Recently, the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ, advertised Stolen, a new documentary with the description: “Between 1922 and 1998, over 80,000 unmarried mothers were incarcerated in church-run mother and baby homes. Tomorrow night, a new documentary [sic] Stolen explores the heartbreaking stories of these women and their families.”
Stolen does indeed tell a heartbreaking story, but it is only the story of a small number of the women and their families who spent time in the Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. It does not tell the story of the 80,000.
This is indicative of the battle to establish and control the narrative of the recent history of Ireland. For about 60 years after independence from Britain, Ireland was a Catholic country. It was not a theocracy of any sort, despite the desire amongst the modern cultural elite to represent it as such. It was—on the face of it—a devout country. Commitment and adherence to the Catholic faith was a cultural and social marker, even if it was not always internalised.
Every family had someone who had entered the religious orders. Often, they were people who should not have done so. They did not have a calling. Many priests, brothers, and nuns were ostensibly Catholic; but they turned their back on whatever calling they may have had through their behaviour and treatment of the most vulnerable. They professed one kind of life, but lived another.
In this, they were not alone. They lived at a time when society dealt with its problems differently than we do today. Often, it was the religious who stood above the standard of the time, offering care and refuge when society wouldn’t. Many dedicated their lives to providing corporal works of mercy. Looking back, so much of that good work is being forgotten, undermined, and undone by those who lived a lie.
They provide the foundation for the terrible stories that are now being selectively used to hammer nails into the coffin of the Church in Ireland. Any attempts at putting these stories into context are attacked as defending the indefensible. The truth is more complex; but it is always putting its boots on while the lies are halfway around the world. Never has this been more true than in the case of the Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, where the story that nuns had buried 800 bodies in a septic tank triggered a government organised ‘commission of inquiry.’
In January 2021, the long-awaited Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was released in Ireland. documenting the history of the institutions where unmarried mothers were sent with their babies. The report is 2,685 pages long. I spent time reading it from cover to cover upon its release, while the mainstream commentators in Ireland looked for soundbites cherry-picked from the report.
I wrote upon its release that it failed to live up to popular expectations that it was going to serve up on a platter the heads of the nuns and priests of Ireland. The report found, in short:
• The mother and baby homes were not a particularly Irish and Catholic phenomenon.
• The homes run by the nuns were usually better than the county homes run by the government.
• The nuns did not force women into the homes against their will.
• The nuns did not profit from running the homes.
• The nuns were not generally abusive.
• The nuns did not work women to the bone as has been widely alleged.
• Poverty and small mindedness were the reasons that women had to resort to entering the homes.
• Infant mortality was shocking mostly because of poverty and overcrowding, not deliberate neglect by the nuns.
None of these findings satisfied the many who were waiting for yet another denunciation of the Catholic Church in Ireland, where all the ills of society are blamed on the nefarious influence of the religious of Ireland. The Commission was chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy. She had previously Chaired of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin and the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, both of which have been instrumental in the demise of the Church in Ireland. Judge Murphy was expected to deliver the same results in her report into the Mother and Baby Homes.
Judge Murphy disappointed the commentariat by providing a balanced and nuanced report, and since its release there has been a concerted campaign to undermine it and the Commission more broadly, and ultimately to see it retracted in some way. It fails to fit the narrative, and its existence—along with the McAleese report into the Magdalene Laundries a few years before—undermines the truisms that the Catholic Church is intrinsically evil and to blame for all the failings of pre-modern Ireland.
The women who tell their stories in Stolen are entitled to do so. They are entitled to make a film that tells their side of the story. Many of them feel strongly that the Commission of Investigation did them an injustice, failed to represent their stories, and that the process of giving testimony was flawed and unclearly explained.
However, Stolen, we are told in the introductory credits, is funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the Television Licence Fee. It is not independently funded. From this perspective, it would be fair to expect a balanced documentary, in which the accusations raised could be countered and those accused would be given the opportunity to respond. No such counter-perspectives are provided for in the documentary. It is a state-funded documentary that pushes the blame away from the state itself and onto the religious who were tasked with providing social services when the state was absent during Ireland’s formative years.
It is another attempt to refute the Commission of Investigation, offering no right of reply and carried out at license payers’ expense. Perhaps Judge Murphy or others on the Commission were given the opportunity to participate. Perhaps some of the Congregations were contacted and given the opportunity to respond to some of the accusations levelled. Perhaps some of the countervailing voices that were heard at the time of the reports release, when the cacophony of outrage was in full swing, were invited to give their perspectives. But they do not appear. We hear nothing from them. There is no defence and no rebuttal.
Irish Senator Michael McDowall, himself no apologist for the Church, and a former attorney general in Ireland in the early years of this millennium, was one of those who defended the Commission’s report at the time. The former deputy prime minister told the Seanad (Irish Senate) that “The commissioners have not got fair or adequate acknowledgement of the massive amount of work they did to uncover a huge scandal in the way Ireland dealt with its most vulnerable people in the past.”
Yvonne Murphy herself gave a lengthy explanation for many of the criticisms levelled at the Commission and the report, as she refused to come before a Parliamentary Committee to explain why the Commission did not yield the right answers. Much of the criticism levelled at the Commission, and at the apparent reasons it failed to come to the expected conclusions, was that the testimony of survivors to a parallel Confidential Committee did not find its way into the report. Judge Murphy explains and refutes this:
The work of the Commission is reflected in its final report and its interim reports and not by commentators who seek to sweep aside its findings. While the Confidential Committee was separately constituted, its report is an important element of the Commission’s final report. It is not true to say that the testimonies of the women were “discounted” or “discarded” by the Commission. Professor Daly did not say this. Others did. The accounts given were very much taken into account by the Commission. They were relied upon to the extent that the Commission considered appropriate having regard to the totality of the evidence gathered by the Commission and before making its findings. Those accounts were also reported in a manner that preserved confidentiality in the lengthy Confidential Committee report which was, as directed, ‘of a general nature.’
The problem for many is that these testimonies were considered to be the totality of the story. Many wanted the bad stories—and there are many—to be the only story of the Mother & Baby Homes.
Judge Murphy clarified:
It must be noted that the number of mothers who spoke to the Confidential Committee is a tiny proportion of the total number of mothers in the institutions under investigation. 304 mothers gave testimony to the Confidential Committee; 18 were in the institutions before 1960. In the period 1960-1998 inclusive, there were 24,207 mothers in the institutions investigated—the experiences of 1 per cent of those are reflected in the Confidential Committee Report.
The many voices who had something positive to say are expected to be discounted and the story of the 1% is supposed to be the official history of the Mother & Baby Homes. A partisan documentary of a minority of voices is expected to supersede and usurp an official Commission of Investigation carried out diligently over many years and with great rigour and sensitivity. There is little resistance to this in Ireland.
One of the powerful moments in the documentary is then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s words in 2017 to the Dail:
Tuam [the Mother and Baby Home that prompted the investigation initially] is not just a burial ground, it is a social and cultural sepulchre. That is what it is. As a society in the so-called ‘good old days,’ we did not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings, we dug deep and deeper still to bury our compassion, our mercy and our humanity itself.
Referring to the scandal of the Bon Secours mother and baby home in Tuam, Kenny said “No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children”:
We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip, the wink and the elbow language of delight in which the holier than thous were particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what is called respectability. Indeed, for a while it seemed as if in Ireland our women had the amazing capacity to self-impregnate.
For their trouble, we took their babies and gifted them, sold them, trafficked them, starved them, neglected them or denied them to the point of their disappearance from our hearts, our sight, our country and, in the case of Tuam and possibly other places, from life itself.
This was the story of Ireland’s relationship with unmarried mothers. But it is not the story that many want to be told. Stolen dedicates significant energy in depicting the Church and the Nuns as the villains, and the only villains. That the Commission’s report put the blame on society, on community, and on the men who failed to stand up when they made a woman pregnant, is not good enough. The blame has to be apportioned on the Church. It is convenient for the state that it apportions blame away from itself, through the use of state funds.
Noelle Browne, a survivor of the Mother and Baby Homes, says, towards the end of the documentary, “Let the Catholic church face up to the horror … stop hiding it and protecting the Church. The government kowtows to the Catholic Church … they are criminals as far as I am concerned.”
There are few that can honestly believe anyone is kowtowing to or protecting the Church in Ireland nowadays. If anything, it is open season on the Church and no one has the temerity to defend it. Anyone who does is condemned as equally appalling. It is probably the most maligned institution in the country. The survivors who speak in Stolen are entitled to tell their story. They are entitled to be angry. They should be heard. They were wronged and deserve recompense and restitution. But theirs is not the only story and it is not the full story. The role of the Church is not the full story nor the only story. And this is where the problem lies.
Too many people insist that this should be the full story. The BAI (a state body now disbanded, whose functions were transferred to Coimisiún na Meán), using license payer money, seemingly bankrolled this venture without seeking a balanced perspective. Despite all the requests for RTÉ—the national broadcaster—to be bailed out, because the TV license is not generating enough revenue, there seems to be no shortage of funds when it comes to taking a one-sided swipe at the Catholic Church.
There are numerous examples from the past where the national broadcaster rushed to condemn the Church in Ireland. Many have already forgotten the high profile defamation case taken and won by a Galway priest, Kevin Reynolds, against RTÉ over a Prime Time Investigates programme. Almost everyone assumed he was guilty of abuse in Africa once the accusation was made, because the presumption of innocence no longer applies to priests in Ireland. He was fortunate to be able to rely on a DNA test to prove the accusations unfounded when hardly anyone would dare defend him. Others may not be so lucky when mob justice is in action and the assumption of guilt is assumed.
If the BAI funded a documentary that presented the Mother & Baby Homes in a wholly positive light and claimed all the religious were wonderful, wholesome, flawless individuals, then there would be uproar. It would be considered propaganda and a distortion of the past. And rightly so, because it would not be telling the full story.
Yet, for all the clamour about misinformation—or disinformation—that we hear now, we seem quite unconcerned about the repeated attacks on, and misrepresentation of, the Church and the religious. That is because, as a country, Ireland is now conditioned unquestioningly to accept the narrative put forward about the Church as rotten to the core.
This is not to say that the Church is innocent in all of this. Stolen was broadcast mere days before the release of the Report of the Scoping Inquiry into Historical Sexual Abuse in Day and Boarding Schools Run by Religious Orders, which tallied 2,395 allegations of sexual abuse across 308 schools that had been recorded by the religious orders that ran those schools.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate these issues from the problematic Mother and Baby Homes. In response to the Report, Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell, declared that the Catholic Church in Ireland will not achieve “authentic, enduring renewal and reform” until the abuse crisis is fully addressed:
It is vital that we come to recognise the dynamics of denial, and address them. Not just the call of the gospel, but basic human justice, demands that we not dismiss the witness of those who suffered abuse, but recognise their continuing hurt and suffering, and begin to come to terms with the fact that this darkness has roots deep within ourselves. When that darkness finds itself masked by outward displays of piety and exterior appearances of service, its destructive potential is amplified. Report after report, victim after victim, testifies to the horror unleashed by this manifestation of evil.
In response to the Scoping Report, the Government has committed to another Commission of Inquiry into the issue of sex abuse in schools. The Scoping Inquiry noted a 2022 Central Statistics Office Sexual Violence Survey that suggested that over 40,000 people over the age of 35 in Ireland are estimated to have experienced sexual abuse as a child in school, indicating that the problem runs far beyond only religious schools. There are 3,300 primary schools and around one thousand post-primary schools in Ireland. The Scoping Inquiry, looking at religious schools, covers only a small portion of the total, and the ratios indicate that abuse is equally as prevalent across all schools.
The current Irish prime minister, Simon Harris, rightly pointed out that there ought to be a collective national shame, yet for now, the finger seems to be pointed only at the Church and at the religious of Ireland’s past.
A Church Maligned
Photo by Fiona Dodd on Unsplash
Recently, the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ, advertised Stolen, a new documentary with the description: “Between 1922 and 1998, over 80,000 unmarried mothers were incarcerated in church-run mother and baby homes. Tomorrow night, a new documentary [sic] Stolen explores the heartbreaking stories of these women and their families.”
Stolen does indeed tell a heartbreaking story, but it is only the story of a small number of the women and their families who spent time in the Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. It does not tell the story of the 80,000.
This is indicative of the battle to establish and control the narrative of the recent history of Ireland. For about 60 years after independence from Britain, Ireland was a Catholic country. It was not a theocracy of any sort, despite the desire amongst the modern cultural elite to represent it as such. It was—on the face of it—a devout country. Commitment and adherence to the Catholic faith was a cultural and social marker, even if it was not always internalised.
Every family had someone who had entered the religious orders. Often, they were people who should not have done so. They did not have a calling. Many priests, brothers, and nuns were ostensibly Catholic; but they turned their back on whatever calling they may have had through their behaviour and treatment of the most vulnerable. They professed one kind of life, but lived another.
In this, they were not alone. They lived at a time when society dealt with its problems differently than we do today. Often, it was the religious who stood above the standard of the time, offering care and refuge when society wouldn’t. Many dedicated their lives to providing corporal works of mercy. Looking back, so much of that good work is being forgotten, undermined, and undone by those who lived a lie.
They provide the foundation for the terrible stories that are now being selectively used to hammer nails into the coffin of the Church in Ireland. Any attempts at putting these stories into context are attacked as defending the indefensible. The truth is more complex; but it is always putting its boots on while the lies are halfway around the world. Never has this been more true than in the case of the Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, where the story that nuns had buried 800 bodies in a septic tank triggered a government organised ‘commission of inquiry.’
In January 2021, the long-awaited Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was released in Ireland. documenting the history of the institutions where unmarried mothers were sent with their babies. The report is 2,685 pages long. I spent time reading it from cover to cover upon its release, while the mainstream commentators in Ireland looked for soundbites cherry-picked from the report.
I wrote upon its release that it failed to live up to popular expectations that it was going to serve up on a platter the heads of the nuns and priests of Ireland. The report found, in short:
None of these findings satisfied the many who were waiting for yet another denunciation of the Catholic Church in Ireland, where all the ills of society are blamed on the nefarious influence of the religious of Ireland. The Commission was chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy. She had previously Chaired of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin and the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, both of which have been instrumental in the demise of the Church in Ireland. Judge Murphy was expected to deliver the same results in her report into the Mother and Baby Homes.
Judge Murphy disappointed the commentariat by providing a balanced and nuanced report, and since its release there has been a concerted campaign to undermine it and the Commission more broadly, and ultimately to see it retracted in some way. It fails to fit the narrative, and its existence—along with the McAleese report into the Magdalene Laundries a few years before—undermines the truisms that the Catholic Church is intrinsically evil and to blame for all the failings of pre-modern Ireland.
The women who tell their stories in Stolen are entitled to do so. They are entitled to make a film that tells their side of the story. Many of them feel strongly that the Commission of Investigation did them an injustice, failed to represent their stories, and that the process of giving testimony was flawed and unclearly explained.
However, Stolen, we are told in the introductory credits, is funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the Television Licence Fee. It is not independently funded. From this perspective, it would be fair to expect a balanced documentary, in which the accusations raised could be countered and those accused would be given the opportunity to respond. No such counter-perspectives are provided for in the documentary. It is a state-funded documentary that pushes the blame away from the state itself and onto the religious who were tasked with providing social services when the state was absent during Ireland’s formative years.
It is another attempt to refute the Commission of Investigation, offering no right of reply and carried out at license payers’ expense. Perhaps Judge Murphy or others on the Commission were given the opportunity to participate. Perhaps some of the Congregations were contacted and given the opportunity to respond to some of the accusations levelled. Perhaps some of the countervailing voices that were heard at the time of the reports release, when the cacophony of outrage was in full swing, were invited to give their perspectives. But they do not appear. We hear nothing from them. There is no defence and no rebuttal.
Irish Senator Michael McDowall, himself no apologist for the Church, and a former attorney general in Ireland in the early years of this millennium, was one of those who defended the Commission’s report at the time. The former deputy prime minister told the Seanad (Irish Senate) that “The commissioners have not got fair or adequate acknowledgement of the massive amount of work they did to uncover a huge scandal in the way Ireland dealt with its most vulnerable people in the past.”
Yvonne Murphy herself gave a lengthy explanation for many of the criticisms levelled at the Commission and the report, as she refused to come before a Parliamentary Committee to explain why the Commission did not yield the right answers. Much of the criticism levelled at the Commission, and at the apparent reasons it failed to come to the expected conclusions, was that the testimony of survivors to a parallel Confidential Committee did not find its way into the report. Judge Murphy explains and refutes this:
The problem for many is that these testimonies were considered to be the totality of the story. Many wanted the bad stories—and there are many—to be the only story of the Mother & Baby Homes.
Judge Murphy clarified:
The many voices who had something positive to say are expected to be discounted and the story of the 1% is supposed to be the official history of the Mother & Baby Homes. A partisan documentary of a minority of voices is expected to supersede and usurp an official Commission of Investigation carried out diligently over many years and with great rigour and sensitivity. There is little resistance to this in Ireland.
One of the powerful moments in the documentary is then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny’s words in 2017 to the Dail:
Referring to the scandal of the Bon Secours mother and baby home in Tuam, Kenny said “No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children”:
This was the story of Ireland’s relationship with unmarried mothers. But it is not the story that many want to be told. Stolen dedicates significant energy in depicting the Church and the Nuns as the villains, and the only villains. That the Commission’s report put the blame on society, on community, and on the men who failed to stand up when they made a woman pregnant, is not good enough. The blame has to be apportioned on the Church. It is convenient for the state that it apportions blame away from itself, through the use of state funds.
Noelle Browne, a survivor of the Mother and Baby Homes, says, towards the end of the documentary, “Let the Catholic church face up to the horror … stop hiding it and protecting the Church. The government kowtows to the Catholic Church … they are criminals as far as I am concerned.”
There are few that can honestly believe anyone is kowtowing to or protecting the Church in Ireland nowadays. If anything, it is open season on the Church and no one has the temerity to defend it. Anyone who does is condemned as equally appalling. It is probably the most maligned institution in the country. The survivors who speak in Stolen are entitled to tell their story. They are entitled to be angry. They should be heard. They were wronged and deserve recompense and restitution. But theirs is not the only story and it is not the full story. The role of the Church is not the full story nor the only story. And this is where the problem lies.
Too many people insist that this should be the full story. The BAI (a state body now disbanded, whose functions were transferred to Coimisiún na Meán), using license payer money, seemingly bankrolled this venture without seeking a balanced perspective. Despite all the requests for RTÉ—the national broadcaster—to be bailed out, because the TV license is not generating enough revenue, there seems to be no shortage of funds when it comes to taking a one-sided swipe at the Catholic Church.
There are numerous examples from the past where the national broadcaster rushed to condemn the Church in Ireland. Many have already forgotten the high profile defamation case taken and won by a Galway priest, Kevin Reynolds, against RTÉ over a Prime Time Investigates programme. Almost everyone assumed he was guilty of abuse in Africa once the accusation was made, because the presumption of innocence no longer applies to priests in Ireland. He was fortunate to be able to rely on a DNA test to prove the accusations unfounded when hardly anyone would dare defend him. Others may not be so lucky when mob justice is in action and the assumption of guilt is assumed.
If the BAI funded a documentary that presented the Mother & Baby Homes in a wholly positive light and claimed all the religious were wonderful, wholesome, flawless individuals, then there would be uproar. It would be considered propaganda and a distortion of the past. And rightly so, because it would not be telling the full story.
Yet, for all the clamour about misinformation—or disinformation—that we hear now, we seem quite unconcerned about the repeated attacks on, and misrepresentation of, the Church and the religious. That is because, as a country, Ireland is now conditioned unquestioningly to accept the narrative put forward about the Church as rotten to the core.
This is not to say that the Church is innocent in all of this. Stolen was broadcast mere days before the release of the Report of the Scoping Inquiry into Historical Sexual Abuse in Day and Boarding Schools Run by Religious Orders, which tallied 2,395 allegations of sexual abuse across 308 schools that had been recorded by the religious orders that ran those schools.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate these issues from the problematic Mother and Baby Homes. In response to the Report, Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell, declared that the Catholic Church in Ireland will not achieve “authentic, enduring renewal and reform” until the abuse crisis is fully addressed:
In response to the Scoping Report, the Government has committed to another Commission of Inquiry into the issue of sex abuse in schools. The Scoping Inquiry noted a 2022 Central Statistics Office Sexual Violence Survey that suggested that over 40,000 people over the age of 35 in Ireland are estimated to have experienced sexual abuse as a child in school, indicating that the problem runs far beyond only religious schools. There are 3,300 primary schools and around one thousand post-primary schools in Ireland. The Scoping Inquiry, looking at religious schools, covers only a small portion of the total, and the ratios indicate that abuse is equally as prevalent across all schools.
The current Irish prime minister, Simon Harris, rightly pointed out that there ought to be a collective national shame, yet for now, the finger seems to be pointed only at the Church and at the religious of Ireland’s past.
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