There are three certainties in this life: death, taxes and the Irish establishment thanking God (or whoever they worship) that they are more virtuous than their predecessors.
Yet this last one can no longer be allowed to occur without response. With the news that the Government’s historians are to release their interpretation of the Mother and Baby Home files, the trial by media against the church’s role in these homes has already been convened publicly, with government mouthpiece RTE manipulatively using images of Our Lady on their reports regarding the homes rather than say, images of the Taoiseach’s office, absent fathers or of dysfunctional families, all of whom enabled these institutions to exist.
What is already being primed for release is that these homes had high mortality rates, with the implication that devoting all of their time and resources to said institutions was somehow beneficial to the Catholic church.
Firstly, on the question of infant mortality.
Many modern Irish people find it very difficult to understand just how poor the country was post Independence. In 1917, 9 in every 100 births ended with the child dying within its first year of life.
One of these tales of the deaths of children at a young age was recalled in the writings of James Joyce, who evoked his 3 year old brother’s death from typhoid and the shock and sorrow that it brought to their family, no less sorrowful because of its commonality.
George Joyce was reported to have said as his last words, ‘I am very young to die.’ When he was buried at Glasnevin, he was buried alongside the many other infants who had not made it past that stage of life due to the fierce poverty that the people of Ireland lived in, only a generation away from the Famine.
The infant mortality rate in these Mother and Baby Homes would always be higher than outside them, these were the poorest people in a poor society. To put it into perspective, over 5,000 children died before they reached their first birthday in 1916. In 2014, that number was 240. Imagine if such a facility as a Mother and Baby Home existed today, would you expect the rates of deaths in that home to be higher or less than those outside if we were to use that 240 number? Higher of course, for a variety of reasons.
It wasn’t just babies of course, if you were a 25 year old in Ireland in 1911, the life expectancy was only 41 years old. That meant, by the time you are 25, most of your life had already been lived.
The causes of deaths were significant too, in 1916, out of a total of 50,000 deaths, Infectious diseases and Influenza accounted for 2,000, TB accounted for 6,500 and Bronchitis and Pneumonia accounted for almost 7,000 deaths. Those infectious diseases included things like scarlet fever and whooping cough, which would disproportionately affect children in these institutions, not just in 1916 but for decades to come.
Statistics show that it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Ireland’s infant mortality rate declined enough to compare with the UK and Northern Ireland, coinciding with Ireland’s entry into the European Economic Community (EU).
If you were to consider a country that followed a similar trend, Japan had an infant mortality rate of 166/1000 in 1920 before falling to 12/1000 in 1975.
These stats have always been readily available, in fact, the Mother and Baby Homes stats now being released pair up with ones already available from the Vital Statistics reports. In 1923, the number of infant mortalities were as high as 1 in 3 births to unmarried mothers. By the 1940s, that number was still at 1 in 5, it did not fall substantially until the 1950s.
During the early decades of Independence, it is also worth noting that there was a deep Urban/Rural divide between infant mortality rates. Urban deaths were almost double those of rural homes.
Gastroenteritis was the leading cause of these sad deaths.
A study by the NCBI links this Gastroenteritis to the deaths in Mother and Baby Homes and those in poorer urban areas, through the provision of shared sanitation. In areas where shared sanitation occurred, infant mortality rates were at their highest due to the spread of this illness, part of the reason for the dramatic reductions in infant mortality rates leading into the 1960s were attributed to the exodus from urban areas and the decline of shared sanitation areas.
This study also found that urban areas were likely to have a higher risk of having a disability at an older age, thanks in part to the illnesses that they were exposed to as children because of these conditions.
Another factor was the lack of penicillin, which was not available until 1930, though Ireland would have to wait until the Health Act of 1947 for a proper framework for government support of its administration.
The question then arises, why did the Catholic church provide labour to the government and to the Irish people to mind the daughters/girlfriends and children that they either did not want or could not take care of? Why didn’t the church tell the deadbeat fathers, the dismissive parents, the greedy politicians to sort it out themselves? For the same reason that someone like Mother Theresa offered care that was imperfect, if they didn’t do it, nobody else would.
It is often implied that there was something in Catholic culture or teaching that made this a crucial part of the church’s social plans, by ‘correcting’ the ‘fallen away’ women. But this ignores the fact that such homes were not unique to Catholics, Protestants in Ireland also ran these homes, in fact they even permitted Catholic women to be brought into them. In one home, Bethany Home, 200 children were buried in unmarked graves between 1922 and 1949, something that modern journalists dwell on, but not uncommon for generations for whom things such as birth certificates were still relatively alien. One article by pro government outlet The Journal even referred to these children as ‘disappeared’, sensationalising the story when it was already tragic enough. The Church of Ireland’s role in these homes is even more significant as it was, in fact, Protestants who had originally brought Magdalene Laundries to Ireland in 1765.
There is also the idea that this system of what some have termed ‘incarceration’ was some integral part of Catholic teaching, even specifically the Irish church, a claim that is easily refuted even by the contemporaries who did not see any benefits in such things still existing. The Mother and Baby Homes were a State initiative, the purely Catholic homes for such mothers rejected the herd mentality of this approach. For example, Legion of Mary founder Frank Duff has been praised for the homes that he set up for women and children, which taught the women many basic skills so that they could work if needs be and take care of their children, encouraging the women to become independent and to take pride in their appearances. If it was Catholic policy to stick women into industrial homes, then why did someone as esteemed as Frank Duff break rank?
Whatever people feel about the past, one unforgivable aspect to this story is that there is also now the illusion that Ireland has moved on from such cruelty. It is easy for a middle class liberal living in an affluent part of Dublin to browse their articles on The Journal and to assume that everything has been made well, but for those living in the real world, that is far from the truth.
This past Christmas, 1,000 families spent it in emergency accommodation. This is no rarity, there are almost 3,000 children in emergency accommodation at any one time. These children are surrounded by drug users, prostitutes and those who are likely to attempt suicide. Dozens of homeless people die in Ireland each year, often freezing to death on the streets as Ireland’s woke generation walks past them, reading about the latest Mother and Baby home reports on their iPhones. One of the most recent deaths was a mother of 4 who died in a tent in Clondalkin, she lay there for a number of days before being found. In another shocking story, a homeless boy named Sam was photographed eating pasta off of the ground outside the GPO in Dublin.
Sam is amongst many who, while they may or may not be homeless, rely on soup kitchens, food parcels and handouts to survive from day to day, most of them organised by the Catholic Church.
On Christmas Day in 2020, the Irish church did as it did back then, offering help because no one else would. Despite Covid restrictions. the Capuchin Day Centre in Dublin fed thousands with their Christmas hampers and Christmas dinners while the Knights of Columbanus did the same.
The church is no longer generally speaking responsible for the care of children to mothers who have fallen on hard times, instead that goes to the Health Service Executive. Some of the stories reported on the HSE in recent years.
500 children going missing in state care between 2000 and 2011.
Children in HSE care ending up being prostitutes in brothels.
Dozens of children dying in state care each decade, of both natural and unnatural causes.
Hundreds of children known to HSE dying in preventable deaths each decade.
There have also been other more localised horror stories. Children being turned into drug mules in large numbers to feed the drug habits of the Irish public, leading to gruesome murders, along with child drug use itself becoming more rife. There is also the growth of youth suicide, the 4th highest in the OECD, alongside the frightening exposure of young people to pornography, with the Irish government even allowing MindGeek to operate here, despite them running a pornography empire that exploits child usage of their apps alongside child abuse images that they have allowed to be shared on them. Ireland also now has to deal with the exposure of both women and children to prostitution apps like Onlyfans which are allowed to operate here, perhaps because it keeps a section of the community subdued financially rather than advocating for the government to achieve a genuine economy that fosters growth.
Then of course there are also the horror stories of children being delivered alive and left to die in Maternity Hospital Abortion Wards in Ireland, something that the majority of Irish people do not want to admit that they voted for in 2018. 6,666 lives destroyed by the same afflictions of selfishness that led deadbeat dads and selfish families to dump their kids and grandkids into these homes in the 20th century. The same economic cruelties telling women that they have no other options.
The leaked numbers mooted in this Mother and Baby Home report involve 9,000 deaths over the course of 1922 to 1998. This would mean an average of 118 per year, bearing in mind a drop off in the 70s and 80s. These were the poorest people in the poorest conditions in one of the world’s poorest countries at the time. If we are discussing 14 homes, then that means single digits of deaths in each per year. As sad as it is, it is not in anyways surprising or inconsistent with anything considered here, those are the expected numbers of deaths for the terrible conditions that these people lived in.
In discussing the upcoming release, Catherine Corless’s picture was included by RTE in their report on this. For some reason it depicted her smiling at the grounds of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, a place where her work has played a significant role in the propagation of an urban legend that babies were flung into septic tanks by nuns, even though most people at the time of her claims (only 7 years ago) knew this was absurd. This story has led to many innovations and variations, especially from pro government ‘comedians’ like Waterford Whispers and Blindboy, who treat this fantastic theory as fact (even as they receive state monies while kids of today go homeless). The story has many avenues that hang in the air. Did the nuns kill the babies? Have their bodies been found? None of these questions get to be answered because ambiguity is allowed to reign where clarity and evidence for political convenience should surely be sought.
When a conference was organised to discuss this topic from an historical perspective in August, Patsy McGarry of the Irish Times reported on its cancellation but didn’t bother a follow up report on it having gone ahead. We tagged him in our posts on the event when it did take place, but to no reply unfortunately, even though he had replied to posts regarding the cancellation.
The sad thing was that the three men speaking at the conference, Brian Nugent, Eugene Jordan and Rory Connor, presented compelling and well researched arguments against many of the claims made against the church regarding these homes. Brian Nugent (author of @tuambabies) specifically discusses two things, the impossibility of the archaeological allegations surrounding Tuam and the myth that the Catholic church wielded power in Free State Ireland, it shouldered responsibility, but that was not power. Protestants still maintained many of the real positions of authority. Rory Connor detailed some of the false allegations which have been made in the intervening period. Eugene Jordan then presented a compelling detail of the deaths of children from what were contagious diseases, while journalists have spread the concept of kids being ‘slaughtered’ by nuns. Lastly, all three men engaged in a discussion on the failure of historiography to take these things into account.
We have attached those videos below, as they actually address some of the points raised in the Press Statement released by the Tuam Home Survivors in response to the ‘leak’ of the report this past week. It states that most of those children dying in that particular home were less than 12 months old, which was not uncommon before the 1950s, particularly when deaths peaked during the economic situation during The Emergency of World War II before dropping after the Health Act of 1947. They also mention ‘starvation’ as a cause of death because ‘marasmus’ was listed on the death cert, something that Eugene Jordan has addressed as being the cause of death resultant due to stomach problems from unsafe feeding, living and sanitation conditions, not to be confused with intentional withholding of food out of cruelty or lack of abundance. A Newsweek article from 2015 even pointed out that the poorest women in the United States, unmarried black women, are still 6 times as likely to lose their baby before their first birthday as their white counterparts. Their statement also says: ‘What we do know is that the Tuam pit whether described a cess-pit, waste-water tank or other, is where the bodies of the Tuam children were thrown’. Yet we do not know this. The most likely theory, which everyone agreed on when the story first broke but forgot on the run up to the 2018 Referendum Against the Unborn, is that it was a burial chamber where the nuns themselves were also buried and these bones were moved over time. Brian Nugent has even presented evidence of regular advertisements being placed for coffins.
Ireland was a very very poor place for much of the 20th century. It was cruel towards those that it did not want to take care of, then as now, that included unmarried women and their children. In the month of June alone in 2020 for example, almost 1,000 kids reported abuse in Ireland. That is not to consider those who did not report their abuse. The numbers of abused children have been steadily increasing in the past few years, with physical abuse making up 6,000 of the 24,000 reported cases of abuse in 2018. Irish people today have never known the true poverty that existed 100 years ago, the lockdown is the closest that they have come to those conditions, with both child abuse and domestic violence increasing steadily in that time. The cruelty has other faces. In the UK today, and likely Ireland, 85% of abortions are to unmarried women. The situation is the same across other aborto normative cultures, are we to believe that those who tell a woman just to shove a forceps into her and to destroy her child or take a dangerous pill to do so are kinder than those who came before them?
Statistics are often hard to personalise. One story from last year emphasised the personal cost of the failures of the modern faceless Irish state. Published in the Irish Times , it told the lifestory of Shane Griffin, a social worker who had committed suicide on New Year’s Eve 2019. As a child, Shane was put into foster care due to his mother’s mental illness. He ended up in 19 different placements between foster care and residential homes. He was abused in some of the homes that he was placed in and at age 16 he was returned to his mother, where he was abused sexually by a grown man. Shane referred to himself as, ‘an adult child of the Irish State’.
These Mother and Baby Homes were real cases, involving real people, no different from the real people of today. George Santayana once said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but it might be better to say that those who do not understand the past are doomed to repeat it. Such a lack of understanding is why Irish people are repeating the mistakes of the past again and again towards its children.
In trying to turn the Mother and Baby Homes into a tool to beat the church with, the politicians, journalists and pro government ‘comedians’ of today are allowing the homeless, the domestic violence victims and child abuse victims in their midst to go past them. Those who organised the New Year’s Even anti God sketch evidently filmed it over the Christmas period, out of RTE’s €200 million budget, when the likes of the Capuchin Day Centre and the Knights of Columbanus were preparing to feed thousands of needy children and their families. It’s healthy to criticise the problems and failings of the church, but it’s not not healthy to tolerate hypocrisy and complete nonsense.
In 2021, we can give thanks to God that those helping those people in need are from our church in such vast numbers. Just as it was 100 years ago, their efforts are not perfect, but they are better than nothing.
The authorities in the church meanwhile need to encourage men like Brian, Eugene and Rory who are trying to defend her good names. Mistakes were made, these homes were not nice places, but there is no need to allow for fantasies about babies being flung into septic tanks, which is being given as a reason by many for not attending Mass, not baptising their kids, and even for verbally abusing priests and nuns in the streets.