TThe Irish state has made its fair share of apologies in recent years. In 1999, then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologized to victims of abuse by state religious institutions. Ten years and a report of institutional abuse later, his successor, Brian Cowen, apologized again.
In 2013, Enda Kenny, visibly moved, hit her chest over the horrors of the Madalena laundromats, where thousands of women were arrested and abused. In 2019, taoiseach Leo Varadkar twice wore state sackcloth and ashes, first for the sexual abuse of children in day schools and then for the lies told to more than 1,000 women in a cervical exam scandal.
Two weeks ago it was taoiseach Micheál Martin’s turn, and this time he was apologizing to the thousands of women and children who passed 14 homes for mothers and babies and four state-run county homes; its treatment is the product of a “suffocating, oppressive and brutally misogynistic culture”.
Among the many people to whom Taoiseach was apologizing was me and my birth mother, Jane. Pregnant at 19 and victimized by what Martin called “a deep failure of empathy, understanding and basic humanity for a long time”, Jane arrived at the doors of St Patrick’s mother and baby’s home in Dublin in January 1968, the largest such a home in the country, and signed a paper stating that she wanted to put her baby up for adoption.
Four months later, I was born; two days later, Jane changed her mind and said she wanted to be with me. Too late, they said, you signed the papers and that’s it. She stayed for another three months, but no meaningful contact with me was allowed. It was better this way, they said.
It was also a lie. A terrible lie that changed your life. The Adoption Act of 1952 specifies that consent is not valid “unless it is given after the child reaches the age of six months”.
In the late summer of 1968, I was adopted. Jane would never have other children. It would be 35 years before we saw each other again, the reunion requested by Jane and brokered by the adoption agency, which made us exchange letters for several months before making an appointment. In the months and years that followed, we struggled to tell each other our respective stories – and to reconcile the fact that the course of our lives was determined by a lie.
In her most vulnerable moment, Jane was denied the dignity of the truth. Any compassion she received came wrapped in a grotesque ideology disguised as a moral code, which treated vulnerable girls as guilty of an intolerable sin and totally worthy of reproach.
In the decades prior to my birth, this sin was further exacerbated by a perverse belief that, because a girl became pregnant outside of marriage, she passed on the seed of her transgression to her descendants, condemning them, in turn, to a lifetime depravity. The progressive notes of the 1960s changed the moral mood of the song a little, but Jane and all the other girls in St. Patrick’s and beyond were still sinners – pitiful, perhaps, but also free will and choice.
For an apology to have any weight, it must come with a commitment to never repeat the terrible crimes that led five successive prime ministers to rise up in Dáil Éireann and apologize to the country.
Martin spoke of a “profound generational error” and acknowledged that it is “the duty of a republic to be willing to take responsibility. Being willing to face hard truths and accept parts of our history that are deeply uncomfortable. “
The hard truth is that the last century of Irish history has a line of cruelty and insensitivity against the innocent, the poor, the marginalized and the pregnant, perpetrated by a state and its agencies and tolerated by a society infected with an asphyxiating and cowardly Catholicism that did not tolerate concessions.
Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people passed through industrial schools, Madalena laundries and homes of mothers and babies, their suffering rationalized by a moral barbarism that treated them as perverse and defective impediments to the march of a new nation with many other growing pains .
However, despite all the decided advances that Ireland has unquestionably made towards greater tolerance in recent decades, that line still exists, and we are not entirely removed from the stench of what Kenny described in 2009 as “distinctly cruel and ruthless Ireland” lacking a quality of mercy ”.
It ignites otherwise in the direct provision, the purgatory system that Ireland uses to prosecute asylum seekers, especially people of color. Established in 1999 – three years after the closing of the last Madalena laundry and just a year after the last home for mothers and babies to close its doors – this network of private for-profit accommodation centers has seen more than 60,000 people going through a device described in 2020 by the Irish Commission on Human Rights and Equality as a “serious violation of human rights”. Even Irish President Michael D. Higgins criticized the system as “totally unsatisfactory in all respects”.
Stories of overcrowding, abuse, sexual harassment, racism and depression are continually leaking into the public domain, as well as the fear that if someone in the system demonstrates against any difficulty, it could lead to being moved to a less desirable location or even harm your asylum application.
The fear of arbitrarily applied discipline echoes the constant terror felt by those in previous institutions and laundries, their humanity diminished by a system designed for “others” them. The same is true of asylum seekers, whose existence behind the walls of direct benefit is regularly ignored or dismissed without empathy.
A common refrain around the mother’s report and the baby’s home is: how could we let this happen? The answer is complex and painfully simple. Yes, it’s all about the history and power structures of the church and the state and systemic misogyny. But it is also because we allow a vulnerable sector of society to be dehumanized.
The country did this with the Madalena laundries and industrial schools. We are doing this with direct provision. The time to fix it is now: otherwise, in the coming years, we will see another taoiseach make another apology.
• Fionn Davenport is the editor of the Irish Travel News Network. He is currently based in Manchester