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By Sasha Brown
January 2021 saw the publication of the long-awaited Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, the product of an investigation originally established by the Irish Government in 2015. The investigation was triggered by the 2014 discovery of mass graves in the grounds of one of over a dozen mother and baby homes later investigated as part of the Commission’s efforts. Shockingly, these graves contained the bodies of babies and children.
What were the mother and baby homes?
The report spans 76 years, with the existence of mother and baby homes dating back to the early 1920s and the last home having closed in 1998. However, the largest number of admissions was in the 1960s and 1970s. Unmarried mothers and their children were admitted to mother and baby homes when their family or the father of the child were unwilling or unable to support them. Given the church and state’s emphasis on family values and the cultural conservatism of Irish society, pregnancy out of wedlock and the resulting ‘illegitimate' children were a great source of shame during this period. Consequently, for many families mother and baby homes provided a means of dissociating from this social taboo. The report itself acknowledges that mother and baby homes and the social attitudes which gave rise to them were not unique to Ireland, yet they were particularly pervasive and persisted far longer there than in other countries. To some degree, the influence of the Catholic Church upon the state and societal norms was significant as it reinforced notions of pre-marital purity and influenced legislation against contraception and divorce.
Key findings of the report
The human rights abuses associated with the existence of mother and baby homes have been laid bare by the publication of the inquiry’s findings. Infant mortality in the homes was incredibly high, with up to 9,000 children dying in 18 institutions between 1922 and 1998. Many children who survived infancy were adopted, sometimes against their mother’s will. Others found themselves institutionalised elsewhere, away from their mothers and consequently carried the shame of their so-called illegitimacy with them into adolescence.
In addition to shedding light upon the disproportionately high number of infant deaths in the homes, the report details several other areas of grave concern. Multiple vaccine trials were conducted in the homes with poor levels of compliance with the regulatory standards of the era. The trials involved both women and their children without consent and, despite the apparent absence of any serious injury resulting from the trials, the notion of these women and children being used as unwilling subjects in a medical experiment is sinister. It is indicative of the lowly position they came to occupy within, or rather on the margins of, Irish society.
Ireland signed and ratified several international human rights treaties during the post-war period while mother and baby homes were still operative, including the European Convention on Human Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women. That the homes, with their suboptimal living standards, dubious adoption processes and complicity in unethical medical trials, could exist at all under the radar of these human rights instruments and their accompanying enforcement mechanisms is astounding. It raises unavoidable questions about who exactly can be held responsible, and what the Irish Government can offer beyond token apologies.
What is left unresolved and why the report still matters
The publication of the report is significant in that it signals a move by the Irish state toward greater transparency, accountability and liberalisation. Further, the findings of the report give voice to the affected women and their now adult children. However, this potential for closure was undermined even before the official publication of the report when it was leaked to Irish media. The fact that those directly affected were not the first to see the report’s findings, and that highly sensitive information was shared in this way, is a further abuse of power by those in government leaking information to the press and as a result, trust in the state is further eroded. In addition, prior to the publication of the report, legislation was passed by the Irish government that effectively sealed the archive testimony of survivors for 30 years by transferring records to the Irish Child and Family Agency which is subject to data protection laws. The implication of this legislation is that the very people the report concerns may not have access to information about their own identities or indeed those of their absent relatives. The denial of access to the truth risks undermining the purpose of the investigation and its inclusion of survivor testimony.
The Coalition of Mother and Baby Homes Survivors has responded to the report by expressing a sense of vindication but lamenting the tardiness of the report’s publication and its myriad omissions. Importantly, the Coalition rejects the suggestion that the homes and the abuses suffered within them were a result of societal failure or misogyny. Rather, the Coalition asserts that the Irish Free State was ‘profoundly anti-women both in its laws and in its culture and out of which emerged the Mother and Baby Homes’. This position makes a crucial distinction between the responsibility of families of the women and the culpability of the state itself which ultimately denied young women their fundamental rights.
What next?
The Irish government has now initiated the process of establishing a plan of action in light of the report. This will supposedly ensure a victim-centred approach which seeks engagement with living former-residents of the homes and the provision of counselling services to those still blighted by the traumas resulting from their experiences in Mother and Baby Homes. In addition, access to information is to be prioritised, with the promise that a central repository of records will be made available to survivors and their families alongside archival databases.
The past decade has seen huge social and cultural progress in Ireland, with the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the decriminalisation of abortion marking a significant departure from the state’s historically close association with the Catholic church and the stiflingly conservative culture produced by such an alliance. While the report’s findings are at times horrific in nature and reflect darkly upon a culture of misogyny and shame in Ireland, the fact that these truths have been made public marks yet another step in the right direction for a nation marred by conflict and repression.
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