WUNRN
Single Mothers and the Architecture of
Confinement in Ireland
By No Peace Without Justice and Sentinel
Human Rights Defenders
And endorsed by the National Women’s
Council of Ireland and Adoption Rights Alliance
Wednesday 24 June 2015 at 17.30-18.30
Room XXII, Palais des Nations – UN Headquarters Geneva
In 2016, Ireland will celebrate the
centenary of the Easter Rising – the defining moment in her birth as an independent
nation. Religious and political leaders will join hands and call on Irish
people from home and abroad to come together to remember and celebrate the
ideals of the 1916 Proclamation. That iconic document promised an Irish
Republic which “guarantees religious
and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens,
and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole
nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation
equally”.
This is
Ireland’s official history – one of freedom earned through sacrifice. Its
heroes honoured and never to be forgotten, with monuments in every Irish
town. However, there is an unofficial history. The monuments to its
heroes are mass graves, silence and secrecy. The Proclamation was not for them.
This history involves the incarceration, enslavement and death not because of
people’s beliefs, race or class, but because of their gender. It resulted in the establishment of a network of
institutions that illegally removed the parental rights of unmarried women as
well as their basic human rights and liberty (and their children’s). It
involved forced incarceration, forced labour and slavery, the removal of their
children for illegal/forced adoptions, medical and vaccine trials without
consent. These were the lucky ones. Many more lie in mass graves on the grounds
of religious property all over the country. Others lie in unmarked graves in
Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin – a stone’s throw from the tourist trail graves of
the Irish heroes who promised “civil
liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens”.
·
County Homes pre-dated M and B Homes and
were essentially what was left over from workhouses. The women who went through
the system are dead. However, they are linked in that many pregnant women
(second offenders) ended up in County Homes and were then sent to:
·
Mother
and Baby Homes, established as separate institutions for
unmarried mothers and children at the behest of central and local government authorities
in an independent Ireland’s early years, an attempt at reform of former
workhouses, euphemistically renamed County Homes.
·
Magdalene Laundries also
confined women, with numerous accounts of horrific physical and psychological
abuse, as penance to wash away their sin.
·
So-called ‘nursing homes’ that received
women from State maternity hospitals, only to have their children adopted
through agencies, many of which are still in operation and tightly guard their
files.
The
criminal outcomes of this system include the following. Illegal and forced
adoptions: with staggeringly large numbers of children born outside of
marriage being adopted, the lack of paperwork and hiding a child’s real parents
contravenes that person’s right to discover their identity or have it
re-established. Vaccine trials: Dozens of institutions participated in
illegal vaccine trials against thousands of children in Mother and Baby Homes
run by the Wellcome Foundation (now GlaxoSmithKline) across almost half a century.
Unnecessary deaths: In some homes, death rates reached 68%, with
children buried in mass graves and in the same plots as Magdelene Women, with
no proper paperwork and no proper burial rites.
Medical
trials: More than 450
dead infants from Mother and Baby Homes were dissected in the medical departments of Irish universities without
the knowledge or permission of their mothers, buried years later as “anatomical
subjects.”
Symphysiotomy: More than 1,500 symphysiotomies during
childbirth were conducted since the 1940s, often
without the consent of the woman. While the Government initiated a redress
scheme in 2014 at the prompting of the UN Human Rights Committee, it is widely
considered to be inadequate and requires that women who accept an award indemnify and hold
harmless a large number of bodies.
For some victims, there has been a modicum of
admission, through a State apology issued in 2012, although the report
preceding it has been criticised as “incomplete” and lacking “many elements of a prompt,
independent, and thorough investigation”. For most of the women and children of Ireland’s
unofficial history, there has been no apology, no redress and no acknowledgment
of the crimes they endured. They continue to be silenced and their children
remain second-class Irish citizens denied a right to their identity and their
medical records. This parallel history must also be highlighted during
Ireland’s centennial, to recognise and embrace all of Ireland’s heroes and
acknowledge the wrongs done so that Ireland can truly become a modern home of
equality for all its citizens.