Michael Clifford: We’ve become indifferent to dead babies

The Tuam babies story this week says much about the past, but about the present also.

The graveyard in the grounds of the former so-called mother-and-baby home was first discovered by two 12-year-old boys, in 1975. One of them opened the concrete cover and was met with the horror below. Pretty quickly, the cover was drawn across again. In the 1970s, the past had not yet been acknowledged. Indeed, the past wasn’t even past.

The next major juncture in the story was last October, by which time local historian, Catherine Corless, had painstakingly compiled and matched records from the home. Corless concluded that the concrete tank must contain most, if not all, of the nearly 800 infants who had died in the home during its existence, between 1925 and 1961.

The story was first published in the Connaught Tribune on October 10 last, which reported that the number of babies allegedly involved was 788. Continuing research has brought this number up to 796.

Declan Tierney’s report in the Tribune began: “Research has shown that there are 788 children, from newborns to eight-year-olds, buried in a graveyard that was attached to an old orphanage in Tuam.

“And a group of interested individuals have now established the names of each of the children, what age they were when they died, and the causes of their deaths. It is now their intention to erect a memorial in their honour and this will contain the names of each of the 788 children.”

Tierney’s report stated that Tuam Town Council had been approached about funds.

That’s eight months ago. There was precious little reaction to the story. It made no waves.

The mainstream media did not pick up on it. In the dark past, such an oversight might have been attributed to a reluctance to upset the powers that were, such as the Church.

Does anybody really believe that the mainstream media today would ignore such a story on the basis of subservience? But the mainstream media is not the gatekeeper it once was. Social media often drives the agenda these days, but there was little take-up in cyberspace. And what about the tribunes of the people — politicians? Some of the most passionate comment about the story has emanated from Galway politicians, such as Colm Keaveney, Ciaran Cannon and Lorraine Higgins.

Politicians in this country pay far more attention to local than to national media.

Is it plausible that none of them, nor their staff nor close supporters, read the local paper back in October?

Then there’s the Bishop of Tuam, Michael Neary. Last week, he issued a statement on the matter. “I was greatly shocked, as we all were, to learn of the extent of the numbers of children buried in the graveyard in Tuam. I was made aware of the magnitude of this situation by media reporting and historical research.”

When did the bishop’s shock take hold?

Did nobody point out to him the news that was published in the local paper last October?

We move on to May 25, just a fortnight ago. The Mail On Sunday gave the story the full shock treatment. The paper had the added detail that the burial ground was actually a septic tank. That detail strikes a primal chord. The notion of throwing the bodies of society’s most vulnerable into a pit designed for waste spoke volumes for the times that were. Yet, the substantive issue was the same as it had been the previous October.

There was still little take-up. The news, over the following days, was dominated by the results of the local and European elections, not to mention the presence, among us, of Kim and Kanye.

The story only began to gain traction when the world outside looked in.

By last Wednesday, the mass grave, with its resonances of massacres and war zones, was making headlines in CNN, the major American newspapers, Al Jazeera, and as far away as Australia.

On Wednesday, on RTÉ’s News at One, Aine Lawlor introduced it as a story that was getting attention abroad. By that afternoon, the focus had shifted. It was as if the world outside had awoken the media here, and all other organs of state and society, to the horror that had been uncovered: ‘Wake up, Ireland! You have another scandal on your hands’. In the media, there is a condition known as ‘being too close to the story’. Reporters suffering from this tend to lose focus, and even objectivity, on the big picture, because of an extended period working in close contact with the parties involved.

Perhaps wider society has also got too close to the story of the brutality of the past. For the last two decades, the dark past has been tumbling out in all its horror.

Industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, symphysiotomy, clerical sex abuse, the wronged, the discarded, the punished, all the marginalised victims of a totalitarian society whose public morality was subcontracted out to the Catholic Church which, in turn, was obsessed with sex.

Is it possible that the drip, drip of these scandals has left the national psyche jaded, or even exhausted, by the emotional toll of acknowledging the long procession of the wronged?

Either that, or maybe many among us had believed that all of the scandals had already been aired, if not properly dealt with.

Then, along comes another. It says a lot that it took the glare of the outside world, and the primal detail of infants discarded in a septic tank, to awaken national outrage.

Now, establishing the facts should be the primary focus. The remains in the tank may account for some, all, or none of the infants who died at such a frightening rate during the 36-year existence of that home. A proper inquiry must establish how life was lived and how it died, not just in Tuam, but in the other so-called mother-and-baby homes in the State.

More high walls must be knocked down. How, for example, could a home run by religious, rather than dedicated medical personnel, have ever been regarded as a suitable place for the birth and nurturing of new life?

Is it any wonder that the mortality rate was so much higher in these institutions? After all, the State was asking the nuns not to nurture and care, but to hide from public view the results of what society at large regarded as the wages of sin.

Any inquiry must resist an impulse to focus primarily on blame.

The nuns’ regime may have been harsh, or even brutal, but it was tacitly approved by wider society. Those infants, whose lives were regarded as second-class, and their mothers, deserve no less than to have history properly recorded, even at this late stage of the excavation of the past.

Michael Clifford