of Mary has over 10 million, it has pierced the deepest parts of Africa, it is in the hidden heart of China, it is a very public part of religious life in South America.
Ireland today has fallen once again into record crime, record emigration, record drug use, high profile crimes of violence against women and the US State Department regards it as one of the worst places for human trafficking in the world.
If its people wish to make a difference, they can always volunteer to help the Legion of Mary care for women (and men) who are in need.
And if it wishes to point fingers at people from the past, perhaps they should muster the self esteem to do so at Britain’s legacy rather than at the heroic people like Frank Duff and Edel Quinn (the Legion’s saintly heroine in Africa).
