This is such a horror that it transcends sectarian bickering, but please recall that the Calvinists were WHY the Irish were in such destitution. To them, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” made lots of sense, because God hated them anyway.
Or did you forget that the potato famine was caused by the fact that the Irish had to rely on root vegetables because their Calvinist oppressors would burn everything that grew above ground? It’s not natural to be a one-crop people, but the Irish had only one crop they could survive on.
“I do blame the Catholic Church,” says Corless. “I blame the families as well but people were afraid of the parish priest. I think they were brainwashed. I suppose the lesson is not to be hiding things. To face up to reality.
“My fear is that if things aren’t faced now it’s very easy to slide back into this kind of cover-up again. I want the truth out there. If you give people too much power it’s dangerous.”
Living and dying in a culture of shame and silence for decades, the Home Babies’ very existence was considered an affront to Ireland and God.
It was a different time, some defenders argued this week, omitting to mention that the stigmatizing silence that surrounded The Home was fostered by clerics. Indeed the religious orders were so successful at silencing their critics that for decades even to speak of The Home was to risk contagion.
And now that terrifying era of shame and silence is finally lifting, we are left to ask what all their lonesome suffering was in aid of, and what did it actually achieve?
To donate to the memorial for the mothers and babies of The Home, contact Catherine Corless at catherinecorless@hotmail.com.
The quote, above, is from article. Is this the consequence of eating too many potatoes?
I don’t see what all the fuss is about. These girls were simply given over to reprobation and were obviously merely fulfilling the will of God.
Perhaps some folks here are under the delusion these Romanists had free will or something?
*cough cough*
They were Calvinist oppressors by chance. By purpose they were the royal houses of Great Britain, who sought to end any chance of a Royal Irish challenge to their claims of total authority - as well as their claims of rightful authority.
I am Catholic by conversion and mostly English in ancestry, without a drop of Irish blood.
One of the most shocking places I have ever visited is the Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin - in my ignorance I thought it was the Catholic cathedral until I was charged admission, and saw all the triumphalist and martial tributes to the conquerors of the Irish and Papistry.
Why did the Irish live in filthy and deplorable conditions, and count themselves fortunate if they had a pig to bring inside a one-room hut? Well, if a man made improvements on the land he rented, a bigger house, better drainage and so forth, he would not receive any compensation for those improvements from the landowner, were he evicted - and those very improvements could well be the incentive to evict him and his family in order to receive a higher rent.
Ireland exported food during the famine - wheat, sheep, beef. The starving were kept from that food at gunpoint. I think that genocide would be an accurate word.
When we were in Kerry and Cork I thought the people warm and happy - the famine 150 years behind them. But in the North, still in the Catholic towns, there was a sharpness and a bitterness to them, the strife there far more recent.