I was away for the weekend but when I came back to check the papers, it was same old, same old. Operation Trash Old Catholic Ireland and defame dead Catholic nuns by the Irish media was back in action in order to push what I call point 1 of The Message, namely that The Catholic Church is the ultimate evil. For that purpose, the excavation of the site of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam is a gift that keeps giving.
The thing about defaming Catholic nuns is that they are a soft target as they are too dead to defend themselves. Thankfully David Quinn attempted to do some journalism on the issue here for the Catholic Herald. As David notes, considering much of this depends on the burial or non – burial of the babies, who was in charge of this is quite important.
Turns out, it wasn’t the job of the nuns. As the Commission of Investigation shows “the nuns were not in charge of the burials. In the opinion of the Commission, that responsibility lay with Galway County Council which actually owned the home and should also have been recording the burials, which it neglected to do.”
The editor of this site, an absolute crappy cradle Catholic who hasn’t darkened the door of a Catholic church for years (not even Christmas I’m told), also did some journalism on the issue last week.
The people who don’t do journalism are the folks at the Sunday Times. When they aren’t peddling outrageously misleading headlines about how deportations from Ireland have ‘spiked’ (they have not) it’s back to business as usual: get the nuns.
This headline from the Sunday Times was a real keeper. “The rain is ‘children’s tears’ at Tuam mother and baby home dig.” And then the sub-title: “Excavation begins at the Bon Secours institution where Catherine Corless exposed the burials of nearly 800 children in a septic tank.”
It comes with the obligatory photograph of a statue of Our Lady looking a bit worse for wear, the implication being that she herself had a hand in bringing about this sorry state of affairs. In contrast the photograph of Catherine Corless has a halo around her, as she is standing with the sun behind her. Not subtle.
So precipitation from the sky is not a result of cloud cover and droplets becoming heavy enough to fall to the ground due to gravity, but they are “children’s tears.” Oh so Jesus was taking the day off from providing the rain with His tears and let the little children do it instead. This is what Irish journalism has reduced itself to.
This quote was pulled from a local: “When I saw all of the rain falling today, I said to myself, that’s the children crying,” said Anna Corrigan, who discovered in her fifties that she had two brothers born in the home. Her brother John died at the home aged just 16 months. An inspection report described him as “a miserable emaciated child with voracious appetite … probably mentally defective.”
That seems quite a selective quote there, shortened from an inspection report. Not that I am saying conditions at the home were great. They were not and the people who raised the alarm were the nuns themselves, as John noted last week. Not that you know that from reading this ridiculous piece of journalism.
Even the usually sensible Brenda Power told us elsewhere in her opinion piece “Catholics should show lost Tuam babies same care as the unborn.” Excavation of almost 800 bodies from the former mother and baby home has proven divisive, but the infants deserve Christian burials.
They do indeed. And what Catholic has said these babies who were entrusted by the Irish State into the care of the nuns have said otherwise? My position is quite clear: the dig should happen and babies should receive a proper funeral. It is indeed a Catholic work of mercy to bury the dead.
But back to the ‘children’s tears’ reporting. The media handling of Tuam, the hysteria and inaccuracy of the reporting has a lot more to do with trashing Catholic Ireland than it has to do with giving a proper Christian burial to long deceased babies.
The Sunday Times in its “reporting” said “Despite the horrors once contained within its walls, the Dublin Road housing estate still hosts a handful of front gardens featuring statues of the Virgin Mary and other religious effigies. The home may be gone, its atrocities laid bare, but not everyone has turned their back on the church.” (My emphasis)
Horrors and atrocities. That’s not a fair, accurate or honest reading of Chapter 15 of the final report of the Commission of the Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes. And this is exactly why the Times says further on that ‘statement inquiry published in 2021 confirmed the mistreatment.’ There was mistreatment. I am not saying otherwise. What I am saying is mistreatment is not the same as horror or atrocity, which is precisely why the editors of the Sunday Times have said ‘mistreatment’ when talking about the State report. It’s a very clever but cynical linguistic sleight of hand.
One comment in Chapter 15 of the report on Tuam did indeed say by one mother ‘my time there was very hard as we were treated so badly. We were never allowed any kind of recreation, no talking was allowed during meal times or when you were in the nursery attending your baby’.
But they were not all like that. At 15.125 of the report is says “One mother said that she had never seen anything wrong in the Tuam home. She said that Sister Gabriel, Bina Rabbitte and Mary Wade (Nurse) showed great concern for sick and dying children with Bina Rabitte being upset over the sick children. This was proof to her that they were caring people.”
At 15.138 of the report it says: ‘A former child resident wrote of her memories of the Sisters of Bon Secours in 2002. She described them as ‘the kindest and dearest nuns I had the privleg (sic) of knowing’. ‘I am shocked and appalled at the people who falsely accuse the Bon Secours nuns of abusing the children in their care’. She said that she was well fed, clothed and kept warm in the winter by the Sisters. The children learned how to sing and step-dance with the nuns and staged plays at Christmas time. “We had a good instructor and entertained priests, nuns and high class people of Tuam. We lacked nothing’. She cried when she was boarded out, aged seven but soon grew to love her foster family. Sister Hortense sent a gift every Christmas to her and to other boarded out children. She described Sister Hortense as having ‘a heart of gold’.
At 15.134: ‘Another mother said that she had been treated well in the Tuam home and while the other girls worked hard in the laundry, they were never subject to ill treatment or abuse.’
The Guardian has gone absolutely bananas on the Tuam story. In this piece we are told “Despite this, religious and political conservatives in Ireland, rallying against recent progressive changes, have even argued for bringing back such institutions.”
Hang on there are people in Ireland who want to bring back Mother and Baby Homes? What nonsense is this? That’s the first I’ve heard of it. No one named – no quote given. But this is what you get these days.
The final report of the commission of the Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes is here. The Executive summary states, “Ireland was a cold harsh environment for many, probably the majority, of its residents during the earlier half of the period under remit. It was especially cold and harsh for women. All women suffered serious discrimination. Women who gave birth outside marriage were subject to particularly harsh treatment. Responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families. It was supported by, contributed to, and condoned by, the institutions of the State and the Churches. However, it must be acknowledged that the institutions under investigation provided a refuge – a harsh refuge in some cases – when the families provided no refuge at all.”
A lot of journalists were very upset that the Report was not harsh enough on the nuns and that it instead called these homes a refuge. You see, that’s how the media works in Ireland, they get upset at the idea that their narrative of Evil Nuns might be undermined by fact finding and the truth that the nuns were not as evil as the media (including films) would have you believe. What kind of person actually wants these homes to be harsher than they were so it can feed their sick desire and agenda of trashing dead nuns? That’s some disordered thinking right there.
It always reminds me of my favourite quote from CS Lewis, in Mere Christianity:
“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that”, or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
You see the problem? The media say the mother and baby homes were terrible places run by evil nuns. The truth is that they were for many women ‘a refuge.’ This makes people disappointed as there is no pleasure in the headline: Not all Nuns Evil.
Some people would actually prefer it if the homes were harsher for the mothers and their unfortunate children than they were in reality because that fits the narrative of Evil Catholic Ireland. In sum, having more mothers and babies mistreated by nuns is better, is “the win”, the media actually wanted. And they will not let facts or nuance get in the way of securing that win.
If you read the chapter on Tuam it is clear that the children’s home was established and owned by Galway County Council and it was operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours. Galway County Council was responsible for maintenance and improvements. At one time the Department of Local Government and Public Health wanted to hand the whole thing over to the nuns and reopen it as an external institution but the wicked evil nuns “refused to sign this agreement until Galway County Council agreed to carry out extensive improvements and install central heating.” The Council continued to drag their heels on the issue but eventually caved.
Chapter 15 of the report is worth reading in full unless you want to hear that every nun was evil and mistreated their charges. If that’s what you want to read, then go to the Guardian and the Sunday Times. If you want to read the truth about the playroom, for instance “Play-Room Children and Toddlers: There were 59 children in this group. All seemed healthy and normal” and then further descriptions of children with disabilities and how the nuns were caring for them, then don’t bother.
A word on the nuns. I’m not saying all was great back in the day – clearly it wasn’t. But these women did not drop out of the sky. These women cared for those mothers and their children, who were desperate and for whom no one else would care for, not even their families. And yet a whole army of so-called feminist journalists have trashed these women and their efforts for years.
These women who were nuns were our (or at least my parents) sisters, cousins and aunts. I don’t mean literally – we had no nuns in the family but plenty of others did. They were human, just like the rest of us. It would be naïve to think they all had true vocations. Old Ireland was a cold place for a single woman. But plenty of them did their best doing a job no one else wanted, certainly not the men.
The wholesale ruthless vilification of every single one of these women who are too dead to defend themselves is neither proper journalism or indeed dignified. There is such a thing as decency and the hysterical, inaccurate reporting around Tuam isn’t it.