As the bodies of dead babies are dug up, innocent nuns are vilified

This week, the largest excavation of a burial site in Irish history began in Tuam, County Galway. Forensic scientists hope to find the remains of some 796 babies, and by DNA comparisons with living people, then “identify” them. The babies all died of natural causes in a “mother and childrens’ home” run by Bon Secours nuns between 1922 and 1961. Most of these mothers were unmarried, and were accordingly shunned by Irish society. Just about the only people proffering help to these poor social lepers were the nuns, who are now being popularly execrated as the primary culprits. 

Quite so: And in modern Ireland, the Good Samaritan would probably be recast as King Herod.

The story of Tuam is quite shocking but not in any sense unique, either to Tuam or to Ireland. Ill-treatment of unmarried mothers was widespread in most societies until recent times. The vilely misnamed “honour killings” of unmarried mothers still occur amongst immigrant communities in Britain, a country that recently legalised full-term abortions. A viable human being may now be killed in the mother’s womb after nine months’ gestation and not be regarded as the victim of a crime.  At the same time, Ireland was preparing to stage its very public piece of expiatory, agitprop-theatre around the recovery of the pathetic remains in Tuam,  even as it continues on the same enlightened journey towards full-term abortion. So, while it publicly recovers some infantile torsos, it is apparently preparing to generate others, also known as “progress”.

Tuam is an appropriate place for this paradox, for – quite coincidentally – the name means “burial mound” in the Irish language.  Tuam was also an epicentre of the Irish Famine of the 1840s, in which over a million people died of hunger and disease. The original workhouse in Tuam for the homeless poor was built in 1846, at the height of the Famine. Life there was meant to be harsh to discourage a culture of exigent dependency, which is exactly what the modern welfare state has created. Across the western world, the state’s generosity to single mothers has helped cause an epidemic of dysfunctional, fatherless families, often producing socially-aberrant, exigent offspring. But discussing this existential crisis is nearly as taboo as single-motherhood once was. 

Getting these things wrong is easy. Getting them right is less so. This suggests that human history is largely about mankind’s endless escapes from the prison created by the previous generation to a new one created by its successor, ad infinitum.

Southern Ireland gained independence from Britain in 1922, and by agreement across all parties promptly surrendered control of education, health and culture to the Catholic Church. So the appalling treatment of unmarried mothers was a consensual matter, which in neither detail nor harshness was confined to Ireland: The US would not even allow unmarried mothers past immigration at Ellis Island.

Wrong? Yes, of course by today’s standards, yet the Archbishop of Tuam clearly thought he was doing right in 1924 when he organised a bonfire of all books in the library of University College Galway suspected of “glorifying” unmarried motherhood. Professor Howley of UCG’s English Department concurred, asking: “What else was to be done with these books? Was there any great sin in incinerating them?”

Ireland agreed: Single motherhood was an evil that brought shame on the entire family of the “erring” women. Other societies around that time embraced even worse perversions, such as communism, Nazism and fascism, and were supported by intellectuals such as HG Wells and Bertrand Russell. George Bernard Shaw said in 1935, “It is nice to go for a holiday and know that Hitler has settled everything so well in  Europe.”

In Tuam, that other GBS, Galway’s Bon Secours, the desperately poor and overworked  sisters toiling for years in unsanitary, overcrowded conditions in the converted workhouse, did their very best for the thousands of wretchedly undernourished single mothers and their children, who were easy prey to epidemics. The same kindly nuns are now being vilified by the Irish tabloids, with clear (but baseless)  accusations of murder. This iniquity has been made far easier by the cultural defeminisation of nuns, as exemplified by the fate of Sister Nora Wall. In 1999, this innocent was imprisoned for life for assisting in the rape of a young woman. Not one feminist spoke up for her or denounced the sentence, presumably because she was a nun: Indeed, the single person who did so is the author of this column. Only when the evidence against her was revealed as 100 per cent perjury was she pardoned and released. 

The presumption of nuns’ guilt-as-charged remains today. Hence one Irish Times columnist this week disgracefully declared: “Here in Ireland, we had the hideous exhumation in 1993 of the graves of women buried at the High Park Magdalene Home in Dublin – so that the nuns could sell the land for property development.”

In fact, the respectful removal of human remains, as here, is a legal and cultural norm whenever a traditional burial ground is being repurposed. But in modern Ireland – which was officially born the day that Nora Wall’s cell door shut and the key thrown away – anything done by religious orders is at best inherently suspect, and at worst, also as here, explicitly hideous. So, Ireland is following a well-beaten European path in creating a secular Elysium in which the beliefs of two millennia of organised religion are abandoned for the liberating ideologies of egalitarianism, full-blooded feminism and the even more full-blooded execution-by-abortion of fully-gestated human beings. 

Moreover, if the Irish state proves incapable of silencing  Christian traditionalists who still cherish those life-affirming elements of the culture, ethnos and ethos of the Irish people, the necessary piece of censorial surgery can be entrusted to the liberal media. Since the pusillanimous days of Nora Wall’s exoneration, those outlets have turned lynching into a far finer and more  irreversible art. As the excavators uncover the lost bodies of Tuam, they are symbolically digging  fresh graves for as yet unidentified victims. History’s remorseless cycle continues anew.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.