said it was “unforgivable” that children born outside of marriage were treated as outcasts. He spoke of their sense of abandonment and of the stigma and lack of birth information which had been a “terrible burden” in their lives. “We honoured piety but failed to show even basic kindness to those who needed it most.”“an underlying, but enormously influential, strain of misogyny, and a negative and oppressive attitude to sexuality, particularly in relation to women”.
Children’s socks line a grotto on an unmarked mass grave at the site of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, which closed in 1961.Many of the 550 witnesses who gave evidence to the commission were shocked to find the report contained only very brief extracts of their testimonies, or nothing at all. “Their courage in coming forward had been
“Every Sunday you had to listen all about sin and you believed it, because the whole country was imbued with it, a culture of control and fear. ” Many women told the commission either that they were pressured to sign adoption papers or didn’t recall signing anything at all. Yet the commission decided they were not forced to give up their babies. The report acknowledged that they often had little or no choice in the matter, but that absence of choice was “not the same as ‘forced’ adoption”.considered a wider meaning of “force”. In fact, the committee found that forced adoption was common.
It seemed to me, reading and listening to these stories, that the lasting damage was not so much the misfortune of being an unmarried mother, or the child of one – though that was bad enough – but the secrets and lies that followed. People searching for their birth records from a mother and baby home would be told by the nuns that they had been destroyed in a fire, only to have them turn up, years later, heavily redacted, at Tusla, the Irish child and family agency.