Alison O'Connor: Misogyny is still very much a part of Irish society
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She was 15 years old. She went into labour not knowing what the birthing process involved.
Then again, she did not know how she got pregnant in the first place. Experiencing the pain of labour, she believed she was dying.
“They actually tied me, because I was in pain. I thought I am going to die. They tied me with some, I don’t know, stuff to the bed... It was absolutely horrific. But anyhow, once it was over I was told, 'I suppose this will teach you; offer it up for the sins you committed' and all that.”
The report into Ireland’s mother and baby homes is some 3,000 pages long. I haven’t come close to reading anything like all of it.
However, having gone through a considerable amount of it, there is a sense of being emotionally flayed, being hit with page after page of shame, abuse, scorn, violence, confusion, neglect, torment, cruelty, inhumanity, disgrace, innocence destroyed, abuse, and incest. This was grand misogyny, fuelled by Church and State.
In the midst of this ferment of horror, the girl known in the report as Resident A, who gave birth in the Sean Ross home in Roscrea, Co Tipperary in the 1950s, keeps coming to mind.
She couldn’t tell her outraged parents, who had 11 other children, how she got pregnant because she simply did not know what the mechanics involved. “I didn’t actually know any facts of life to be fair.”
One day, out with her sisters, she was pulled into bushes. “Whatever happened, it happened, and I didn’t even know that this is where babies come from or anything… It was like, rape I suppose you would call it.”
She was still breastfeeding her four-month-old baby boy when he was adopted without her permission ever being sought. It was just savage.
If simply reading the report as a citizen of this country can leave you so heartsore, imagine the agony it causes to those who were directly involved.
The infant mortality rate alone was extraordinary. Some 9,000 children died in the homes between 1922 and 1998.
In 1943 in Bessborough in Cork, it could have been said that the majority of women and girls, rather than giving birth, actually gave death there, as three-quarters of all children born that year died in infancy.
This is a report that needs to be considered by us all at considerable length.
Irish men are fairly well trashed here, be it the men who did the impregnating and subsequent abandonment; the gardaí who turned a blind eye to statutory rape, rape, incest, and what was essentially infanticide when you look at the thousands of babies that died; the clergy who ruled with an iron fist; and the politicians who never lifted a finger to address the situation.
What we must take on board is that, while these homes are now closed, some of the attitudes that went with them remain a stain on our national landscape.
They continue to inform attitudes towards woman, particularly when it comes to sexuality and independence. How could they not?
We only have to go back a few weeks, to the end of last year, and the apology and substantial compensation from the Minister for Justice and the Garda Commission to Joanne Hayes, the woman wrongly accused of murdering a baby over 35 years ago. That was a wait of three-and-a-half decades for the Kerry woman, now in her 60s.
Think of Nell McCafferty’s excellent book on that particularly Irish scandal, with a title that could be adapted to so many others that occurred in its wake. it was called.
Think of the 14-year-old girl in the X case; remember the women in the Magdalen laundries, a number of whom 'graduated' from the mother and baby Homes.
Who can recall without wincing the details of the women subjected to the violence of symphysiotomy during childbirth?
Remember Anne Lovett giving birth alone in a grotto.
What about the clinically dead woman kept on life support as her brain rotted because she was pregnant?
Not long before that, we had the raped asylum seeker forced to continue with a pregnancy against her will.
It was 2012 when Savita Halappanavar died in a hospital in Galway. We also have Miss C and Miss D.
In recent days we think of Vicky Phelan, living on her own in an apartment in the US as she takes part in a clinical trial to prolong her life.
While gravely ill, Vicky has spent recent years working tirelessly on behalf of other women caught up in the CervicalCheck scandal.
On the road to the airport now.
— Vicky Phelan (@PhelanVicky) January 10, 2021
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Try this out for more legacy size — the buildings that house the three main maternity hospitals in Dublin, where Irish women go to deliver somewhere around 90,000 babies annually, have a combined age of almost 450 years.
In some instances, these structures have more akin with workhouses than anything approaching modern healthcare facilities.
Only last year the Tampax ad — aimed at assisting women on how to correctly insert a tampon in their vagina (oftentimes excruciating if done incorrectly) — was banned after complaints.
The Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland prohibited the ad from being shown after it received over 80 complaints.
It accepted that the ad caused widespread offence. Some viewers found the ad messaging “provocative” or “suggestive”.
Worst of all — and this list is a long one — is the more than 170,000 Irish women who travelled to the UK for abortions from 1980 to 2016 because the procedure was banned in their own country.
In the Dáil chamber on Wednesday, after Taoiseach Micheál Martin had given the State apology on mother and baby homes, Cork South West TD Holly Cairns told of campaigning in the abortion referendum in 2018.
The Social Democrats deputy described how the type of attitudes laced throughout the mother and baby homes report often remain to this day.
During the campaign she came across people on doorsteps who asked what was to “stop the young ones from sleeping around at the weekend” and going off to get an abortion on a Monday.
“It is still here. It hasn’t left us, this fear of girls and women and the desire to control their lives and their bodies,” she said.
One of the best things we can do now is to ensure that Irish young people are given proper sex education, both at home and in school.
In the mother and baby homes report, Resident A was not the only pregnant girl ignorant of the “facts of life”.
At it’s most basic level, Irish children and teenagers should be taught about relationships and sex, and respect and consent, from a young age, in an objective manner, entirely outside the control of the Catholic Church.
A Government commitment to do that would truly be amazing.