Open Letter to Archbishop Michael Neary regarding Tuam Home

 

Most Reverend Michael Neary, Archbishop of Tuam

In a sermon in the Cathedral of the Assumption, Tuam on 11 March 2017 you asked - in relation to the women and children of the former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam: “How could the culture of Irish society, which purported to be defined by Christian values, have allowed itself to behave in such a manner towards our most vulnerable?”

I responded at the time. To understand my response in context you will need to read my article The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns [3]

I would answer the Archbishop as follows: The late Pablo McCabe was a homeless schizophrenic man who presumably qualified as one of “our most vulnerable” and former Sister of Mercy Nora Wall was hardly a member of high society. McCabe had no money but prior to 1999 no woman had ever been convicted of rape so McCabe was accused to make the allegation appear more plausible. The leaders of the Sisters of Mercy betrayed both of them and sided with the accusers. Archbishop what makes you think that the current accusers are more plausible? Do you really find it acceptable that a Government Minister [John Halligan] should refer to Nazis and talk about Belsen, Auschwitz and Dachau? Archbishop, if a Garda investigation into the Tuam Home produces no evidence to support such claims will you do or say anything at all? Or will you remain silent like the current leaders of the Sisters of Mercy?

My response to you forms part of Comment 53 in the article (Don't worry - I don't include all the comments!). The preceding Comment 52 summaries the scandal surrounding the wrongful convictions of Pablo McCabe and former Sister of Mercy Nora Wall AND also the paranoid utterances of former Junior Minister John Halligan. 

History Seminar on Tuam Mother and Babies Home

There have been a lot of developments since 2017 not least our Seminar on Tuam Children's Home  that we held in Galway on 4 October 2020. We had to transfer it from Dublin because your colleague Diarmuid Martin cancelled our Dublin venue at the last moment - supposedly on health grounds although we had been approved by the health authorities!

In my talk I referred to an article by Emer O'Kelly in the Sunday Independent on 8 June 2014 "Tuam Babies Cry Not For Justice But For Vengeance" that opens with the following

Seventy years ago, on the orders of a maniac, little children and babies were herded into barren camps in Germany and occupied Poland by men in black uniforms. They were starved to death in those camps; sometimes they had hideous medical experiments carried out upon them while alive, so hideous the silence of death was probably merciful. And when they died, their little bodies were thrown into huge pits. Because they were scum: Jewish scum.

During the course of the article Emer O'Kelly trice denounces the Good Shepherd Sisters i.e. the wrong nuns!  (NOTE [1] )

Thus It's hardly surprising  to read in a recent article in the Irish Times by Stephanie Walsh a retired teacher who specialised in Relationships and Sexuality Education.  Good work of religious in aiding single mothers now largely forgotten (subtitle "In the 1970s church people provided more assistance to women in need than secular society")

Some years ago I met a Good Shepherd Sister who had placed women with us. I asked why the Sisters hadn’t publicly defended the important role they had played in improving the lives of single pregnant women. She answered that it was impossible to get a fair hearing in the media that had demonised all religious involved in that work.

In my experience, church women and men provided more assistance to women in need in the 70s than did the secular community. Most of the social workers who contacted our family were religious Sisters; many of the women in trouble were referred by priests.

The demonising of the nuns is not confined to bigoted anti-clerics: "Progressive" priests who like to make themselves popular with the media also get in on the act. In June 2014  Fr Brian D’Arcy had an  article in the Sunday World entitled “Fr Brian: Baby Graves are Our Greatest Crime” that includes the following:

“When I first heard the news that more than 800 babies were buried in what was formerly a septic tank I was astonished – because initially I thought it happened in some famine-stricken country today. Then I thought I was hearing about Nazi Germany…..” etc 

Unfortunately Fr Brian's Sunday World article is no longer online but a shorter version is available  in the Irish Examiner dated 5 June 2014 entitled Disposal of babies' bodies in Tuam 'as bad as Nazi Germany': Fr Brian Darcy 

Well-known cleric Fr Brian Darcy has said the discovery of almost 800 babies bodies next to a Galway mother and baby home is as bad as anything that happened in Nazi Germany. The Government has today confirmed that a "scoping exercise" is underway to determine whether other mass graves such as that found in Tuam exist in other parts of the country.

Fr Brian Darcy said he thought previous scandals involving the Church had left him "unshockable", but that this was a shocking as something that happened in Germany during World War II. He added that people needed to be brought to justice for "sinful crimes". "I think if the facts are as bad as they seem to be, and I have no reason to doubt that, I think this will cause a massive revolution about the kind of country that we had and the kind of country that we're all children of."

(Helpful key words after the article include "Nazi Germany" and "World War II") (NOTE [2] )

In contrast with this  you have Irish atheist and editor of the SpikedOnLine magazine Brendan O'Neill who wrote an article on 9 June 2014  “The Tuam Tank: Another Myth about Evil Ireland” with subtitle  “The obsession with Ireland’s dark past has officially become unhinged.”  He quotes some of the world-wide headlines:

Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, declared the Washington Post. ‘800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, said the New York Daily News. ‘Galway historian finds 800 babies in septic tank grave’, said the Boston Globe. ‘The bodies of 800 babies were found in the septic tank of a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland’, cried Buzzfeed.    ......The blogosphere and Twitter hordes went even further than the mainstream media, with whispers about the 800 babies having been murdered by the nuns and demands for the UN to investigate ‘crimes against humanity’ in Tuam.

 Unlike Fr Brian, Brendan O'Neill believes it is nonsense. However it certainly wasn't just "Twitter hordes" that suggested the nuns murdered babies. The Sunday World - for which Fr Brian has written for many years - had a story on 29 June 2014 subtitled “Councillor Seeking Justice For ‘Murder’ of Babies” about then People Before Profit councillor Deirdre Wadding. The following is an extract:

Deirdre said that what was happening to single mothers in Ireland even in the 1980s was a form of “torture”. “In later years, there was brutality, what you would call torture,” she said, describing the babies bodies found in the septic tank in Tuam as “nothing short of murder”. “Children seem to have been allowed to die. No doubt the cracks will uncover as time goes on and we can be sure if it happened in Tuam it happened elsewhere. We have to seek justice. Somebody has to be responsible for this. ……If that means individuals being brought to court, jail sentences, whatever it means, we cannot hold back”.

Another woman describes a “sinister scene” in the Good Shepherd convent in New Ross in 1964.

I saw a baby in a nun’s arms and blood dripping along the floor. I saw another nun standing with a shovel in her hand. I was a 12 year old. I knew they were going out to do something, or dig a hole for that child but nobody would listen to me.

The claims of child murder and dumping babies in a cess pit are complete lunacy comparable to the 19th century hysteria in Canada over the "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" that also involved claims of infanticide by nuns in Montreal. The difference is that then, Catholic Bishops and clergy stood firmly in support of the nuns whereas now you are silent when not actively throwing them to the wolves! 

To answer your question

So to answer your question: How could the culture of Irish society, which purported to be defined by Christian values, have allowed itself to behave in such a manner towards our most vulnerable?” Before you respond to the publication of the Report on Mother and Babies Homes today, perhaps you will take time to consider just WHO are the "vulnerable" ones here? Is it the "Survivors" backed by all the power of Media and State  or the nuns in general, and the Bon Secours Sisters in particular, who have been subjected to obscene abuse - up to and including Blood Libel?

Yours sincerely,

Rory Connor

PS You are well aware of the lie spread worldwide by the media a few years ago that the Catholic Church refused to baptise the children of unmarried mothers and the apology issued by Associated Press at the behest of the Jesuit Magazine "America": Tuam Babies and Associated Press Apology to Bon Secours Sisters It was a lie directed at your own predecessors more than at the Bon Secours Sisters but most journalists were probably too ignorant to realise this! It doesn't measure up to the Nazi Nun claims but it is important  because it can be PROVEN false - even 60 years after the Tuam Home closed. 

NOTES

[1] And THIS is Emer O'Kelly writing about Nora Wall (extract from the Wikipedia article on Nora). It's clear that her rant against the Bon Secours/Good Shepherd nuns was not an aberration!

On 28 November 1999, the Sunday Independent published an article entitled "Judge reflects a nation's outrage" by columnist Emer O'Kelly. The  title refers to the sentencing by Judge Anthony Murphy of a Brother of Charity to 36 years imprisonment for the physical and sexual abuse of children. However the article contains these words about the Nora Wall case:

When the former Mercy nun Nora Wall was vindicated, and an announcement was made that she was not to be retried for rape, there was an outcry from some members of the public about the way she had been vilified before her conviction was set aside. The horrible reality of our society is that so many appalling crimes of abuse of children by Catholic religious have been proved in the courts that many people are inclined to believe that no cleric, man or woman, accused of such crimes can possibly be innocent. And that is not the fault of public opinion. It is in large measure the fault of the religious authorities who seem more concerned with limiting the damage to their own reputations and standing than in acknowledging their collective guilt and active negligence.

[ Emer O'Kelly has, of course, nothing to say about Nora's co-accused, homeless  schizophrenic Pablo McCabe who was accused solely in order to make Ireland's first rape allegation against a woman, look more plausible! RC ] 

[2]  An article in the Irish Independent on 5 June 2014 gives a slightly different perspective on Fr Brian's views: Fr Brian D'Arcy: Tuam mass baby grave 'an incredible, awful, unchristian and unsocial thing'  Instead of Nazi Germany, he refers to "a bad regime" and then there is THIS:

He has called for those responsible to be brought to justice.

“It’s not just a sinful approach to life it’s also a serious crime. This seems to have been self-imposed and cruel and ruthless and therefore needs investigated. I presume some of the people from that era are still alive and need to be brought to justice for that. We cannot claim to be pro-life and allow that to happen to children. We need to establish the facts of what did happen but it seems to me that over a short period of life over 800 people weren’t even given recorded deaths, some of whom seem to have died from starvation."