Barry Clifford: Inconvenient Children

David Quinn, writing in the Sunday Independent today, has only one defense of the mother and child homes in Ireland and that is to find a similiar state of affairs elsewhere thus trying to help dilute the crime of infant murder if can be diluted at all. To parody Stalin: “One death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic” and lies the kernel of David’s tactics. But we are not talking about Sweden, it is Ireland and a Catholic one where more broken little bodies lie just beneath the ground and a nations conscience that still waits for closure. It is also because that Ireland was the most Catholic country in western Europe and it was a living nightmare then though David tries to tell us otherwise.

It is true Britain had led the way before us with Mother and child homes because they led the way here in Ireland too; after all they were the boss of all bosses. And David must remember that the Catholic church ruled them both before King Henry Viii got an idea that he would be better off without them. It is a pity that we did not go along more with old Henry on that one but it does take much longer to change a religion and a point of view than a tantrum from an overwight King suffering from gout and syphillis.

David feels miffed that Ireland is being compared to Stalin’s Russia or Pol Pot’s Cambodia and as he is so fond of statistic’s, I feel it is only fair to offer a relevant point of view with regard to same: Sweden is too far and too cold to matter but if we take 1935 as a random pivotal year to work on then that country had almost nine million people but very few deaths reagrding mother and baby homes. Stalin did not have mother and baby homes for unmarried mothers but did reach a statistic or two for political murder, but then he had 175 million to choose from. Ireland in proportion to them and Cambodia together topped them all.

By 1935 Ireland had already imprisoned over 175,000 children and their mothers by throwing them into baby homes, industrial institutions and Magdalene laundries. In Tuam, just one small town in county Galway, lie 800 babies in an anonymous pit large enough to build a house on one of those institutions, and there are many more to be found and that have already been for the unspeakable has yet to be spoken. In that pivotal year of 1935 Ireland had a population of just 2,800,000. That speaks of the collective grip of religious madness and little else in number terms alone.

Other religions, as David soundbites as a mitigating factor, had the same attitude to unmarried mothers, and many I daresay still do, but that does not make a great wrong right. It is the twisted and frightening  phycosis of religion that is the problem whether you wear a Catholic or a Muslm hat. 

The stoning to death of women still exists in backward desert baked countries and is irrelevant to Ireland and its own version of Catholicism and only is so far that if another 50,000 join her does not make one death any less than murder by any attachment or silent complicity in it by those involved. And a former editor of the Irish Catholic rag mag like David cannot mitigate their (the Irish Catholic church) blame out of these terrible crimes against mothers and their babies or of their other 'inconvenient children' as described by him, though I am sure he will never stop trying as long as the cheque does not bounce from the men dressed in black.

Barry Clifford