Tim McInerney:
Hello, everyone. Tim here. We don’t have time for a full questions and answers session this week, but we couldn’t ignore all the great feedback we got from you about our last episode, so thanks everyone for your shares and ratings. We’re thrilled so many people were interested in the subject and we’ll definitely be following up more on the knowledge gap in future. There were two things too that loads of people pointed out to us, so I thought I better mentioned them. Firstly, that the Scottish education system is of course different from the one in England, so lots of statistics that we mentioned won’t apply there. If you have any comparisons between the syllabi in Scotland and England, please let us know because it would be really interesting to explore. Secondly, I got one of my dates wrong. The Victoria statue wasn’t actually removed from Dublin’s government buildings until 1948. So shout out to Shane Hennigan on Twitter for setting us straight on that one. It really makes it even more interesting, actually, since, of course, that was around the time that the Irish Republic was officially declared. So thanks, Shane, and thanks to all of you. Let’s get on with the episode.
Naomi O’Leary:
Hello. Welcome to Irish Passport
Tim McInerney:
Let’s do it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
I’m Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney:
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK. I’m recording one, two to three. OK.
Tim McInerney:
Hello.
Naomi O’Leary:
Welcome back, everybody, to the Irish Passport. Did you recognize the sound of those bells?
Tim McInerney:
It’s a familiar sound, Naomi.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So if anyone spent any time in Ireland or you listened to Irish News, our public broadcaster sounds this. It’s called the Angelus Bell and it’s sort of a symbol, I suppose, of, you know, the institutional embeddedness of Catholicism in Ireland. We played it because today we’re looking at the Catholic Church and its relationship with Ireland past and present.
Tim McInerney:
Indeed. Coming up on this episode, Naomi’s is gonna be talking to the now quite famous local historian Catherine Corless, whose incredible revelations about secret burial sites in Catholic mother and baby homes was just the latest of many scandals to have recently rocked the Church in Ireland.
Catherine Corless:
What really kept me going was the silence of the people who should be helping, who should be giving me answers. I was being fobbed off the whole time and I was being discouraged by people in power and people who should have been there to help. And that angered me, and that, I just had to. It just drove me to define justice for them.
Naomi O’Leary:
And we’ll also be hearing from journalists, Ellen Coyne, about a recent maternity hospital row in Dublin, which has become emblematic of Ireland’s backlash against Catholic institutional control.
Ellen Coyne:
So the core of the problem is the Irish public would pay for this hospital to be built and then as soon as it was, it would effectively be owned by a religious congregation because it owns the land. Nobody ever anticipated the scale of the absolute uproar.
Naomi O’Leary:
We’ll also hear from the senior doctor who resigned in protest at the plan.
Peter Boylan:
I felt it was wrong. I said that if this gets out into the public arena, or when it gets out, people will not be happy with that arrangement. In particular, women, would not be happy with that arrangement.
Tim McInerney:
Yup, three great interviews coming along there in just a little bit. And in fact, there is so much to talk about in this episode that we’ve decided to make it a little bit longer than usual. But even at that, we’ve only really managed to look at a few facets on this enormous theme. So we hope that you’ll forgive us for everything we’ve had to leave out. Hopefully we’ll be able to get around to a lot more that’s connected to this in future episodes.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely. So we’re going to kind of park sexuality and we’re gonna kind of park women’s rights only just touching on them. We plan to dedicate entire episodes to those in the future. So we should probably start, I think, Tim, by stating this is quite a sensitive topic and, you know, because it’s a matter of faith, it’s difficult for people to see beyond their own biases. So let’s just state what our biases are to begin with.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, fair enough. I think we should mention from the outset it might be fair to say that neither of us are particularly religious.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yes, myself. I’ve never actually belonged to any church or religious institution. I did report on the Vatican when I was a correspondent for Reuters in Rome. I was in St. Peter’s Square when Pope Francis was elected and when he came out on the balcony and that was like a really special moment that I’ll never forget. This is to say that I’m not hostile towards religion, but I do struggle quite a bit with some of the basic tenants that are common to all faiths. In terms of my family background, my parents come from two different backgrounds, one is Catholic and one is Methodist, and they married at a time when that was a big deal. Essentially, I grew up without religion because they made an agreement between themselves that they wouldn’t bring up the children in either religion. You know, we could decide for ourselves, when we were of age, but we were culturally Christian, so we would have Christmas and Easter. The family story goes that my grandmother baptized me in the kitchen sink when I was a baby to stop me going to limbo.
Tim McInerney:
I don’t think you’re the only one, actually, Naomi. I’ve heard her these stealth baptisms being, stories about that quite a bit by well-meaning grandmothers. So for my part, I was brought up in the Catholic tradition, but I think a lot of Irish people will identify with this, it wasn’t actually a very religion-based experience. I mean, I know that must sound super strange. In my experience anyway, the religion gave a structure to local life. So mass and weddings and communions and especially funerals were a kind of social glue, especially in rural areas where large groups of people might not get opportunities to come together otherwise, you know. In Irish villages, there’s very little public infrastructure, So the church kind of stood in for that physically.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so it has, like, a useful role, kind of bringing people together for occasions.
Tim McInerney:
Practically speaking, yeah, just to bring a lot of people into one room at one time. But:
Naomi O’Leary:
Interesting.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, as far as I could see, it was more about social respectability, really, than it was actually about religious doctrine.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so you’re saying that even though people might be coming together regularly under the auspices of the church, they actually might not be that religious?
Tim McInerney:
I mean, I don’t claim to speak for anyone else, of course, but this is what it seemed like to me, and not just in the church environment, even within the schools and within the institutional environment as well. It felt like, and I might have been imagining this, but it felt like nobody really cared if you actually believed in God or not, you know? It wasn’t the point; that’s what it felt like. Okay. And then there was this odd mixture of disrespect and deference, which kind of went together. I think that really characterizes the Irish Catholic tradition.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. That’s such an Irish thing as well. Like deference to authority is not something that you will find easily in Ireland.
Tim McInerney:
Right. If anyone’s seen this the sitcom from the 1990s, Father Ted, I think that really captures that, actually, it really captures that feeling of farce, you know, and that was a really real feeling, to me anyway. It felt like everyone kind of had to humour these priests and nuns because they just had so much power. So I think in total, it’s an important caveat to remember that that a lot of nominal Catholics, you know, wear and have always worn this identity very loosely.
Naomi O’Leary:
I don’t know, for myself, I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to the conclusion that religion and ritual and the structures of the church play a really important role in people’s lives, you know, for humans, particularly at momentous times, like, you know, when you have to deal with a death or a marriage, you know, it gives you a script and a sense of occasion. And it’s really important for people, you know, even if it might not be strictly rational, it’s hugely effective in a way, you know, it works for people. And also traditions are so incredibly tenacious, you know, and they’re actually part of our heritage. They’re ours.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. That they are ours in lots of ways. A lot of people who have left religion behind still only have these kind of milestones to work with. You know, they only have the first holy communion or that or the marriage in a church or whatever; this is all they’ve ever known. And it belongs to them as much as anyone else, really. I mean, let’s face it, a lot of these traditions all over Europe and, Ireland included, are pre-Christian anyway, you know, like they were there long before the church came. And like you say, it looks like they’re gonna be there long before the church goes away, long after the church goes away.
Naomi O’Leary:
Well, let’s take a look at the figures on that. So according to the most recent census, which is from 2016, there are about 3.7 million members of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland, so that’s about 78 percent of the population.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And even though that’s a massive figure, that’s actually fallen quite dramatically from a much higher figure of 84 percent in only 2011 in the census.
Naomi O’Leary:
And before that, it was even higher. I mean, it is the overwhelmingly dominant religion in Ireland. But I think it is telling as well to look at mass attendance, historic mass attendance. Today in the Republic of Ireland there is one of the highest rates of mass attendance in the western world, so about 46 percent of the Catholic population attends mass weekly. Rewind to the 1970s, this would have been like 91 percent.
Tim McInerney:
Jesus.
Naomi O’Leary:
Which is just, it’s amazing to think of.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it’s pretty unbelievable, 91 percent of anyone doing anything really is quite something. But yeah, I mean, it also shows you how the percentage of Catholics in Ireland totally overshadows other religions in the country. We’re talking about the Republic, of course. The next biggest affiliation after the Catholic Church is the Protestant Church of Ireland, and that only counts about 100,000 members in the Republic. And this is, you know, one of the reasons why the country has become so associated with Catholicism in the popular imagination.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, it’s kind of understandable but it is a really ingrained cliché, like the Irish priest or nun or policeman, actually, it’s definitely a stock feature in American pop culture, I think. Now that probably did reflect reality back in the mid 20th century. I mean, now we get a lot of press from African countries and places like the Philippines, but probably back in the day, you know, Ireland was a huge exporter of priests and nuns. And now if we look at today or our most recent figures in 2014, there were only five priests ordained in Ireland. Five.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah.
Naomi O’Leary:
I mean, I think that is an astonishing reflection of the turnaround that the church has had in recent years.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, for sure. And I think it’s fair to say that that the stereotypes that go along with it have become long out of date, really for a while now. But it’s still, in France, for instance, where I live, whenever you see an article about Ireland in the media, it’s often introduced first and foremost as a strictly Catholic country. And this always happens, especially when the country’s doing, I think, progressive, which can be really reductive, you know, and frankly unrealistic.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Any cultural issue that’s reported about, internationally, about Ireland is always prefaced with majority Catholic Ireland or traditionally Catholic Ireland. It kind of bugs me because sometimes Catholicism is relevant to the story and is relevant to what goes on and on it, and sometimes it’s just not. And I also think it’s really important to make a distinction between the church as an institution, you know, like a power and what people actually practice and believe.
Tim McInerney:
Like, paradoxically, actually, one of the reasons why the Catholic Church in Ireland has so often been in the international media these days is because the country is in a pretty dynamic moment in terms of its Catholic past. It’s a moment that’s pretty dramatic, actually, in some cases quite conflictual.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, that’s true. And not just in international press, but also in Irish press. I mean, issues to do with social, ethical questions are often on the front pages of Irish newspapers now, because this is a moment when there’s a kind of a reckoning with that past. I think, you know, it’s interesting. I think it’s the generation that grew up in a period of scandal for the church is now reaching a certain age.
Tim McInerney :
The seeds of this have been going on really now for about 30 years. If we think back to the 1990s, a lot of our listeners will remember when the Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live and that was a massive scandal. I mean, it wasn’t just a scandal in Ireland, it was a scandal in the United States.
Naomi O’Leary:
I think her tapes were burned in America and everything.
Tim McInerney:
Absolutely, yeah, steamrolled. People were steamrolling them, you know. I mean, this was, it was just such a shocking thing to do back then. But as an Irish person doing that, as a young Irish person doing that, I think she really represented the seeds of a growing number of people who resented, excuse me, the measure of social and political control the church hard, especially at that time in our society. And that was way before the big, bigger scandals had even broken.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. It’s certainly something that I noticed growing up there at this palpable kind of streak of anti-clericalism. Like a priests were such a — I don’t know. No one had a positive word to say about them. You know, the song by Hozier, Take Me to Church? That’s such an interesting one. I remember when that came out and just listening to those lyrics; to me, it really it was like a musical expression of that sentiment among the younger Irish generation. You know, rebelling against the strictures of the church, particularly regarding sexuality.
Tim McInerney:
Sure.
Naomi O’Leary:
I think the key moment, really, that we have to address is the gay marriage referendum of 2015.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Right. And I mean, like we will probably harp on about this quite a bit in future episodes.
Naomi O’Leary:
Undoubtedly.
Tim McInerney:
Undoubtedly. And Irish people do as well, and it’s not unfounded because this really was a game -changing moment and everyone felt it in 2015. Certainly as regards to the Catholic Church, it looks like a litmus test to everyone. It was like this was going to be one huge test to see if the old days were over or not. And if this referendum failed, it meant that nobody had really moved on. And this was going to be a way to gauge that.
Naomi O’Leary:
And, of course, during the campaign, Leo Varadkar, you know, the new leader of Fine Gael, who is openly gay, I think he made his name a little bit in it because he came out on national radio, and that was like a defining moment of the campaign.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, he was Health Minister at the time, wasn’t he? What was it? Like, 63 percent of people voted for equal marriage in the end. You know, a majority in almost every single constituency.
Naomi O’Leary:
It was in the 60s. I don’t remember the exact figure except for Roscommon, that was like the one holdout county.
Tim McInerney:
That was it. The majority in every one except for Roscommon, shame.
Naomi O’Leary:
Shame.
Tim McInerney:
Shame
Naomi O’Leary:
So to me, as soon as that referendum was passed, instantly the question was, is there now going to be a row over abortion? You probably know that abortion is almost completely banned in Ireland. There’s a constitutional ban. I think that’s gonna be a harder fight to change than gay marriage. Believe it or not. But we’ll park that and we’ll deal with that properly in its own time. But Tim, actually, I wanted to cover this early on. Can we just set out the historical reasons why the Catholic Church became so prominent in Ireland?
Tim McInerney:
Right. I was kind of racking my brains about how to do this because it really is a very long, and to give it its dues, very illustrious history. But it would take us you know, it would take us a 500-page book to get through properly.
Naomi O’Leary:
That could be a future project, Tim.
Tim McInerney:
I’ll leave it up to better-informed people than me. But to bring it down to a potted history, I’ve decided to choose five landmarks in Ireland that people might be familiar with, that I think kind of sum up Catholicism in the country.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. Landmarks like buildings? Like a potted history of Catholicism in buildings?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, more or less.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay.
Tim McInerney:
We’ll see how I do. Okay. Right.
Naomi O’Leary:
Go for it.
Tim McInerney:
So landmark number one is Clonmacnoise. This used to be a really huge tourist centre, actually, but it’s been a bit abandoned in the last few years, which is a pity because it’s really striking. This is a monastery.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh, it’s yeah, it’s the medieval monastery. And it has one of those round towers, right? It’s kind of a tourist brochure staple.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, for sure. It’s very iconic. So I chose this building first to highlight that Ireland was, since the early Middle Ages anyway, a very important country for the church because it became the stronghold of the Catholic religion, during the Dark age. When the rest of Europe fell to the barbarians after the collapse of Rome, the most precious Catholic manuscripts were sent to monasteries, like Clonmacnoise, to be copied and kept safe.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh, wait. Okay. So I’ve heard this said that the Irish saved civilization. Is that what they’re talking about?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, more or less. And it’s not an understatement. So to give you an example, you know, we wouldn’t have things like the Iliad or The Odyssey if they weren’t kept safe in these monasteries. But once this age begins to recede, Irish missionaries went back into mainland Europe and started promoting these books of philosophy again.
Naomi O’Leary:
Wait. So they were like re-Christianising everybody?
Tim McInerney:
More or less, yeah. If you go to Switzerland, for instance, there’s a cynical Saint-Gall that city was founded by Irish missionaries in the Middle Ages.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, like Ireland was like a backup copy of Catholicism?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So this always kind of casted it as a very powerful connecting piece to Western Christianity. And there was actually an entire sub religion called Celtic Christianity in the early Middle Ages. If anyone’s ever seen the Book of Kells on visits to Ireland, you know, this is kind of symbolic of that branch of Christianity. But this was later suppressed actually by Rome because it was just too powerful.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. Okay. So that’s Clonmacnoise. And I can see like this is perhaps where Ireland gets the name the lands of Saints and scholars.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah.
Naomi O’Leary:
So that’s a monastery. Well, what’s your next landmark, Tim.
Tim McInerney:
- So I’m jumping forward a thousand years.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay.
Tim McInerney:
And we’re gonna look at the mass rocks. And these are actually quite intriguing. They’re all over the country and they can be quite difficult to identify, actually.
Naomi O’Leary:
Mass rocks?
Tim McInerney:
Mass rocks, yeah. In the 18th century, for the entire century, actually, penal laws were imposed on Ireland, kind of a tool of colonization. The Catholic majority in Ireland were forced to relinquish a lot of their civil rights to the Protestant elite, which was taking over the country at the time, and Catholic worship and education actually had to be carried out in secret locations a lot of the time.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, so wait. These mass rocks, then they’re like makeshift altars?
Tim McInerney:
Oh, yes, exactly. Yeah.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. Okay. And they’re in fields and stuff? Right. So this was a way of an underground continuing of the religion that was being suppressed by these laws?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it was. And I think they’re more important as a piece of mythology than they were, practically speaking, because for generations afterwards, you know, people got to point to them and say that’s you know, that represents us, that represents our oppressed identity.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh, well, that must’ve been a really powerful symbol. I can kind of see how we had the development of a class identity, the impoverished, suppressed but insurgent Catholic majority and a privileged, Protestant ruling class who were loyal to Britain. I can understand why there is, kind of, an underground but very strong association with of Catholicism with Irish national identity. Of course, that’s historically inaccurate. That’s one of my pet peeves but we’re gonna get to that later. Okay, Tim, and what’s next What’s your next building?
Tim McInerney:
Alright. Next up, we have we have a big one. We have a Maynooth, which is still standing. It’s the biggest seminary on the island and that was established in 1795.
Naomi O’Leary:
A seminary?
Tim McInerney:
A seminary, yeah. It’s a seminary and a college and they have a university there now as well, actually. So after the penal laws were repealed, the church took back control in Ireland with a bit of a vengeance, really. The colonial administration realized that the Catholic Church was actually quite useful in governing the Catholic Irish people. So they gave them back, you know, a lot of control and allowed them a bit of a free reign. So for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Maynooth College was home to this incredibly powerful Catholic hierarchy, which worked in tandem with the colonial administration and later they worked with the independent state.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so the British Empire sort of outsourced some of its ruling to the church?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Not in any official level, really, but that’s kind of how it worked. And they both had the same ultimate goal, really, which was, you know, gaining control of the majority. Maynooth exerted such social control and political influence, in fact, that in many ways its hierarchy has been seen as a kind of shadow government in Ireland until recently enough.
Naomi O’Leary:
That sounds really spooky.
Tim McInerney:
The church did offer this whole infrastructure of education and social charity that really hadn’t existed actually during the previous 18th century. So it offered also a kind of sort of alternative political system for Irish Catholics who were at that stage pretty disenchanted, as you can imagine, with their imperial rulers.
Naomi O’Leary:
Interesting. Okay. So we’ve done three. So what’s next?
Tim McInerney:
- So we’re pulling up into more recent history now. Next up, I pulled out the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin’s Parnell Square.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh right. Yeah.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. I mean, like, this is one that people probably won’t have been to because you could pass it very easily without seeing it. It’s a memorial to various Irish rebellions, including the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. But if you go there, you’ll see that it’s all actually built around this huge water feature in the shape of a cross. It opened in 1966. It was opened by Éamon de Valera, the Taoiseach at the time, and he was, of course, a veteran of The Rising himself. And in many ways, it kind of encapsulates Devil Lara’s vision of Catholic Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
Like, how can we describe that vision? That da Valera’s Ireland?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, like the words will strike fear into people. I mean, not even to joke about it, because the decades after independence are often considered as some of the most oppressive years of Catholic social policy.
Naomi O’Leary:
Book banning and all that kind of —
Tim McInerney:
Book banning and book burning. And we heard about that in the Irish language episode a little bit. The church was given a central role in the identity that the new Republic was building for itself. And that’s what this monument shows.
Naomi O’Leary:
In this period, from my understanding of it, de Valera is kind of seen as perpetuating a very isolationist Ireland, which was modelled on very idealistic notions about the past. I think it was a radio speech that he made in the 30s or so, that kind of sums up this vision that he had of like happy maidens and romping children and athletic youths, you know, happy in the fields. And I think some of these traditional ideas that he had about the family were actually written into the constitution, right. And that’s part of the reason why it’s taken many, many decades to legislate for things like divorce, because that was actually explicitly banned, right.
Tim McInerney:
Right. Yeah. Exactly. Happy maidens. The irony of that, and happy children, hasn’t been lost in recent decades because as it would turn out, of course, you know, though quite the opposite was often true. de Valera’s 1937 Constitution had really far-reaching consequences. No, actually, it forbids any kind of state religion in the Republic officially.
Naomi O’Leary:
Curious?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, curious. I mean, you wouldn’t think it, but you know, officially there is no state religion in the Republic of Ireland. But then it does recognize it at the same time, this “special place” for the Catholic Church in the Constitution. And like you say, since all these ideas about the family are written into the constitution, it’s really difficult to get them out again.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. OK. So I can see he worked that in there. He got around the kind of secularist tradition of Irish nationalist, but still managed to put the church at the centre. So that’s kind of summed up in the Garden of Remembrance. What’s your next building?
Tim McInerney:
- Right. So for the final one, this is the last one. I’ve picked out the papal cross in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. And that commemorates the visit of John Paul II in 1979.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh, yeah. OK, so if you’ve been to Dublin listeners, you might have seen this one over the trees. It’s this huge grass that’s like 35 meters high and in the middle of a huge park called the Phoenix Park, which is close to the city centre.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And the size of it just shows you how important the Pope’s visit was back in 1979, over 2.5 million people went to church events set up for that visit that year. And that’s more than half the current population right now in in the Republic. I would have been much more back then. So in a way, this visit kind of represents the zenith, I suppose, of Catholicism in the Republic of Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s quite interesting that this is a time when the church was, it was kind of having a progressive rejuvenation. Of course, you know, this is —
Tim McInerney:
This was the time of Vatican II, a lot of things changed in those decades in the 60s and 70s. There was a lot of motivated, very positive looking, young people actually, in support of the church at the time.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely. Well, they thought they were going to change the world like, you know, it’s a kind of, it’s, they’re like hippies, you know. You have peace and love and caring for everybody.
Tim McInerney:
Absolutely. It’s not unrelated at all. The journalist David McWilliams famously called the children born in 1979, the Pope’s children, because it turns out, for some mysterious reason, the birth rate in the country soared just about nine months after all of these mass meetings of 2.5 million people. We might remember that contraception, of course, was illegal at the time.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh my god.
Tim McInerney:
And this was, incidentally, the first generation since the famine to increase the population of the country, actually, rather than decrease it. So like this had huge consequences.
Naomi O’Leary:
Ok, so like the Pope actually genuinely did bless Ireland.
Tim McInerney:
I mean, well, that’s the funny thing. He blessed Ireland with this massive generation of young people all at once. And then he cursed himself because that was the exact same generation that would see and see to the spectacular downfall of the church in Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
My God, it’s kind of poetic, isn’t it? Or Shakespearean? Of course, this is bringing us up to the more recent period, which is a much darker history. And it’s really defined the Irish church in more recent times. It’s been 30 years now of almost uninterrupted scandals coming out about the church and church institutions. And it seems like each one is more gothic and horrific than the next.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And we’ll take a more close look at the early emergence of these scandals later on. But first, one of the most recent and momentous scandals has in many ways probably been the most representative of how people began to wake up to the very dark realities of Catholic Ireland in the last few years. Naomi interviewed the local historian, Catherine Corless for this episode, who exposed institutional abuse on an international scale a few years ago. In particular, she highlighted the extent to which Catholic institutions had buried their darker secrets, quite literally in the back garden.
Naomi O’Leary:
Before we listened to Catherine’s stories, let’s just explain exactly how the institution that she’s talking about fits in to the Catholic Church’s role in Ireland in the 20th century.
Tim McInerney:
What her research was centred on was a mother and babies home. Some of our listeners might have heard already about Magdalene Laundries, which we’ll get onto later, but Magdalene laundries aren’t quite the same thing as mother and babies homes are they?
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. And so they fitted into the same system but they’re different. So the two mother and baby home was originally a workhouse, so it was built to house the destitute during the famine, and after Ireland became independent, it was taken over by the Bon Secours Sisters, who are an order of nuns who are trained as nurses, and they turned it into a mother and baby home. That basically means somewhere that unmarried mothers could go to give birth.
Tim McInerney:
So maybe you can explain how they worked exactly?
Naomi O’Leary:
- So young women would go there when they were pregnant and they would give birth there and then they would stay there for about a year where they would work for the nuns unpaid. So the state was funding these institutions at the time to the tune of about one pound a week per mother, per child. And the mother would be separated from her baby and the baby would be kept there in the home and raised until they were old enough to be fostered out or sent to industrial school, so about the age of maybe seven. Industrial schools, of course, are another kind of institution where abuse was rife, unfortunately. Sometimes if mothers were, you might say, repeat offenders, so to speak, if they came to the home more than once to give birth, then they might be transferred on to a Magdalene laundry.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, the whole thing until recently enough has been shrouded in taboo, has been quite vague. I know that in certain families, not even the close relatives would be fully aware of what was going on. You know, one day your sister or your niece or your cousin was just whisked away, without explanation, and you might never see her again. The women were veritable prisoners, you know, during all this. I spoke to one family where the older brother found out, you know, against all odds, where his sister had been sent. This would have been in the mid-sixties. And he arrived there unannounced at the convent, and he said he was there to visit her. He said he had been sent by the family, which, of course, he hadn’t been. And instead, he snuck her into the back of his car, drove straight to Dublin and put her on a boat to escape. And I mean, I use the word escape quite, quite literally, to England, because if she had stayed in Ireland, she would’ve been sent back. She would have nowhere else to go. And as it happened, of course, she never saw her baby again.
Naomi O’Leary:
When you were saying that, I actually got chills. It’s, I mean, these stories are so shocking to hear. I mean, it’s like a totalitarian world, like having to sneak his sister out of the country in the back of his car like that. It’s just unthinkable. You know, of course, the whole issue of consent in a system like this is very murky. One of the issues of dispute about the homes is, you know, whether women’s babies were taken from them against their will. Some of the women who came through them say they were, you know, they didn’t really have, it wasn’t their choice to give up their babies. And there’s also another complicating factor is there was a demand for babies from families that wanted to adopt in the United States. So there’s an old newspaper report from Tuam, for example, that Catherine Corless unearthed. And it says that wealthy couples would sometimes come all the way from America to Galway to pick out a baby. And it also it describes the separation of mothers and babies as being a very painful moment.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it’s a deeply unpleasant chapter of Irish history and hasn’t been accepted as a chapter of Irish history until the last two decades, Really. It just wasn’t talked about for a long time. And now we have to accept that it has defined the second half of the 20th century in particular. It’s left a lot of very damaged people in its wake, a lot of very hurt people. It’s not pleasant. And Catherine Corless got a lot of resistance, actually, just for talking about it and researching into it. So let’s hear from your report.
Catherine Corless:
I’m Catherine Corless from Tuam County Galway. Tuam is the town that has been in the news quite a lot because of my research, the mother and baby home in Tuam, the survivors and the ones that didn’t make it, those that died.
Naomi O’Leary:
Here are a few facts about Catherine Corless. She’s a lady in her 60s who lives in a small farm outside Tuam, a town of about 10,000 people in County Galway in the west of Ireland. She used to work as a secretary, but that was before she left work because she had four children with her husband. In recent years, sitting at her kitchen table, she began to research local history. She started with family history. And then she learned how to request documents from state bodies and how to find things in archives. There was a memory that she had from her childhood that niggled at her and that wouldn’t let her rest.
Catherine Corless:
I remember the children going to school, as a youngster myself, I would have been about five or six years old. I’d just started school in Tuam at the Mercy Convent, and at the time there were those little children at the school with us. We noticed them, that they were quite thin and miserable and very quiet, and they were kept apart from the rest of us. So that was in my mind, all those years. They were only in Tuam schools for two years. And then it just seems to disappear off the face of the earth.
Naomi O’Leary:
These were the home babies, the children born to unmarried mothers in the nearby Tuam mother and babies home. She decided to solve the mystery of what became of them, the thin, miserable children who were kept separate from all the others in her school.
Catherine Corless:
I was a bit curious first of all because I went to my local library in Tuam and thinking I would get a wealth of information there but they literally had nothing on the Tuam home and even in the microfilm, of the archival Tuam Herald, which is the local paper, there was very little on that either. My next step then was to contact the Bon Secours Sisters,
Naomi O’Leary:
The Bon Secours Sisters, which run the home, they still run health care facilities today. They’re still around. They’re not just an Ireland, but all over the world, from Peru to the United States. Her request to them came up empty. They said they had no records of the mother and baby home in Tuam. So Corless decided to change tactics.
Catherine Corless:
The Tuam home, where it stands, it was originally a workhouse. There was a lot of workhouses in Ireland at the time of the famine, and right up to 1922. The workhouses catered for the poor and the infirm. And it also catered for unmarried mothers and babies. This same building was used for the mother and baby home in Tuam when the workhouses closed down; they just turned it into the mother and baby home and nothing else. It just catered for mothers and babies from 1925 onwards, closed down in 1961 and the whole area was less derelict and the building and everything just fell apart. And then the Galway County Council came in 1972 when they decided to knock the home, the whole big massive building, and they decided to put a housing estate on the ground. I just got the idea to talk to local people who live in the area, on the Dublin Road, where the Tuam home once stood.
Naomi O’Leary:
In the middle of the housing estate on a patch of ground with home once stood, there was a shrine. It was carefully tended its grass carefully mowed and flowering plants and bushes had been planted around a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Naomi O’Leary:
The local people believed this to be a burial place, and they had carefully tended it, year after year.
Catherine Corless:
I got the story that in 1975 there were two little boys playing in the area. It was wilderness at that time, now, the landscape was completely different than what we see today. They came across a sort of tank and they broke open the slab that was on top of it. And what they saw was a lot of little skeletal remains and skulls. It didn’t make sense to them that there were the children’s remains there. Other people thought then they were unbaptized babies, because at that time in Ireland, babies who were not baptized were not allowed into consecrated ground. There were sort of buried in fields and in outlying areas.
Naomi O’Leary:
The locals had different theories about what the bones were. Some thought it was a famine grave. The sheer scale and pace of deaths during the Irish famine from 1846 to 1852 was so heavy that mass graves dot the country. But why were these bodies of children? Why were the skeletons so small? Without knowing whose bones they were, the locals decided to tend the area and keepers as a sacred space.
Catherine Corless:
So the locals decided ok there’s children bones here, we’ll put it in dedication to them and for forty years, the locals in that housing estate just kept this little patch of ground just amongst themselves. They funded it and just because there was children’s remains and skulls in that area.
Naomi O’Leary:
While Catherine Corless was talking to them, one of them made a throwaway remark.
Catherine Corless:
One person mentioned to me, he just happened to say that there’s more than famine victims there if they are famine victims. He said it’s known that some of the home children are buried there as well. Now that’s really what niggled me at the time. I did a little more bit of intensive research on the home itself because I was intrigued to know why were all those remains found there? And how come they be all sort of in a mass grave area? It didn’t make sense to me.
Naomi O’Leary:
Catherine Corless redoubled her efforts.
Catherine Corless:
I contacted Bon Secours Sisters again, and they had no records of any children being buried there. I contacted the Galway County Council who owned the ground; they had no knowledge of any burials there they told me. Then I just thought of the births, deaths, marriages, registration office in Galway. Surely if children had died in the home, that they would have a record of the dead. That’s how I found out that there were 796 children who died in the home between the years 1925 and 1961.
Naomi O’Leary:
She requested the death certificates one by one, paying four euro for each one. There were 796. Each one was for a child, aged up to three years old. The causes of death were varied and mundane. Infections, malnutrition. One outbreak of the measles carried off 27 children at one time. Perhaps more important to notice than the overall number of the deaths, is the rate. 1943 was a bad year. One in three children living in the home that year died. The following three years, the rate was one in four. An inspector’s report from 1947 noted that some of the children were emaciated. During this time, the local county council was paying the sisters one pound a week for each mother and child kept in the home. It wasn’t an insignificant sum in 1940s Ireland.
Catherine Corless:
Now, the big question was, “Where are they buried?” So nobody seemed to know. The Bon Secours Sisters again told me that perhaps the families after the mothers who had the babies, perhaps the babies’ grandparents brought them home to their own graveyards and buried them in their own plots. Now, without even checking, first of all, I knew that wasn’t, that wasn’t an option because when those mothers were sent into their mother and baby home in the first place, when they were pregnant outside marriage, it was a crime nearly. It was frowned upon by the church. The women were ostracized. And it was an awful shame on the family. That’s how they felt, because it goes back to the church. They ostracized the women. They condemned them. They said they were sinners. And a lot of the parish priest wouldn’t allow the women to stay in the village, even when they had their baby and tried to come back home. They were sent off again so that most of the mothers went on to England to work. There were more or less banished from their home place. So I knew bringing an illegitimate baby back home to the village to bury it, wouldn’t have been an option with the families.
Naomi O’Leary:
Her next step was to check the graveyards. She took her list of 796 children and she began to cross-reference the names with local graveyards. She started in Tuam, and she went as far as neighbouring Mayo.
Catherine Corless:
All this, all the graves in the cemeteries in the area, they’re all recorded in a cemetery book, babies and children and everybody. Two of the names for my list appeared on a cemetery record book. And I subsequently found out that they were orphans because the Tuam catered for orphans as well, so already you have the distinction that orphans were buried in the main tomb graveyard in consecrated ground.
Naomi O’Leary:
She discovered orphans were buried in consecrated ground. Illegitimate children, born to unmarried mothers were not. So where were they? Corless turned to her next resource, old maps.
Catherine Corless:
I did a bit more intensive research than into the grounds itself, knowing that it was a workhouse at one stage before the before the Bon Secours Sisters took over to run this mother and baby home. We’re talking about the same building, the same seven acres of ground. I went right back. I start studying the workhouse at the time. So I had very old maps, I had maps going back to 1840. I had an account of the guardians of the poor who ran the workhouse at the time, going back to 1840. And on their maps, I noted that there was a Victorian sewage system underground, for the workhouse.
Naomi O’Leary:
In the time that the workhouse was built, such places had their own sewage systems. Common public sewage systems only came later.
Catherine Corless:
They were big brick structures and there was tunnels laid into them. You could actually walk down the tunnels. That’s how they were cleaned out at the time. And the septic tanks that they had then there were big walls that were brick walls and there were just over, they were about seven foot high and they were huge. So I knew then that where these boys found the bones in the 1970s, I knew from my old maps and from records that at the time of the workhouse and the famine, that this was a walking sewage area. Later on then, I discovered that in 1937 from archival newspapers, I noted that the sewage system that was in use up to 1937 was closed down because the Bon Secours Sisters in the Home, a new system came in which joined them up with the main Tuam sewage system. So the whole underground Victorian underground sewage system became defunct in 1937. All the research I had done, pointed to the sisters using this as burial walls.
Naomi O’Leary:
This was the discovery that would lead to the headlines that reverberated around the world: 800 children buried in a mass grave in a sewage tank. The reaction was quick and from some quarters, vicious. Local businessmen said Corless was bringing a bad name on the town. Others asked why she wanted to dig up the past at all. Local police said that these were famine burials, ancient history. National and international commentators dismissed her research. But under significant public and media pressure, the government announced that a commission of investigation would be set up to find out the truth. And they sent archaeologists to start digging up the shrine where the children’s bones had been found.
Catherine Corless:
They sent down the archaeologists and on March the third, the Minister Katherine Zappone, the Minister for Family and Youth Affairs gave the announcement on March the 3rd of this year that the commission of inquiry that the archaeologists had found a significant number of human remains, and that the carbon dated it to the era of the Tuam home when the children were there, right up to about 1950s, they were able to do that. So my research and my suggestion of, which I knew in my heart and soul had to be true, was proven on that day.
Naomi O’Leary:
What have you found people’s reactions to this story to be?
Catherine Corless:
Well there was a shock. Some people, most people didn’t want to believe it. The church denied it because, and when I approached them, I asked them, “Did they know anything about those burials?” The first reaction I got from the church, from the Archbishop in Tuam, was that they had nothing to do with the running of the home, that they would have no records of such. The mourners said they had nothing to do with it. But yes, a parish priest went up there every single day to the mother and baby home. He’s headmaster. He heard confessions. He baptized all the babies. And my question was, would a priest not have been there for the children who died? And would there not be a little blessing or just a final, just a little blessing at the end? Shouldn’t there have been a medical report for each and every child? I was met with just silence. I asked the county council as well about this graveyard, and when they sent in the builders in the 1970s, there’s no records. There was no records of any burials or anything. They didn’t want to hear about it. I asked about the Bon Secours Sisters again and they just said that whatever Sisters were there at the time, they’re gone now and we have no records, really. We don’t know anything about the Tuam home. I would say it was mainly the businesspeople of the town that frowned upon the whole idea. I was told I was given Tuam a bad name. And anyway, why am I doing this? It’s so long ago? I reckon that if the Bon Secours Sisters were open and honest with me back in 2012 and told us about those burials and tried to help and try to do something about it, this wouldn’t have happened at all, it really wouldn’t.
Naomi O’Leary:
What kept you going all that time?
Catherine Corless:
I think it was just it’s my nature to get answers. What really kept me going was the silence of the people who should be helping, who should be giving me answers that I was being fobbed off the whole time and I was being discouraged by people in power and people who should have been there to help, especially the church. I must say, I was really saddened by their reaction. It was just as if things had never changed from the 1940s and 50s. These are illegitimate children. And I mean to say it as kind of a “so what?” kind of an attitude. Move on. And that angered me. And that I just had to. It just drove me to find justice for them because they just literally had nobody.
Naomi O’Leary:
For now, Corless is waiting for the coroner’s report that will explain in more detail what the archaeologists have found under the ground in Tuam. She doubts that all the children’s bodies will be found in the septic tank site. She believes from her knowledge of the maps that there are probably other locations where they could have been buried. I asked her what she thinks should happen now.
Catherine Corless:
There’s a lot of, as we call them, home babies still around. There in their 70s now. A lot of them have brothers and sisters buried there in that area. They want them removed out of it because they feel it’s not a dignified burial. They want to know how they were buried. Was there any ceremony or would they just show down there or just left there? And they want them in consecrated ground. My argument all along was I said there are still people alive who were born in the home. They want answers. They don’t know where their mothers have gone, too. They were separated as babies from their mothers. The mother spent a year there with the baby to breastfeed the baby. And at the end of the year, they were out the door and that they were just separated. That was the end of the mother. And even around to Tuam alone, there are at least 50, if not more, survivors. Men and women who were born in that home. And some of them yet have to find where the mothers went to. It’s just, it’s a tragedy from one end of the whole thing to the other.
Naomi O’Leary:
And what did the survivors want?
Catherine Corless:
They’re not looking for compensation. They’re looking for answers. They’re looking for an apology, first and foremost from the church, from the Bon Secours Sisters and from the state, because they were all complicit in this whole operation. So at the moment, a lot of the survivors are calling on me to ask me to help them to find some relative, because a lot of them feel they’re just alone in the world. And I have been successful in a lot of occasions in bringing people together and finding information for them. And a lot of the time, it’s just a grave that they will find, if their mothers have died long ago. And that alone is some little comfort for them to know where their mother is buried.
Tim McInerney:
Thank you, Naomi, and thank you to Catherine Corless so much for that report. I’m so glad she agreed to speak with us. And that interview was really something else.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m so grateful for Catherine Corless that she spoke to us. I was really impressed by just like her grit and her determination, you know, because she was met with silence so many times and criticism and general opprobrium, but she never let it stop her back. She just kept up her research. She kept beavering away. It was really impressive. And she kept finding more and more creative ways to find to find the truth. Yeah, it’s something I found interesting actually in the story was the detail about how, just privately on their own steam, the local people had maintained the site where the children’s bones had been found.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, that’s curious, isn’t it?
Naomi O’Leary:
They it as a shrine and they planted the plants and they mowed the lawn and everything. You know, it was a sacred space for them. And also the demand of the survivors that their brothers and sisters be buried in consecrated ground. To me, it shows me that, you know, people aren’t necessarily abandoning their spirituality or their beliefs or their religion at all. But there is a huge disillusionment with the church as an institution. And those things are separate.
Tim McInerney:
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, it says a lot actually, doesn’t it? So it’s important to remember as well that behind this institutional scandal, there’s all these private tragedies, the names of those 796 children who died at the Tuam home between 1925 and 1960 were released publicly. And I personally know people who were rushing to that list to see if their brothers or their sisters or their whoever was on there, you know, just there was no other way to know. The nuns in charge of this hospital have taken so much away from people. And it’s hard to imagine how any amount of compensation would be enough.
Naomi O’Leary:
And, of course, you know, Corless said they’re not even looking for compensation, but just acknowledgement. You know, there are many people who came through these homes alive today, she said, and many of them are hugely angry. I think a lot of the anger comes from the frustration of their attempts to find, you know, truth about where they came from and to find family members. You know, there is this wall of silence and it’s not just the religious institutions either, it’s the state as well. Corless told me that this is starting to improve. She sees small signs of improvement over recent years. This culture of silence, you know, this unwillingness to acknowledge the issue of abuse on this dark chapter of history. I think this is really part of the building head of steam of anger about religious involvement in the provision of public services that has been building up in recent years.
Tim McInerney:
Right. And this brings us, of course, to the greater context, right. Because one of the most significant parts of the Catherine Corless story is that it came out just after decades of exposure of various abuses in various different institutions run by the Catholic Church.
Naomi O’Leary:
I think it was kind of, it all started in like the 1980s and particularly the 1990s, right? So maybe we can talk a little bit about that period. If we go back to this time, this was a time when the church was still heavily lobbying against contraception, which has only just become legal in the Republic, it was against divorce, which was, of course, illegal up until the 90s, it was also preaching against like the likes of unmarried couples and gay people and, you know, against illegitimate children as well.
Tim McInerney:
Sure. Right. And the church was pretty brutal in its authority on these matters. Even in the 90s, it was not uncommon for “deviant” members of the community to be denounced from the altar in front of everyone they knew, especially in rural areas. And that was at the time a kind of a blacklisting, you know, especially for a very devout Catholic communities, these people would in some respects become untouchables.
Naomi O’Leary:
I can remember vaguely that the first kind of whiff of scandal that I can remember came in 1992. It was the bishop of Galway, of course, Eamonn Casey. And it emerged, he was quite popular, I think, and it emerged that he’d secretly had a son with a woman in America, and he was using the collection basket funds to keep the whole thing under wraps.
Tim McInerney:
Sure. Yeah. We were both, of course, very young children at the time. I suppose I was one or two years older than you as well. I would’ve been about seven or eight. And of course, I lived in Galway, so it would have been quite centred there, too. There was some kind of tangible disconnect that you could actually feel. You know, I remember wondering as an eight year old, why on earth everyone was so preoccupied with this, but the older generation were in this total state of incredulity. You know, they just couldn’t believe that a bishop, not just a priest, but a bishop, had lied to them like that. And at the time, that idea was just unheard of because when these things happened, they were covered up.
Naomi O’Leary:
This was just an early sign of the scandals that were to come. It was just minor compared to the stuff that was going to come out in the course of the 1990s.
Tim McInerney:
We are, of course, talking about the spate of allegations of child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions that started to come out in the 1990s, leading to a series of criminal cases and government inquiries after that. And quite honestly, if you say the words Catholic Church to anyone under the age of 40 in Ireland today, that’s the first thing that they’re going to think about. A lot of this abuse took place in the state childcare system, which was outsourced to religious orders a lot of the time. So these children really were some of the most vulnerable members of society. They often had no parents to run to or anyone who would listen to them, just like Catherine Corless says. A lot of these victims are the people who are nobody. And the predators who took advantage of them were often priests who held, like we just said, some of the highest authority in the community. Remember that priests and bishops could ruin people’s reputations with not that much effort by denouncing them from the altar or by other methods. A lot of these children were too afraid to mention a word about what was done to them until well into their adulthood.
Naomi O’Leary:
And we don’t have the time to go into each case here. But like it came out bit by bit that abuse within these institutions had been systematic and it had been going on for decades under people’s noses and that there was also cover ups.
Tim McInerney:
Sure. And these are cases of not just sexual, but a horrific, violent and psychological abuse that was taking place in these institutions. The details are just chilling, really. It’s a pity that we don’t have time to do them justice, but we decided that if we talked about one, it wouldn’t be fair, so we’re not going to talk about only in detail. But as people started to talk more openly, it became clear that very few people in the older generation had been unaffected in some way by these abuses of one sort or another. And like you say, the more shocking element was the extent of the cover ups. It became clear that abusive priests had been moved around to make sure that they couldn’t be followed up on after complaints were made against them.
Naomi O’Leary:
Of course, alongside the mother and baby homes like the one that we discussed, there were the industrial schools, which there was a major report on. And, you know, these were kind of the weakest members of society, poor and orphan children. And, you know, the conditions in these places were just shocking. They were kind of run like Victorian institutions but right into the 20th century, perhaps the most notorious sort of institution that we’ve kind of touched on earlier is the Magdalene laundries. They began in the 1700s as a place to put so-called “fallen women”, you know, that’s kind of code for prostitutes, essentially, but they were expanded to be kind of warehouses for all sorts of women who were unacceptable in society for some reasons.
Tim McInerney:
The women kept in them were supposed to be penitent. They were supposed to be there atoning for their sins and they weren’t used as free labour, as washerwomen by the Orders. It’s important to note that there were Magdalene laundries all over the world, not just in Ireland. And actually there were Protestant Magdalene laundries, also in Ireland and in England and in Northern Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh, interesting. Yeah. I suppose the difference in Ireland really is this scale and the duration of this laundry system. I mean, if you look at how embedded it was, like institutions like the Bank of Ireland and hotels and government ministries and all sorts of institutions were using them, you know, for their washing. And lots of inmates were kept there until they died. And this isn’t long ago history. The last laundry only closed in 1996.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Which is kind of amazing. You know, this was essentially a form of slave labour. And the women were not free to leave. While the mother and baby home sequestered women for usually for one year, in the laundry the duration was often indefinite and this was promoted, of course, by the orders as a form of social care but it was also a straight out form of exploitation of the poor and working in industrial laundries without modern machinery, of course, backbreaking work, which is important to remember. And when women did escape, they were often both brought back to the institutions by the police, so they had no protection from the state. And the only real escape was to somehow get out of the country. And of course, here we have the role of England, you know, being as a kind of a place of refuge for women, which it had acted out for many decades and perhaps even centuries in Ireland.
Tim McInerney:
Sure.
Naomi O’Leary:
The nuns’ reactions, of course, to the allegations has been, you know, really difficult for people because it’s been that wall of silence and it’s been denial. Several advocates for the church, you know, still refuse to acknowledge that wrongdoing has taken place, if you can believe that.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it’s astonishing, really, that the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, of the Good Shepherd, I believe, and the Sisters of Charity, which is a separate order, all three of those have to this day ignored requests by the UN Committee Against Torture to contribute to the compensation fund for victims. And there’s about 600 of those victims still alive today.
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s important to remember is that the state is very complicit. And during the years after independence, that kind of outsourced whole swathes of social provision to the Catholic Church. So, you know, the church was filling a need there in health care and education in particular, state was often supporting these institutions with funding and so on. The state as well has been in denial about this and the problematic aspects of this role.
Tim McInerney:
Right.
Naomi O’Leary:
But it has begun to be more forthcoming.
Tim McInerney:
Sure, it took it up until 2013 in fact, for the then Taoiseach at the time Enda Kenny to apologize to the victims. At that point he called the laundries the “nation’s shame” and this reaction has been seen as a little bit too late by a lot of people.
Naomi O’Leary:
And of course, yeah, it’s extremely difficult for children of the laundries to find out just who their mothers were.
Tim McInerney:
Right. And lots of our listeners will have heard about the laundries probably and other institutions like them through a number of films and documentaries that kind of came up in a flood in the 1990s and 2000s as part of this kind of sense of outrage. So we might think of Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, for instance, which won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2002 — seems like a long time ago now — and Stephen Frears’ Philomena, more recently in 2013. And that focuses on how the mothers and children are still dealing, you know, in 2013 with the fallout of those institutions.
Naomi O’Leary:
I met the real Philomena, you know.
Tim McInerney:
Really?
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. You know, she went to Rome to meet the Pope.
Tim McInerney:
Oh, yes, of course. Yeah.
Naomi O’Leary:
And I kind of covered that. And she’s just like a very ordinary, kind of shy, quiet Irish lady.
Tim McInerney:
And how has she reacted to her international fame in that context?
Naomi O’Leary:
I mean, she’s very humble, you know, and she was, it was really meaningful for her to meet the Pope, you know?
Tim McInerney:
That’s interesting that she was at the Vatican even after all that.
Naomi O’Leary:
Well, yeah, it was, you know, part of the kind of the atonement process, I suppose, for the entire thing. Essentially, if you haven’t seen the film, it’s dreadfully sad because she searches for the son that she lost in one of these institutions that was taken away. And unbeknownst to her, he’s also looking for her. In Ireland, you know, there’s huge public outrage about all of this and I think it’s been building over recent months and particularly it comes out in issues to do with health care, for example.
Tim McInerney:
Right. Outrage has reached this boiling point when everyone’s mouth, more or less, fell open when it emerged that the state was going to gift ownership of the new National Maternity Hospital to the Sisters of Charity.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right, so this is one of the institutions which owes money to victims and hasn’t paid. And that would represent an investment of 300 million euro of public tax funds that will be transferred over to this religious institution.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And this is the same sisters of charity who have been ignoring demands for redress from the U.N. Commission Against Torture. This is an order who were exposed in the 2009 Ryan report into child sexual abuse as having presided over decades of abuse in laundries and industrial schools. They have to date only agreed to pay five million euros of the state’s 1.2 billion euro redress scheme for victims of abuse. And they’ve actually only paid two million of that. They’ve refused to contribute a single penny to the $128 million euro fund that Catholic institutions agreed to pay abuse victims in 2002. The Sisters of Charity, it might be noted, like we said earlier, it never issued an apology to their victims.
Naomi O’Leary:
Let’s hear how this scandal over in the National Maternity Hospital broke out. First of all, let’s hear from Ellen Coyne. She’s the journalist who in March broke the story that the religious order, the Sisters of Charity, was going to be given full ownership of the new National Maternity Hospital.
Ellen Coyne:
My name is Ellen Coyne and I’m a senior journalist at the Ireland Division of the Times. Ireland desperately needs a new national maternity hospital. Our existing one is actually in the middle of Southern City Centre. I see just the street behind where I am now and it is tiny and it is cramped and it’s terrible So for over a decade the government has been trying to build a new one. Now there was a really long dispute because the existing national maternity hospitals and St Vincent’s, which is owned by a religious order, couldn’t agree on the governance of the hospitals. So both sides wanted to have more control. Early this year then it emerged that actually the physical land at the St. Vincent’s campus, where the new maternity hospital will be built, is actually owned by a religious order Sisters of Charity which was involved in some of the institutional abuse. So the core of the problem is the Irish public would pay for this hospital to be built and then as soon as it was, it would effectively be owned by a religious congregation because it owns the land. Nobody ever anticipated it, that includes the people writing the story and I include myself in that. The scale of the absolute uproar, I don’t actually think the outrage was actually about the story itself, I think it had been building up for a really, really long time. It was coming up again with Tuam. It was coming up with the Eighth Amendment issue. It was coming up with the failure of the religious organizations to pay the state what they owe to compensate victims. And I think that if it hadn’t been the National Maternity Hospital story, it would have been something else.
Naomi O’Leary:
After news of the deal became public, Dr. Peter Boylan, who’s a former master of the existing National Maternity Hospital, spoke out against it.
Peter Boylan:
I’m Dr. Peter Boylan. I’m Chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the governor of the National Maternity Hospital. I felt it was wrong and I said that if this gets out into the public arena, or when it gets out as it would inevitably, people would not be happy about that arrangement and in particular, women would not be happy with that arrangement. I just thought it was fundamentally wrong because it wasn’t only just the ownership of the hospital, but it was the ownership with a special company set up to run the hospitals was to be owned 100 percent by the Sisters of Charity. I think it would have been a real problem for the sisters as well to own a hospital where things were going on to which they were fundamentally opposed. And it was also kind of, I think, unbelievable to expect today that they would just basically allow this to happen despite no matter what legal arrangement you’ve got in place. It just didn’t make any sense.
Naomi O’Leary:
Dr. Boylan, what kind of effect does Catholic ownership or ethos have on the provision of maternity care in practical terms?
Peter Boylan:
Religious influence has no effect on clinical practice in things like general medicine and general surgery, for example, with a hip replacement operation or gastric surgery or cardiology. None of those areas does Catholic teaching have any, is there any problem with that at all. It’s only in the interface between obstetric practice, maternity care and Catholic Church teachings that there are problems with conflict. For example, in Catholic hospitals, so you couldn’t prescribe contraceptives for contraceptive purposes. There’d be no question of doing, you know, elective sterilization operations. So that’s the sort of way that it influences. That’s why maternity care needs to be completely independent of any possibility of influence. And it’s not to sort of underestimate the tremendous work that the religious have done over the years because the state effectively abrogated or abdicated its duty of care to citizens both in education and health and handed over these to the Catholic Church for the vast majority. So there’s very strong historical reasons as to why you’ve got this hangover but it’s time know in Health you know to have separation of church and state.
Naomi O’Leary:
There was a surge of anger when the deal became public, just as Dr. Boylan had thought. Over 100,000 people signed a petition against it, which is a lot for Ireland. And there were public protests. I asked him why those who agreed to the deal, like the Sisters of Charity, the Board of the National Maternity Hospital and indeed the Irish Ministry for Health didn’t see the public uproar coming.
Peter Boylan:
I think they’re just so desperate to get the new hospital that they were willing to put up with the arrangement, even though it would have made the National Charity Hospital unique in the entire world, it will be the only hospital owned by a Catholic organisation that would be allowing contraception, sterilization and abortion, IVF, etc. So I think they just convinced themselves that these special powers that were written into the agreement would be sufficient to protect clinical independence. I think they were just blinded by their wish to get the new hospital. And also, they weren’t listening to public concerns. You know, there was as you know, there was a petition signed by over 100,000 people, so public feeling was pretty clear you know that they didn’t want this bill at.
Naomi O’Leary:
At the height of the scandal, Boylan resigned from the board of the National Maternity Hospital, saying it was untenable for him to remain on the board when it was, in his words, blind to the consequences of giving ownership to the Sisters of Charity and def to the public outcry. Ellen Coyne told me that in her view, it wasn’t just this story in itself that caused the reaction. It was the context in which it came, just after the revelations about the Tuam mother and baby home and amid a burgeoning national debate about whether abortion access should be widened. And with the public well aware that such religious orders had still not given full compensation to victims of abuse.
Ellen Coyne:
In one sense, it’s an unusual thing to cover because a Catholic influence in Irish women’s health is actually not, in general terms, something new. It’s not really a news story. What’s changed is the public perception and a kind of eagerness on behalf of the general public in Ireland to actively separate church and state, starting with their records on women. Society in Ireland has changed so dramatically and is getting really restless with the idea that the church is still exerting control over women and children, which it has such a terrible track record within the past.
Naomi O’Leary:
In the wake of this scandal, the Sisters of Charity announced that they would divest from their involvement, not just in the National Maternity Hospital, but from health care altogether, meaning that they would give up the three other hospitals that they own. I asked Dr. Boylan for his reaction to that.
Peter Boylan:
Well, I think in the future that any new investments should not be granted to private organisations. And so if hundreds of millions of public money are being spent on building a new hospital then I think the ownership trust should rightfully be in the hands of the state. Now, what sort of governance arrangements you make is another question. The fact that the Sisters of Charity have withdrawn and have said that the Catholic ethos specifically will not, no longer, be the sort of governing principles in St Vincent’s health care group, I think that’s very positive. In the early days of the state, the state didn’t get involved in health care to the extent that it should have done and left to the religious. But now that the state is involved and is funding health care and so on, their mission can be directed elsewhere and that’s appropriate. That’s what happens with the passage of time.
Naomi O’Leary
Ellen Coyne told me that the sheer complexity and scale of religious involvement in health care and education means that divestment would be the work of lifetimes rather than decades. But she did say that she feels some change is in the air.
[skipto time=01:08:57]Ellen Coyne
Just going back to the foundation of the state, immediately Ireland became a theocracy and what a lot of people used to do as well at that time was if they die, they would hand over huge swathes of their land to the Catholic Church. So from that point on, they were just collecting it. It is a huge amount of, just in terms of assets, it’s absolutely massive. You would be trying to unravel centuries and centuries of involvement. So while I don’t think we’ll ever maybe in your lifetime, or my lifetime, be at a point where none of the religious or health institutions are owned by religious institutions in Ireland anymore, I think what you might see is a change in public policy that would maybe separate the church and the state in a less obvious way. So maybe legalizing access to abortion in certain circumstances or making sure that there is no religious discrimination available. That there’s more a secular attitude taken to our education as well.
[skipto time=01:09:53]Tim McInerney
Of course, like some of you will have picked up from that report, one of the reasons why this whole issue is so urgent is because everyone is expecting a referendum on the Eighth Amendment.
[skipto time=01:10:02]Naomi O’Leary
Right.
[skipto time=01:10:02]Tim McInerney
Now, for people who are not aware, this is the amendment to the Irish constitution that imposes heavy restrictions on access to abortion in the Republic, some of the heaviest in the world, in fact.
[skipto time=01:10:13]Naomi O’Leary
Yeah. So it’s been kind of an international cloud over Ireland in recent years. So it’s basically a bad law. It doesn’t achieve what it wants to, which is to stop women from having abortions. They just go to a different jurisdiction, mostly England, to get them. And it causes various kind of grotesque cases to occur, you know, because of the constraints on healthcare. So for an example, there was an asylum seeker who was raped and she was forced to carry the baby until it was developed enough to be removed and had a caesarean against her will, and there was another woman who was clinically dead and she was kept alive as a sort of an incubator for her foetus. And of course, there was Savita Halappanavar of another who was miscarrying and she went to a hospital in Galway and requested an abortion, which was denied and she subsequently died, which caused an international furore. So the U.N. has actually condemned Ireland for cruel and degrading treatment of women regarding this law and it’s urged Ireland to reform it. It’s all down to this amendment which was inserted into the constitution in1983.
[skipto time=01:11:15]Tim McInerney:
Right and the amendment explicitly recognizes a right to life of the unborn and says that the mother has an equal right to life. The fact that this is written into the Constitution means that it can only be taken out by national referendum and this is something that politicians in Ireland have been trying to avoid now for decades, because it’s going to make whoever does it probably quite unpopular. And that has led to a lot of outrage in itself.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. Any politician who takes it on is basically going to split their electorate because it’s such a sensitive issue. People are passionately in favour of keeping restrictions on abortion as well as passionately against. So, you know, for all the progress that Ireland has made in the recent few years, it looks like repealing this amendment is going to be a much tougher fight than the fight to equal marriage, if you can imagine that. You know, it’s such a complex and an important issue, we’ve decided to park this whole issue of abortion and the Repeal the 8th movement to look at in more detail in a future episode.
Tim McInerney:
- Right.
Naomi O’Leary:
Tim, do you think that this transition like this period of conflict over the Catholic heritage of Ireland, do you think this will mean a kind of new interrogation of what it means to be Irish?
Tim McInerney:
That’s a really interesting question, actually.
Naomi O’Leary:
Of course, historically there has been a tendency to associate those two things like Catholicism and Irishness, particularly Irish nationalism. I get frustrated with it, as you know, because it’s, but it’s definitely there’ it’s definitely a thing.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it is definitely a thing. And it can be especially strong in romanticized images of Irish rebellions, often among the diaspora.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, but we should say that it is bullshit.
Tim McInerney:
Naomi, we’ll lose our PG rating.
Naomi O’Leary:
Did we ever have that?
Tim McInerney:
I don’t know. I don’t know if we have. But yeah, it’s actually extremely misleading indeed. Like we’ve mentioned before on the podcast, religion was often overused, is often overused really simplistically to characterize the conflict between Ireland and the U.K. and this was no more simple in the past than it is today.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So I’d like to see Irish nationalism as a Catholic movement is just completely historically illiterate. I mean, many of Ireland’s greatest historical patriots were not Catholic. You know, like you just look at 1798.
Tim McInerney:
Right. The massive of 1798 rebellion, which followed the French Revolution, it’s one of the most symbolic Irish rebellions in the narrative of Irish nationalism, and not many people realize or appreciate that right from the beginning, the Republican ideal of the 1798 rebellion was this staunchly secular one, you know. And it was more often than not spearheaded by Protestants, actually, not Catholics. Wolfe Tone bother of Irish Republicanism, as it came to be known, was a Protestant, as were the founders of the United Irishman and the Irish National Assembly, that they created. The 1798 rebellion actually first broke out, mostly in Ulster, in Protestant Ulster, and Catholic participation actually came a while afterwards.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. So I kind of actually do this to people. I, you know, just feel reel off lists of non-Catholics who were founding Irish patriots, you know, like Robert Emmet or pretty much any aristocrat that was involved in the 1916 Rising. They were all Protestants. You know, the people who ran the guns into Ireland for that rebellion were mostly middle class Protestants.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, for sure. And actually, I mean, the idea of nationalism that was founded by, let’s say, Wolfe Tone, for instance, this was very much an alternative to religious identity. So Wolfe Tone, I mean, I don’t remember the quote properly, but he says something like the odious distinction between Protestant and Presbyterian and Catholic needs to be put down and that everyone needs to share this common sacred title of Irishmen, so he actually replaces
Naomi O’Leary:
I remember that quote.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it’s a famous quote from him from his speech on the dock. He’s replacing religious identity with national identity. So it’s a real misrepresentation to characterize the Republican tradition as a Catholic tradition.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. I mean, you can understand people’s tendency to think in this way. You know, it is understandable and it’s complicated by the fact that in Northern Ireland, those who identify as Irish are referred to in shorthand as Catholics very often. And sometimes, you know, they refer to themselves that way, too. My experience, though, is that if someone starts talking about, you know, “real” Irish people being Catholic, it’s a sign of ethnic chauvinism combined with historical ignorance. Unfortunately, it’s something that is an issue with diaspora communities in particular and anywhere really that where Ireland is being viewed from abroad, you know. In Ireland, as we’ve discussed, the reality of Catholicism and people’s relationship to it is rather more complex.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, you said it, complex as the word and listen, we have definitely run out of time at this stage. This is a massive topic, like we said at the beginning, that we’ve just brushed the surface of. Just to remind you, we will come back on some of these big issues in the future. And if any of them you would like to look at in particular, do let us know, because we’d love to hear from you. But for now, thank you so much for listening and don’t forget to review and share the podcast with your friends, if you liked it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, absolutely. We really appreciate every review. And we rely on your recommendations to spread the word about our podcasts.
Tim McInerney:
So next week we’ll be looking at the intriguing and unexpected world of Irish elites. We’ll be looking back at the old colonial elite known as The Ascendancy, who had their own unique culture and some of whom are still haunting their country estates. We’ll talk to Patrick Cooney, who made waves with his documentary on the surviving ascendancy called The Raj in the rain.
Patrick Cooney:
Each one of them had a great, great, great grandparent who had mortgaged the house and set up soup kitchens to save the Irish. And I kept hearing this all the time. I thought to myself, what if there was so many of these aristocrats wanting to save the Irish, why did a million die and why did a million emigrate?
Tim McInerney:
We’ll also be looking at who the Irish elite are today and why they’ve always looked to New York rather than to London.
Naomi O’Leary:
If you have any comments or suggestions or remarks, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch. We’re at @PassportIrish on Twitter or even send your questions to theirishpassport@gmail.com.
Tim McInerney:
And of course, you can find all that information on links to subjects related to what we’re talking about on the show on our website www.theirishpassport.com.
Naomi O’Leary:
Thanks so much for joining us.