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Ireland was no country for young women but for men another story
Opinion piece about the women and children in those homes for unwed mothers:
Ireland was no country for young women but for men another story
Cahir O'Doherty
June 14,2014
The unwed mothers of the homes were simply not valued and neither were their children. The statistics make this plain. The death rate for “illegitimate” Irish children was between three and five times that of “legitimate” children from the 1920’s through the late 1940’s.
***
What Ireland did with the help and instruction of the religious orders in the twentieth century was to remove love and responsibility from each man's actions, by replacing them with judgment and condemnation.
The society they created together is what we’re looking at now.
We know now that tens of thousands of Irishmen abandoned the women they impregnated and the child that was the result, over and over again, for most of the the 20 century.
They did this without injury to their livelihoods or reputations. They discovered they could walk between the raindrops, so they did.
But for Irish women - and their children - it was another story. They became the focus of a lifelong, religiously inspired shame that marked their lives.
***
It was inevitable that the unspeakable shame that was attached to the mother would be attached to the child. We already have multiple eyewitness accounts to confirm this.
Women disappeared, children disappeared, by the tens of thousands, for decades, into those disastrous gulags. Anyone who thinks this story will soon blow over had not been paying attention.
http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/No-country-for-young-women-of-Ireland-but-for-men-another-story.html
Cahir O'Doherty
June 14,2014
The unwed mothers of the homes were simply not valued and neither were their children. The statistics make this plain. The death rate for “illegitimate” Irish children was between three and five times that of “legitimate” children from the 1920’s through the late 1940’s.
***
What Ireland did with the help and instruction of the religious orders in the twentieth century was to remove love and responsibility from each man's actions, by replacing them with judgment and condemnation.
The society they created together is what we’re looking at now.
We know now that tens of thousands of Irishmen abandoned the women they impregnated and the child that was the result, over and over again, for most of the the 20 century.
They did this without injury to their livelihoods or reputations. They discovered they could walk between the raindrops, so they did.
But for Irish women - and their children - it was another story. They became the focus of a lifelong, religiously inspired shame that marked their lives.
***
It was inevitable that the unspeakable shame that was attached to the mother would be attached to the child. We already have multiple eyewitness accounts to confirm this.
Women disappeared, children disappeared, by the tens of thousands, for decades, into those disastrous gulags. Anyone who thinks this story will soon blow over had not been paying attention.
http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/No-country-for-young-women-of-Ireland-but-for-men-another-story.html
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