A grim picture of a cold and callous Ireland that damaged the lives of tens of thousands people by consigning them to institutions emerges from the report of the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes.
It found that mothers and babies suffered material and emotional deprivation in the institutions, where infant mortality was sometimes rampant and women felt they had no choice but to give up their children for adoption.
The huge report, which runs to some 3,000 pages, is a scathing indictment not just of the institutions it examined over a period of five years, but of the society that required them.
Indeed, the report is principally a condemnation of that society – its rigid rules and conventions about sexual matters, its savage intolerance, its harsh judgmentalism, its un-Christian cruelty.
Those seeking to deflect blame from the people and families that made up Irish society onto the religious orders who ran some of the homes will find little encouragement in its pages.
It says that the responsibility for the harsh treatment suffered by the women “rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families.”
The prevailing social mores which promoted this practice, the report finds, was “supported and contributed to by the State and the churches”.
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The principal concern of many families was not for the women who became pregnant, but for their own reputation. One witness told the committee that her mother had “called her a prostitute and a whore. Three of her uncles were priests and her parents were worried about how her pregnancy would affect them. Both sets of parents were also very concerned about how an ‘unmarried pregnancy’ would affect the careers of the witness’s brothers.”
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There are also “disquieting” findings of infant mortality in some institutions; in one year, 1943, 75 per cent of the children who were born or who were admitted to the Bessborough home in Cork died. It says that before 1960, the homes did not save the lives of “illegitimate” children (as they were legally termed then), in fact, the children were more likely to die in the institutions.
