Irish Affairs

(cont……)

There is no chance of these children and their mothers being forgotten now, and that is meaningful. I was too young when I saw in 2002 The Magdalene Sisters, a drama which gave me a lifelong aversion to Irish nuns, so repugnant and sadistic was their behaviour towards the vulnerable women in their control. Being the granddaughter of a woman who was once tarred as “illegitimate” – the bald cruelty of this term, of the thought of labelling a baby thus, is enough to bring tears to your eyes – perhaps led to my interest in this dark chapter of Irish history. My grandmother was born in a mother-and-baby home, but in Wales. It was no picnic, but had she been in Ireland – the country of her suspected father – even greater miseries would have awaited her.

The treatment of children born out of wedlock in Ireland as “an inferior subspecies” – then taoiseach Enda Kenny’s words in 2014 – and the humiliation to which they were subjected is a stain on the church’s history. Corless said in interview at the time that she had lost respect for the Catholic church. She is by no means alone in that.