By David Quinn
Attitudes to unmarried mothers and their babies have changed back and forth over the centuries. The historian Ivy Pinchbeck says that in medieval England, children born outside of marriage were not viewed as being as much of a problem as later and were absorbed into their mothers' communities and worked on the farms like everyone else.
From Elizabethan times, with the introduction of the first poor laws, attitudes began to harden, and then hardened again in the 19th century in both Britain and Ireland. An award-winning essay by Dorothy L Haller called 'Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England', shows how society's attitude became even more punitive in the 19th century and this legacy continued well into the 20th century, with only some attempts to soften the edges.
Ms Haller writes that prior to the 1830s, unmarried mothers and their babies tended to be looked after, reluctantly, out of parish funds, but then it was decided they were too much of a drain on scarce parish resources. They were to be dealt with under new poor laws that made it even harder for them to receive help, including from the father of the child.
Previously the father could sometimes be forced to pay for the upkeep of his child, but then it was decided by the then chancellor that forcing men to pay for their 'illegitimate' children made them "victims of the seducer's art".
The hardening of attitudes to unmarried mothers seems to have happened almost across the board. Many Christians supported it, but so did followers of the rising philosophy of utilitarianism, who were often not at all religious, and who tended to believe in the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest'.
The Gradgrind character in Charles Dickens' 'Hard Times' caricatures the type.
The New Poor Law of 1834 led to the widespread establishment of workhouses and so on. Unmarried mothers and their babies now found the world an even harsher place.
The London 'Times' of 1834 declared that relief to mothers of 'illegitimate' children had reached "a pitch extremely oppressive to the parishes, and grievously detrimental to female morals".
There was lots more of this kind of thing from the leading organs and thinkers of the day and it lasted for decades. A distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor was made very clear. This was Victorian morality writ large.
The laws and the institutions developed under this new, harsher dispensation for unmarried mothers and their children, extended to Ireland. Here, as in England, the churches ran many of the institutions.
After we won independence in 1922, the Catholic Church and Irish society, instead of looking at the system of institutions we inherited and radically reforming, if not abolishing and replacing them, seemed to instead double down on the worst kind of Victorian morality.
This is what helps to explain the Tuam Mother and Baby home, and other, similar institutions in this country, and elsewhere. (Mother and baby homes continued to exist in Britain until well after the middle of the last century.)
Enda Kenny spoke about the matter in the Dáil this week.
He said: "Tuam is not just a burial ground, it is a social and cultural sepulchre. That is what it is. As a society in the so-called 'good old days', we did not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings, we dug deep and deeper still to bury our compassion, our mercy and our humanity itself. No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns' care."
His tone and his words contrasted very sharply with those of Labour's Kathleen Lynch in 2013 when she addressed the Dáil about Bethany Home, which also housed unmarried mothers and their babies.
Ms Lynch, then the junior minister in the Department of Justice, used much softer language than the Taoiseach, even though hundreds of babies also died in Bethany Home and were buried in an unmarked grave.
Explaining the high death rate in the Protestant-run institution she said: "Unfortunately, poverty and disease were commonplace in Ireland up to the 1950s and this was reflected in infant mortality rates.
"Infant mortality rates in the 1940s were at a level that is hard to comprehend today, about 20 times higher than now and that figure applies across the entire population. For those who were malnourished and subject to disease and a lack of hygiene, the figures would have been higher still."
Responding to critics of the home, she said: "Our Constitution demands we respect the rules of natural justice. People are entitled to a fair hearing and an opportunity to protect their good name…it seems to have been accepted at the time that Bethany Home was run by people with charitable motives."
Was Ms Lynch's speech about the Bethany Home too soft? Did Mr Kenny's speech get the tone right?
I hope the commission set up to investigate our mother and baby homes, and the county homes, gets to the bottom of what exactly happened to those babies and their mothers. I hope it throws a full light on why they were established and how they were run.
I hope it finds out exactly why infant mortality rates were so high in them. I hope it finds out why the bodies were often put in unmarked graves and what the burial practices were for the very poor in those decades.
I hope it looks at what was happening before the mother and baby homes came into existence and what were the realistic alternatives to them.
I hope it looks at what was happening in other countries. For example, in social democratic Sweden, where they were sterilising unmarried mothers.
I hope it gives us a full and complete understanding of the whole miserable business and that this will help deliver both truth and justice. Nothing less will do.
Irish Independent
