Ballymena native Liam Neeson, pictured below with Harvey Weinstein, has said that he will make a film on the Tuam Baby conspiracy theory.
Proponents of this theory claim, without evidence, that 800 babies were systematically murdered then flung into septic tanks in a Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. The motive? None provided, unless you count ‘being Catholic’ or ‘being a nun’, which would only make sense to the most irrational of anti Catholic minds.
Those proponents have repeatedly refused to carry out excavations in order to prove this story. Many of them were also aghast recently when the official report into Mother and Baby Homes made no mention of such an occurrence and in fact, made reference to a handyman being paid out of the nuns own pockets in order to build coffins for those children who died. Author Brian Nugent has also found evidence of advertisements from the County Council (who were actually responsible for the home, not the church) which were seeking donations of coffins.
As was common in early Twentieth Century Ireland, the infant mortality rate was significantly higher than in the rest of Western Europe. In 1917, for example, 9 in every 100 births resulted in the child dying before the age of 1.
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.
Where do we fit Neeson and the Tuam Conspiracy Theory into this?
At the beginning of the last decade, stories began to emerge which bizarrely equated children who were without birth certs in Tuam Mother and Baby Home with haphazard claims of bones having been found in various locations underneath the ground in subsequent decades, discounting works by county councils in the meantime which repeatedly dislodged and moved soil in the vicinity.
Although the initial claims of mass murders and babies being dumped in septic tanks were greeted with skepticism, by the time that they had been repeatedly resurrected in order to help pass referendums on marriage and abortion in 2015 and 2018 respectively, most of the public had come to accept them as fact, despite not being able to point to any evidence. As recently as this year, an image of a nun defecating and wiping her backside with a dead baby was repeatedly spread around social media in Ireland, with the caption, ‘Holy Sh*t’, before stating as fact that the nuns had indeed murdered and buried 800 children in Tuam.
In 2014, Irish Times journalist Rosita Boland published an explosive article which has been largely forgotten by those who propound the Tuam conspiracy.
In that article, entitled The Trouble with the Septic Tank Story, Boland wrote of her meeting with amateur historian Catherine Corless:
‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
The article continues:
The deaths of these 796 children are not in doubt. Their numbers are a stark reflection of a period in Ireland when infant mortality in general was very much higher than today, particularly in institutions, where infection spread rapidly. At times during those 36 years the Tuam home housed more than 200 children and 100 mothers, plus those who worked there, according to records Corless has found.
What has upset, confused and dismayed her in recent days is the speculative nature of much of the reporting around the story, particularly about what happened to the children after they died. “I never used that word ‘dumped’,” she says again, with distress. “I just wanted those children to be remembered and for their names to go up on a plaque. That was why I did this project, and now it has taken [on] a life of its own.”
The article rightly points out:
In 1840 a workhouse was built on a site off what is now Dublin Road. When the workhouse closed, the building was taken over, and from 1925 until 1961 it was used as the mother-and-baby home.
As author Eugene Jordan pointed out in a recent interview with Catholic Arena, what is happening here is that people like Neeson are beginning Irish history in 1922, thus rewriting Britain’s complicity in the Free State’s poverty out of history. The Mother and Baby Home has been characterised as a Catholic idea, despite the first Mother and Baby Home being Protestant run and the workhouse system of the British in the 1800s being more widespread and of a far more cruel nature.
Neeson has courted several controversies in the past number of years.
After playing the voice of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia in 2012, he stated that he was considering converting to Islam, and also bizarrely claimed that Aslan (written by committed Christian CS Lewis), ‘Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure but he also symbolises for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries’.
In 2018, speaking to the Irish government’s media arm RTE, he called the Me Too movement “a bit of a witch hunt.”
In 2019, he courted racial controversy by stating:
"I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I'd be approached by somebody - I'm ashamed to say that - and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some [uses air quotes with fingers] 'black bastard' would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him."
At some point, the church is going to have to stare down these allegations instead of running away from them. The official report itself,
A refutation of these absurd claims is not paramount to defending Mother and Baby Homes or the treatment of women in Twentieth Century Ireland.
Queen Elizabeth visits Ireland this week, an island that she still owns a significant part of, and unlike Pope Francis in 2018, there will be no figures like Liam Neeson lining up to criticise her for the acts attributed to her predecessors. Perhaps the hierarchy would do well to reflect as to why the head of the Anglican Church, after centuries of colonialism, famine and persecution towards Irish Catholics, gets more respect here than they do.
Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story (irishtimes.com)
Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes: The REAL Story — Catholic Arena
Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story (catholicarena.com)
