Let’s be honest, the days of beneficial Nuns, all rosy cheeks, toothy smiles, dressed in their habits, usually in black, like banshees, wailing and roaming the Irish countryside, begging for pennies for the poor black babies of foreign lands and scooping up stray laments of children, this stereotyping, of kind and gentle Nuns, might be ok for The Sound of Music, but more often, (another stereotyping), they were seen as ugly, frightful unattractive, middle-aged hags or childless, prissy, and repressed, old spinsters, rightfully both of these images are long dead, but sadly it was not always the case. When several Nuns all in black appear at once, in any town or village in the heartlands of Ireland, in days of old, it usually indicated a convent or laundry building was about to be built or acquired. Fear and anxiety would grip the local poor community, for the villagers knew that the good nuns would require local, unpaid slaves, women, girls and children to run their convent and laundry, and docile boys and men to run their farm and gardens, all unpaid. Soon a girl school house would appear to teach the paying local girls that could afford the education, and order would be established. As for the boys, they would usually have the benefit of a stern, masculine society of frustrated virginal Christian Brothers, a fraternity of sexually repressed bachelors, their whole world would be dominated by lonely old men, addled young men and isolated pubescent boys, in a male school environment opposite. The demisexual Christian Brothers serious and unrelenting, especially in the assertion of their authority and exercise of their brutal discipline. This was the malignant growth of an aggressive cancer, blood-sucking religious leeches operated in Ireland for about 200 years, which is now slowly been ripped out and put to its timely demise.
Survivors and researchers usually present the Magdalene Laundries as the ultimate example of a total institution or prison. The terror so zealously applied by the Nuns in the Magdalene Laundries was indeed meticulously planned by the leaders of the Irish Catholic Church. Nonetheless, the idea that all terror was systematically organised is somewhat misleading. Magdalene Laundries rules certainly gave the Nuns, the authority to arbitrarily punish the women and their children. The Nuns who ran the Magdalene Laundries officially had the right to use violence on the women and their children in their care. Despite these rules and regulations, the Magdalene Laundry Nuns viciously assaulting the women and their children, the Nuns carried out their daily tasks brutally and bloodily. There was a considerable gap between rules and practice as set out in the Magdalene Laundries code of practice, some of the Nuns were notorious among the women for their extreme violence. And sadly a few Nuns were notorious for hitting the women and their children, even kicking fallen women almost to death. The Nuns frequently supervised the women performing their tasks, we must conclude that beating the women and their children was a way of compensating for their own incompetence, and of imposing a certain ‘authority’. Physical violence allowed the Nuns to get the upper hand, to cut a path for herself, literally and brutally, by striking blows with her hands and feet. Using violence was a way of showing that she, the Nun, was in charge. As a demonstration of power, violence was addressed first of all to the victim.
In all the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, the Nuns hit the women harder and more frequently, a few Nuns for more control used sticks and leather straps to beat both the women and their children, many of the women and their children sustained broken limbs and bruises as a result of their brutal beatings. The other weapons the Nuns used also caused humiliation and permanent damage to both mental and physical injuries. Kicking the women or their children took the degradation of the victims to a new level. It is a greater act of contempt than striking the face because it emphasises the asymmetry between the torturer and her victim. The victim lies prostrate on the ground, at the Nun’s feet. The impact of a blow is much greater if administered with the foot. Some Nuns aimed carefully and targeted the most sensitive parts of the body, like the stomach, lower abdomen and back.
The Nuns who had been relatively restrained at other convents became very aggressive at the enclosed slave prisons, known as Magdalene Laundries, which radicalised the incoming young Nuns with good intentions and their normal beliefs and behaviour, were to be corrupted by what they saw in these enclosed prisons, functioning as Magdalene Laundries. In the Magdalene Laundries basic sanitary conditions were so primitive and directly affecting many of the new Nuns. Many of the wretched, slave women and their children were in a dreadful physical state, for the Nuns the working conditions in some of the Magdalene Laundries had drastically deteriorated. Some of the Magdalene Laundries were in total chaos with overcrowding and understaffed, in fairness to some of the Nuns it wasn’t what they signed up for, in fact many of the Nuns were forced into becoming Nuns by their own families. We should not underestimate the discomforts of the Nuns, whether real, or not, separation from their families, harsh climate and working conditions, poor accommodation, as basic as their charges. All this produced feelings of deracination, frustration, fear of contamination and violent disgust for the slave women and their children, which contributed to a radicalisation of their behaviour against the women and their children. Relations between the Nuns were often fraught, and conflicts also arose openly between the older Nuns, and the younger Nuns. Also the Nuns themselves were untrained for their task at hand, all they had as a guidance was the moral compass which got lost on the way. The exercise of power is crucial for understanding of the Magdalene Laundries and how the Laundries worked, perspectively, power only ‘exists only when it is put into action’
But as this exercise of power depends on a degree of consent between the slave workers, the women and their children and the overseers, the Nuns. For these are not the result of a power relation but of a dissymmetrical relationship, where the Nuns has complete power over the women and their children. I prefer the term ‘overwhelming dominance’ to describe a relationship of power characterised by a total dissymmetry between the torturer, the Nuns, on one side, and the victims of their extreme violence, the vulnerable slave women and their children on the other. Power does not proceed from a single instance of central power but that the exercise of power sets in play relations between individuals or groups.The daily perpetration of violence against the vulnerable women and their children of all backgrounds did not only serve to dominate, break and destroy the women and their children.
Acts of immediate violence also served to negotiate power relations within the Nuns personnel. Violence enabled the ‘moral’ codification of relationships. ‘Showing what one was capable of’ was a way of asserting oneself, of negotiating one’s status within the Nuns community. There was no great difference between male and female , as in say, The Christian Brothers and the Religious Nuns in terms of the number and frequency of acts of physical violence perpetrated. But a dynamic that could be qualified as ‘gendered’ was established at all Industrials Schools and Magdalene Laundries. In reality male and female, people in the Religious Orders systematically accelerated and intensified their violent acts in the presence of a new colleague. It was a matter of ‘impressing’ and/or ‘shocking’ one’s colleagues and superiors by specific acts of mindless violence, and of ‘proving’ one’s ‘authority’ and ‘skill’ to one’s colleagues. It hard to believe but many of the Nuns had no empathy, no scruples, and no emotions. Cruel, stupid, random and mindless violence against the slave women and their children was for the enjoyment of a few knuckle-dragging Nuns, many becoming so nasty in their cruel treatment of both the women and their children. The Nuns, like their counterparts the Christian Brothers were "out of control" acting as judge, jury and executioner, keeping us, the holy Irish People safe against the virus scum of the evil, the unwed women and their spawns.
Something else the exercise of power over others, can never be definitive. It must continually be renewed, asserted, negotiated, against the vulnerable women and their children in their charge. This association implies both a relation of overwhelming dominance of Nuns or other Religious Orders personnel vis-à-vis their detainees, but also a complex web of dependencies and interdependencies in the dynamics of power. To act outside or beyond was impossible; nobody could escape the mesh of these complex power relations. Even when Nuns remained passive, or tried to ignore each other, they could not avoid seeing or meeting their fellow Nuns and react to them. The extreme use of physical violence at the Magdalene Laundries and all the other Religious Run Institutions can largely be explained by the social relations inside these secretive Institutions.
Let’s slice through the Irish Catholic Church’s sanctimonious cant, the Nuns and the Religious Orders had to reassert their authority every day, and demonstrate it – to their charges but also to their colleagues and superiors in the hierarchy. By using physical violence, the Nuns exercised brutal power over perpetration of violence against the vulnerable women and their children and more importantly over their own colleagues. Physical domination was indeed the proof of what they were ‘capable of’. Simultaneously it expressed a real thirst for power. Torturing the bodies and minds of the vulnerable women and their children or perpetration of violence against them day after day enabled the Nuns to assert their place in the Magdalene Laundries. The Nuns had also won over the confidence of the Bishops, Archbishops and even the Cardinals of the Irish Catholic Church as chief overseers, of these church run Institutions.
To be fair to some of the Nuns that worked in the Magdalene Laundries, they didn’t all behave badly or with violence. But the question I put is did that make them, the decent Nuns less violent ? Some of the Nuns were seen as ‘good’, ‘humane’ and ‘decent’ Nuns, for their small acts of kindness, some of the Nuns even excused the women and their children from work and maybe didn’t strike the women or their children like the other brutal Nuns. The absence of daily beatings certainly eased the daily lives of the starving and overworked women and their children, despite this apparent non-violence, there were clearly other forms of domination and humiliation used by those good Nuns. Let’s take for example the good Nun or Nuns, forcing the slave women or their children to sing or dance, for their amusement or cutting and shaving off all their hair, to shame them publicly, or sexually abusing them.
This kind of behaviour shows a form of coercion, an abuse of power by the Nuns, which goes unnoticed in relation to the extreme violence used by the other Nuns. This cruel behaviour while seemingly harmless, is an act of domination, the good Nun compels the woman or her child to sing or dance to a particular song. You see in most cases the convent mass graves were behind the convent laundry walls or the laundry building was directly opposite the burial pits. The song might or could be a favourite of the unwed mother or her surviving child, and the women or child would know what is buried in the mass pits, a few feet away, that particular song or dance routine may be a favourite of either the unwed mother or her surviving child, now forced to sing or dance on top of the mass pit. The Laundries in the Convents were at the heart of the secret mass burial sites of the overworked women and their children, most of the surviving women and children would know this, as did the heartless Nuns. Many of the slave women took work, in silent and were passive. The good Nuns, with good intentions by not acting, like refusing to see, amounts to silent approval of what the other brutal Nuns were doing. In brutal reality to understand the excesses of violence, it is crucial to consider the role of the passive bystanders who also generated violence. As the social psychologist Harald Welzer argues that the “active dimension of observing acts of violence’ is underestimated: ‘Through the simple fact of being present and not interfering, spectators endorse rather than challenge the frame of reference chosen by the actors” At the same time, brutal colleagues serve as ‘negative figures of reference’. They allow the spectators to see themselves as ‘normal’, even, by contrast, humane and compassionate.
Many Nuns today feel good about themselves, completely humane. Yet they contributed just as much to the radicalisation of behaviour. And as the French anthropologist Véronique Nahoum-Grappe has shown, someone who is excessively violent, even cruel, can only exist in a situation where she feels authorised to carry out degrading and humiliating acts of violence. This context of impunity and social acceptance is an essential, but not a determining, condition of monstrous behaviour. The more one accepts, the worse one accepts. Such a field-of-force created by the passive Nun permitted and regulated the actions of the violent ones.
Owen Felix O’Neill
Survivors and researchers usually present the Magdalene Laundries as the ultimate example of a total institution or prison. The terror so zealously applied by the Nuns in the Magdalene Laundries was indeed meticulously planned by the leaders of the Irish Catholic Church. Nonetheless, the idea that all terror was systematically organised is somewhat misleading. Magdalene Laundries rules certainly gave the Nuns, the authority to arbitrarily punish the women and their children. The Nuns who ran the Magdalene Laundries officially had the right to use violence on the women and their children in their care. Despite these rules and regulations, the Magdalene Laundry Nuns viciously assaulting the women and their children, the Nuns carried out their daily tasks brutally and bloodily. There was a considerable gap between rules and practice as set out in the Magdalene Laundries code of practice, some of the Nuns were notorious among the women for their extreme violence. And sadly a few Nuns were notorious for hitting the women and their children, even kicking fallen women almost to death. The Nuns frequently supervised the women performing their tasks, we must conclude that beating the women and their children was a way of compensating for their own incompetence, and of imposing a certain ‘authority’. Physical violence allowed the Nuns to get the upper hand, to cut a path for herself, literally and brutally, by striking blows with her hands and feet. Using violence was a way of showing that she, the Nun, was in charge. As a demonstration of power, violence was addressed first of all to the victim.
In all the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, the Nuns hit the women harder and more frequently, a few Nuns for more control used sticks and leather straps to beat both the women and their children, many of the women and their children sustained broken limbs and bruises as a result of their brutal beatings. The other weapons the Nuns used also caused humiliation and permanent damage to both mental and physical injuries. Kicking the women or their children took the degradation of the victims to a new level. It is a greater act of contempt than striking the face because it emphasises the asymmetry between the torturer and her victim. The victim lies prostrate on the ground, at the Nun’s feet. The impact of a blow is much greater if administered with the foot. Some Nuns aimed carefully and targeted the most sensitive parts of the body, like the stomach, lower abdomen and back.
The Nuns who had been relatively restrained at other convents became very aggressive at the enclosed slave prisons, known as Magdalene Laundries, which radicalised the incoming young Nuns with good intentions and their normal beliefs and behaviour, were to be corrupted by what they saw in these enclosed prisons, functioning as Magdalene Laundries. In the Magdalene Laundries basic sanitary conditions were so primitive and directly affecting many of the new Nuns. Many of the wretched, slave women and their children were in a dreadful physical state, for the Nuns the working conditions in some of the Magdalene Laundries had drastically deteriorated. Some of the Magdalene Laundries were in total chaos with overcrowding and understaffed, in fairness to some of the Nuns it wasn’t what they signed up for, in fact many of the Nuns were forced into becoming Nuns by their own families. We should not underestimate the discomforts of the Nuns, whether real, or not, separation from their families, harsh climate and working conditions, poor accommodation, as basic as their charges. All this produced feelings of deracination, frustration, fear of contamination and violent disgust for the slave women and their children, which contributed to a radicalisation of their behaviour against the women and their children. Relations between the Nuns were often fraught, and conflicts also arose openly between the older Nuns, and the younger Nuns. Also the Nuns themselves were untrained for their task at hand, all they had as a guidance was the moral compass which got lost on the way. The exercise of power is crucial for understanding of the Magdalene Laundries and how the Laundries worked, perspectively, power only ‘exists only when it is put into action’
But as this exercise of power depends on a degree of consent between the slave workers, the women and their children and the overseers, the Nuns. For these are not the result of a power relation but of a dissymmetrical relationship, where the Nuns has complete power over the women and their children. I prefer the term ‘overwhelming dominance’ to describe a relationship of power characterised by a total dissymmetry between the torturer, the Nuns, on one side, and the victims of their extreme violence, the vulnerable slave women and their children on the other. Power does not proceed from a single instance of central power but that the exercise of power sets in play relations between individuals or groups.The daily perpetration of violence against the vulnerable women and their children of all backgrounds did not only serve to dominate, break and destroy the women and their children.
Acts of immediate violence also served to negotiate power relations within the Nuns personnel. Violence enabled the ‘moral’ codification of relationships. ‘Showing what one was capable of’ was a way of asserting oneself, of negotiating one’s status within the Nuns community. There was no great difference between male and female , as in say, The Christian Brothers and the Religious Nuns in terms of the number and frequency of acts of physical violence perpetrated. But a dynamic that could be qualified as ‘gendered’ was established at all Industrials Schools and Magdalene Laundries. In reality male and female, people in the Religious Orders systematically accelerated and intensified their violent acts in the presence of a new colleague. It was a matter of ‘impressing’ and/or ‘shocking’ one’s colleagues and superiors by specific acts of mindless violence, and of ‘proving’ one’s ‘authority’ and ‘skill’ to one’s colleagues. It hard to believe but many of the Nuns had no empathy, no scruples, and no emotions. Cruel, stupid, random and mindless violence against the slave women and their children was for the enjoyment of a few knuckle-dragging Nuns, many becoming so nasty in their cruel treatment of both the women and their children. The Nuns, like their counterparts the Christian Brothers were "out of control" acting as judge, jury and executioner, keeping us, the holy Irish People safe against the virus scum of the evil, the unwed women and their spawns.
Something else the exercise of power over others, can never be definitive. It must continually be renewed, asserted, negotiated, against the vulnerable women and their children in their charge. This association implies both a relation of overwhelming dominance of Nuns or other Religious Orders personnel vis-à-vis their detainees, but also a complex web of dependencies and interdependencies in the dynamics of power. To act outside or beyond was impossible; nobody could escape the mesh of these complex power relations. Even when Nuns remained passive, or tried to ignore each other, they could not avoid seeing or meeting their fellow Nuns and react to them. The extreme use of physical violence at the Magdalene Laundries and all the other Religious Run Institutions can largely be explained by the social relations inside these secretive Institutions.
Let’s slice through the Irish Catholic Church’s sanctimonious cant, the Nuns and the Religious Orders had to reassert their authority every day, and demonstrate it – to their charges but also to their colleagues and superiors in the hierarchy. By using physical violence, the Nuns exercised brutal power over perpetration of violence against the vulnerable women and their children and more importantly over their own colleagues. Physical domination was indeed the proof of what they were ‘capable of’. Simultaneously it expressed a real thirst for power. Torturing the bodies and minds of the vulnerable women and their children or perpetration of violence against them day after day enabled the Nuns to assert their place in the Magdalene Laundries. The Nuns had also won over the confidence of the Bishops, Archbishops and even the Cardinals of the Irish Catholic Church as chief overseers, of these church run Institutions.
To be fair to some of the Nuns that worked in the Magdalene Laundries, they didn’t all behave badly or with violence. But the question I put is did that make them, the decent Nuns less violent ? Some of the Nuns were seen as ‘good’, ‘humane’ and ‘decent’ Nuns, for their small acts of kindness, some of the Nuns even excused the women and their children from work and maybe didn’t strike the women or their children like the other brutal Nuns. The absence of daily beatings certainly eased the daily lives of the starving and overworked women and their children, despite this apparent non-violence, there were clearly other forms of domination and humiliation used by those good Nuns. Let’s take for example the good Nun or Nuns, forcing the slave women or their children to sing or dance, for their amusement or cutting and shaving off all their hair, to shame them publicly, or sexually abusing them.
This kind of behaviour shows a form of coercion, an abuse of power by the Nuns, which goes unnoticed in relation to the extreme violence used by the other Nuns. This cruel behaviour while seemingly harmless, is an act of domination, the good Nun compels the woman or her child to sing or dance to a particular song. You see in most cases the convent mass graves were behind the convent laundry walls or the laundry building was directly opposite the burial pits. The song might or could be a favourite of the unwed mother or her surviving child, and the women or child would know what is buried in the mass pits, a few feet away, that particular song or dance routine may be a favourite of either the unwed mother or her surviving child, now forced to sing or dance on top of the mass pit. The Laundries in the Convents were at the heart of the secret mass burial sites of the overworked women and their children, most of the surviving women and children would know this, as did the heartless Nuns. Many of the slave women took work, in silent and were passive. The good Nuns, with good intentions by not acting, like refusing to see, amounts to silent approval of what the other brutal Nuns were doing. In brutal reality to understand the excesses of violence, it is crucial to consider the role of the passive bystanders who also generated violence. As the social psychologist Harald Welzer argues that the “active dimension of observing acts of violence’ is underestimated: ‘Through the simple fact of being present and not interfering, spectators endorse rather than challenge the frame of reference chosen by the actors” At the same time, brutal colleagues serve as ‘negative figures of reference’. They allow the spectators to see themselves as ‘normal’, even, by contrast, humane and compassionate.
Many Nuns today feel good about themselves, completely humane. Yet they contributed just as much to the radicalisation of behaviour. And as the French anthropologist Véronique Nahoum-Grappe has shown, someone who is excessively violent, even cruel, can only exist in a situation where she feels authorised to carry out degrading and humiliating acts of violence. This context of impunity and social acceptance is an essential, but not a determining, condition of monstrous behaviour. The more one accepts, the worse one accepts. Such a field-of-force created by the passive Nun permitted and regulated the actions of the violent ones.
Owen Felix O’Neill
Irish Nuns who abuse;-
The Religious Sisters of Mercy;-
The Ryan Report. The Report recognised that
"the issue of sexual abuse did not feature as prominently in the evidence in relation to schools run by the Sisters of Mercy as it did in relation to schools run by other religious communities"
The Report concluded that other forms of abuse occurred. Concerns were expressed in regard to such abuse at a number of schools, specifically:
All of which closed down between 1969 and 1999. The instances of abuse which the Ryan Commission found had occurred at these Institutions varied considerably in nature, duration and extent. It ranged principally from overuse of corporal punishment to neglect of various kinds.
The 2009 Ryan report described government reports from the 1930s and 40s indicating that children in the care of the Sisters of Mercy were routinely malnourished, and the order sometimes opposed reforms at this time. However, the Ryan report also describes the Sisters of Mercy as leading reforms in the wake of the Kennedy report (1970), which led to the system of institutional homes and industrial schools was replaced by group homes in the 1970s and 1980s. The Sisters of Mercy became aware of allegations of abusive conditions in the industrial schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by which time many members of the order had never seen the industrial schools.
The Sisters of Mercy acknowledged that the Industrial Schools had been "harsh and insensitive to the needs of thousands of children, that it was inadequate and did not meet their basic needs" The Order attributed the poor conditions to the overly large size of the Institutions, insufficient staff, insufficient training for staff, and insufficient funding. The Order has acknowledged the routine use of brutal corporal punishment at the Industrial Schools, which was common practice in Ireland at the time. The Sisters of Mercy in Ireland formally apologised for any abuse suffered by thousands of children in their care in May 2004. In doing so they accepted that thousands of children had suffered, and they made the apology unconditional. In December 2009, the Sisters announced that they would contribute an additional 128 million euros to the fund to compensate victims. This was in addition to the previously agreed 127.5 million euro offer that the Irish government had formed with the Catholic Orders as a whole.
The Sisters of Mercy who ran the largest Magdalene Laundries in Dublin, Ireland. These "large complexes" became a "massive interlocking system…carefully and painstakingly built up…over a number of decades"; and consequently, Magdalene Laundries became part of Ireland's "larger system for the control of children and women". Women and "bastard" children were both "incarcerated for transgressing the narrow moral code of the time" and the same religious congregations managed the orphanages, reformatory schools and laundries. Thus, these facilities "all helped sustain each other – girls from the reformatory and industrial schools often ended up working their entire lives in the Magdalene Laundries" Almost all the Religious Institutions were run by female Religious Congregations,” i.e. Sisters, and were scattered throughout the country "in prominent locations in towns and cities”. In this way, according to Mary Raftery, they were powerful and pervasive, able to effectively control the lives of women and children from "all classes". This second incarnation of Magdalene Laundries vastly differed from the first incarnation, due to their "longevity" and "their diverse community of female slaves, including hopeless cases, mental defectives…[and] transfers from industrial and reformatory schools”. These particular institutions intentionally shared "overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in a laundry, and a preference for permanent inmates", which, "contradicts the Religious Congregations' stated mission to protect, reform, and rehabilitate”. As this expansion was taking place and these laundries were becoming a part of a large network of Religious Institutions, the treatment of the girls was becoming increasingly violent and abusive. According to historian Francis Finnegan, the asylums became "particularly cruel", "more secretive" in nature and "emphatically more punitive". Though these women had committed no crime and had never been put on trial, their indefinite incarceration was enforced by locked doors, iron gates and prison guards in the form of apathetic Sisters. By 1920, Magdalene Laundries had almost entirely abandoned claims of rehabilitation and instead, were "seamlessly incorporated into the state's architecture of containment”.
According to historian Frances Finnegan, in the beginning of these asylums' existence, because many of the women had a background as prostitutes, the women (who were called "children") were regarded as "in need of penitence", and until the 1970s were required to address all staff members as "mother" regardless of age. To enforce order and maintain a monastic atmosphere, the inmates were required to observe strict silence for much of the day.
As the phenomenon became more widespread, it extended beyond prostitution to petty criminals, orphans, mentally disabled women and raped girls. Even young girls who were considered too promiscuous and flirtatious, or too beautiful, were sent to an asylum by their families. Without a family member on the outside who could vouch for them, many incarcerated individuals stayed in the asylums for the rest of their lives, many taking religious vows.
An estimated 30,000 women and (to many experts the figure of 30,000 is way to low,) were confined in these institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries, about 10,000 of whom were admitted since Ireland's independence in 1922. We do not know how many women resided in the Magdalene Institutions" after 1900. Vital information about the women's circumstances, the number of women, and the consequences of their incarceration is unknown.
We have no official history for the Magdalene Asylums in twentieth-century Ireland, due to the Religious Institutes policy of secrecy, their penitent registers and convent annals remain closed to this day, despite repeated requests for information. As a direct result of these missing records and the Religious Institutes commitment to secrecy, Magdalene Laundries can only exist at the level of story rather than history. Though Ireland's last Magdalene Asylum imprisoned women until 1996, there are no records to account for almost a full century of women who now constitute the nation's disappeared, who were excluded, silenced, or punished, and did not matter or matter enough to a society that sought to negate and render invisible their challenges to conceived notions of moral order. In reality the numbers of women and children locked up and abused in these Religious Institutes probably runs to 100,000 plus. The disappeared of the women and children, disposed of in mass burial plots on the Convent Lands is probably much more than the 30,000.
The Religious Sisters of Mercy;-
The Ryan Report. The Report recognised that
"the issue of sexual abuse did not feature as prominently in the evidence in relation to schools run by the Sisters of Mercy as it did in relation to schools run by other religious communities"
The Report concluded that other forms of abuse occurred. Concerns were expressed in regard to such abuse at a number of schools, specifically:
- St Vincent's Industrial School, Goldenbridge;
- St Michael's Industrial School, Cappoquin, County Waterford;
- St Joseph's Industrial School, Clifden;
- Our Lady of Succour Industrial School, Newtownforbes;
- St Joseph's Industrial School, Dundalk -
All of which closed down between 1969 and 1999. The instances of abuse which the Ryan Commission found had occurred at these Institutions varied considerably in nature, duration and extent. It ranged principally from overuse of corporal punishment to neglect of various kinds.
The 2009 Ryan report described government reports from the 1930s and 40s indicating that children in the care of the Sisters of Mercy were routinely malnourished, and the order sometimes opposed reforms at this time. However, the Ryan report also describes the Sisters of Mercy as leading reforms in the wake of the Kennedy report (1970), which led to the system of institutional homes and industrial schools was replaced by group homes in the 1970s and 1980s. The Sisters of Mercy became aware of allegations of abusive conditions in the industrial schools in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by which time many members of the order had never seen the industrial schools.
The Sisters of Mercy acknowledged that the Industrial Schools had been "harsh and insensitive to the needs of thousands of children, that it was inadequate and did not meet their basic needs" The Order attributed the poor conditions to the overly large size of the Institutions, insufficient staff, insufficient training for staff, and insufficient funding. The Order has acknowledged the routine use of brutal corporal punishment at the Industrial Schools, which was common practice in Ireland at the time. The Sisters of Mercy in Ireland formally apologised for any abuse suffered by thousands of children in their care in May 2004. In doing so they accepted that thousands of children had suffered, and they made the apology unconditional. In December 2009, the Sisters announced that they would contribute an additional 128 million euros to the fund to compensate victims. This was in addition to the previously agreed 127.5 million euro offer that the Irish government had formed with the Catholic Orders as a whole.
The Sisters of Mercy who ran the largest Magdalene Laundries in Dublin, Ireland. These "large complexes" became a "massive interlocking system…carefully and painstakingly built up…over a number of decades"; and consequently, Magdalene Laundries became part of Ireland's "larger system for the control of children and women". Women and "bastard" children were both "incarcerated for transgressing the narrow moral code of the time" and the same religious congregations managed the orphanages, reformatory schools and laundries. Thus, these facilities "all helped sustain each other – girls from the reformatory and industrial schools often ended up working their entire lives in the Magdalene Laundries" Almost all the Religious Institutions were run by female Religious Congregations,” i.e. Sisters, and were scattered throughout the country "in prominent locations in towns and cities”. In this way, according to Mary Raftery, they were powerful and pervasive, able to effectively control the lives of women and children from "all classes". This second incarnation of Magdalene Laundries vastly differed from the first incarnation, due to their "longevity" and "their diverse community of female slaves, including hopeless cases, mental defectives…[and] transfers from industrial and reformatory schools”. These particular institutions intentionally shared "overriding characteristics, including a regime of prayer, silence, work in a laundry, and a preference for permanent inmates", which, "contradicts the Religious Congregations' stated mission to protect, reform, and rehabilitate”. As this expansion was taking place and these laundries were becoming a part of a large network of Religious Institutions, the treatment of the girls was becoming increasingly violent and abusive. According to historian Francis Finnegan, the asylums became "particularly cruel", "more secretive" in nature and "emphatically more punitive". Though these women had committed no crime and had never been put on trial, their indefinite incarceration was enforced by locked doors, iron gates and prison guards in the form of apathetic Sisters. By 1920, Magdalene Laundries had almost entirely abandoned claims of rehabilitation and instead, were "seamlessly incorporated into the state's architecture of containment”.
According to historian Frances Finnegan, in the beginning of these asylums' existence, because many of the women had a background as prostitutes, the women (who were called "children") were regarded as "in need of penitence", and until the 1970s were required to address all staff members as "mother" regardless of age. To enforce order and maintain a monastic atmosphere, the inmates were required to observe strict silence for much of the day.
As the phenomenon became more widespread, it extended beyond prostitution to petty criminals, orphans, mentally disabled women and raped girls. Even young girls who were considered too promiscuous and flirtatious, or too beautiful, were sent to an asylum by their families. Without a family member on the outside who could vouch for them, many incarcerated individuals stayed in the asylums for the rest of their lives, many taking religious vows.
An estimated 30,000 women and (to many experts the figure of 30,000 is way to low,) were confined in these institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries, about 10,000 of whom were admitted since Ireland's independence in 1922. We do not know how many women resided in the Magdalene Institutions" after 1900. Vital information about the women's circumstances, the number of women, and the consequences of their incarceration is unknown.
We have no official history for the Magdalene Asylums in twentieth-century Ireland, due to the Religious Institutes policy of secrecy, their penitent registers and convent annals remain closed to this day, despite repeated requests for information. As a direct result of these missing records and the Religious Institutes commitment to secrecy, Magdalene Laundries can only exist at the level of story rather than history. Though Ireland's last Magdalene Asylum imprisoned women until 1996, there are no records to account for almost a full century of women who now constitute the nation's disappeared, who were excluded, silenced, or punished, and did not matter or matter enough to a society that sought to negate and render invisible their challenges to conceived notions of moral order. In reality the numbers of women and children locked up and abused in these Religious Institutes probably runs to 100,000 plus. The disappeared of the women and children, disposed of in mass burial plots on the Convent Lands is probably much more than the 30,000.
The Order of Our Lady of Charity;-
The Religious Sisters of Charity Ireland are one of the organisations included in the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. The four orders that ran Magdalene Laundries in Ireland— were The Sisters of Mercy, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, The Good Shepherd Sisters, and The Sisters of Charity.
In Ireland they had two houses in Dublin Ireland. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity ran two Laundries in Drumcondra and Seán McDermott Street in Dublin, the largest in Ireland.
The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Refuge was one of four congregations involved in managing the controversial Magdalene Asylums. An Irish Government Report found the environment in the Magdalene Laundries to be harsh and involved physically demanding work, which produced a traumatic and lasting impact on the girls.
The young girls and women were imprisoned, beaten, humiliated, even killed and forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions. These were real prisons, punitive Religious Institutions that ran, commercial and for-profit Laundries, with slave labour. The Magdalene Laundries were operated by four Religious Orders —-
The Sisters of Mercy.
The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity.
The Sisters of Charity.
The Good Shepherd Sisters.
Which operated in ten different locations around Ireland. The last Magdalene Laundry ceased operating in late1996. The women and girls who were routinely dehumanise, by repeated exposure to direct violence in the Magdalene Laundries included those who were perceived to be ‘promiscuous’, pretty, or unmarried mothers, the daughters of unmarried mothers, those who were considered a burden on their families or the State, those who had been sexually raped, or had grown up in the care of the Irish Catholic Church.
The women and girls were confined for decades on end and isolated from their families and society at large, sadly many of these women were abandoned, becoming Institutionalised, the women gradually become less able to think and act independently, over time and therefore became utterly dependent on the relevant Religious run Institutions and felt they were unfit to re-enter society. All the women and their children committed no crimes, that was the absolute power of The Irish Catholic Church, you were just taken from your home, your street, your school, your workplace, your family and friends, and they were brutalised by the Nuns or other Religious Orders for life in the Religious run Institutions.
The Irish State never regulated the Magdalene Laundries, or other Religious run Institutions, like Industrial Schools, despite its use of the Religious run Institutions both as places of detention and care. This allowed the Religious Orders of Priests, Nuns, and Brothers, to murder, torture, rape, brutalising the women and children at will and disposing of their battered bodies into mass unmarked graves on their lands, the Convents, Industrial Schools, Orphanages and other Religious run Institutions in Ireland.
The Religious Sisters of Charity Ireland are one of the organisations included in the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse. The four orders that ran Magdalene Laundries in Ireland— were The Sisters of Mercy, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, The Good Shepherd Sisters, and The Sisters of Charity.
In Ireland they had two houses in Dublin Ireland. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity ran two Laundries in Drumcondra and Seán McDermott Street in Dublin, the largest in Ireland.
The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Refuge was one of four congregations involved in managing the controversial Magdalene Asylums. An Irish Government Report found the environment in the Magdalene Laundries to be harsh and involved physically demanding work, which produced a traumatic and lasting impact on the girls.
The young girls and women were imprisoned, beaten, humiliated, even killed and forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions. These were real prisons, punitive Religious Institutions that ran, commercial and for-profit Laundries, with slave labour. The Magdalene Laundries were operated by four Religious Orders —-
The Sisters of Mercy.
The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity.
The Sisters of Charity.
The Good Shepherd Sisters.
Which operated in ten different locations around Ireland. The last Magdalene Laundry ceased operating in late1996. The women and girls who were routinely dehumanise, by repeated exposure to direct violence in the Magdalene Laundries included those who were perceived to be ‘promiscuous’, pretty, or unmarried mothers, the daughters of unmarried mothers, those who were considered a burden on their families or the State, those who had been sexually raped, or had grown up in the care of the Irish Catholic Church.
The women and girls were confined for decades on end and isolated from their families and society at large, sadly many of these women were abandoned, becoming Institutionalised, the women gradually become less able to think and act independently, over time and therefore became utterly dependent on the relevant Religious run Institutions and felt they were unfit to re-enter society. All the women and their children committed no crimes, that was the absolute power of The Irish Catholic Church, you were just taken from your home, your street, your school, your workplace, your family and friends, and they were brutalised by the Nuns or other Religious Orders for life in the Religious run Institutions.
The Irish State never regulated the Magdalene Laundries, or other Religious run Institutions, like Industrial Schools, despite its use of the Religious run Institutions both as places of detention and care. This allowed the Religious Orders of Priests, Nuns, and Brothers, to murder, torture, rape, brutalising the women and children at will and disposing of their battered bodies into mass unmarked graves on their lands, the Convents, Industrial Schools, Orphanages and other Religious run Institutions in Ireland.
The Bon Secours Sisters
The Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours a Roman Catholic religious congregation for nursing, whose stated object is to care for patients from all socio-economic groups and who, in many countries, operate for-profit private hospitals. These are the Nuns that are at the centre of disposing of hundreds if not thousands of babies and children into a Victorian Septic Tank, in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. The same Order of Nuns whose Mission Statement is “For us it was all about bringing people to wholeness and helping them know that there is a God who loves them” God love them, the babies and children that the Holy Nuns, flushed into a Septic Tank in one of their Mother and Baby Homes.
The same Order of Nuns whose net profit, tax free in running, hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare, like hospitals, nursing homes, hospital chaplaincy, home nursing, pastoral services. Their care business in Ireland alone was €230 million a year, and the profit in the bigger healthcare market in America tops $4 to $6 billion dollars every year.
Crimes against Humanity- Crimes against Children
The Importance of treating newly discovered Babies and Children in mass graves in Ireland must be handled with dignity and respect and each child must be identified, family found and the child respectfully re-interred.
In a Mother and Baby Home, run by the Nuns, the Sisters of Bon Secours in the town of Tuam, in County Galway, Ireland, a shocking mass grave, a septic tank, contained over 800 bodies of Babies and Children have been uncovered and confirmed. The mass graves of Babies and Children, must be followed up, exhumed and thoroughly investigated by the Irish Police and the Irish State, as an active crime scene. We are talking here of the deaths of over 800 of Babies and Children, flushed into a septic tank. In addition the Commission, “MOTHER AND BABY HOMES COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION” is also investigating another 17 other Religious Institutions were it is known that thousands of other Babies and Children were dumped into similar unmarked graves. It is now a fact, that Survivors had known for years that thousands of Babies and Children had disappeared within the Religious run, Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes and the Industrial Schools in Ireland.
In Tuam's, Mother and Baby Home in County Galway, Ireland, many of the Babies and Children appeared to be bound and tied at the ankles and hands and tightly wrapped in cloth or newspapers, some of the bound Babies and Children were mutilated. Some local people who happened to witness the discovery and knew of the bodies of the Babies and Children in the septic tank and the underground bunkers, now claim that the bodies of the Babies and Children were stacked like dusty wine bottles in multiple rows from floor to ceilings in 17 of the 20 bunkers. Some of local witnesses say the bodies of the Babies and Children had the appearance of marks of violence, some bludgeoned to death and some bore signs of both malnutrition and mutilation on them. The septic tank and the underground bunkers in the Mother and Baby Home in the town of Tuam, in County Galway, were the secret disposal site for unwanted Babies and Children.
The caring Sisters of Bon Secours, who ran the Mother and Baby Home had strongly denied any involvement in the deaths of the Babies and Children. The heartless Bon Secours Nuns had interred the Babies and Children’s bodies without prior notice, in secret and without informing State Officials who would never have ordered autopsies, or asked probing questions, after all the Nuns, the caring Sisters of Bon Secours, good word was sacrosanct, made holy by the fearful locals. But as is now known the Religious Orders had complete autonomy in all matters with the running of the Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes and the Industrial Schools in Ireland. Worse still, the sacrosanct Nuns destroyed the birth records where they could, preventing the collecting of crucial evidence which would have helped in identifying the Babies and Children. The ongoing official investigation by the Irish Government is a charade, as long as the powerful Irish Catholic Church denies all their documentations and does all in it’s considerable power to destroy all the known written records that incriminate them.
Saying sorry does not work any more, especially in the collective murder of Babies and Children in Irish Orphanages or any other Religious Institutions in which they feel, they, the powerful Irish Catholic Church have immunity in how they ran the Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes, and Industrial Schools in Ireland. The damnatory evidence uncovered by Irish forensic archaeological investigation into the Mother and Baby Home, run by the Nuns, the Sisters of Bon Secours in the town of Tuam, in County Galway, Ireland is incriminating.
This forensic archaeological compromising evidence of hundreds of Babies and Children flushed into a septic tank must be investigated immediately by the Irish Police, as a shocking mass crime against Humanity, the murder and criminal disposable of hundreds of Babies and Children. The Garda, the Irish Police needs to do its job in conjunction with the Irish Court system.
Let’s get this straight, the powerful Irish Catholic Church does not have nor should have immunity in the collective murder and disposable of Babies and Children in any of their Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes, and Industrial Schools in Ireland that they controlled and ran.
Tuam, Mother and Baby Home in County Galway, Ireland should and must be a crime scene and all its actors should be held accountable, age or time gone, should not be a consideration in not to investigate. The Irish Police, the Garda, needs to do its job immediately free from political interferences and the ongoing Irish Catholic Church intimidation. The investigation should be open and above board, no matter how painful for all concerned, nobody in Ireland, especially the Catholic Church Clerics, high or low officials should be above secular law, the secular Law of the land of Ireland. If the Irish State or Irish Police, An Garda Síochána, feel they cannot do their job than the United Nations should step in Immediately. We are only talking about one Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, at the moment. What happens when the Commission “MOTHER AND BABY HOMES COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION” finds thousands of more Babies and Children dumped in other mass graves in each of the other Mother and Baby Homes in other parts of Ireland, we officially have 17 more Religious Institutions to discover and possible as much as 200 other Religious run Institutions, God help us.
A PERVASIVE SENSE OF SHAME
The Bon Secours Nuns email has now come to light…the email is damning in itself….The Bon Secours Nuns were telling lies to the world and covering up like pros, of course they had professional help by a well known PR. Firm here in Ireland. The Bon Secours Nuns hired Terry Prone, a PR and reputation management expert, to deal with the media.The little, holy Bon Secours Nuns email was indicative of a deliberate policy of disinformation and outright lies, quote from their email issued in their name…“you will find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, ‘Yeah, a few bones were found – but this was an area where famine victims were buried’in the 1840s. So move on please!!…” The language of the email was very clever. The local Gardaí were casting their eyes to heaven. Up there, The local Gardaí said, doubtless God was nodding his approval. How could anyone suggest such a thing of the poor holy Nuns, the wonderful, iniquity, Bon Secours Nuns? The tone of the email was essentially condescending to, and dismissive of, Catherine Cordless’ who found the 800 babies in the septic tank…
The Bon Secours Sisters are behind the biggest private hospital empire in the world, they take in billions of dollars profit a year. “The Bon Secours Sisters grotesque empire was built on the bones of the murdered Tuam babies and their unwed mothers plus another ten thousand or more babies and children, now dumped and buried in other mass gravel pit graves in Convents up and down this green country of Ireland. The Bon Secours Sisters not only did they steal the children from their mothers, they also sold and trafficked the babies out of Ireland. The Bon Secours Sisters were paid by the Irish State, 'headage payments' of up to $3,000 for each child sent to the United States.” at the time and huge sum of money in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. Let us be very clear on what I’m saying, please remember it was the good Nuns and their criminal antagonists in the Irish Catholic Church who illegally sold the babies, who trafficked in them and, in many cases, starved and neglected the babies and children to point of death.
The Irish Catholic Church had a oppressive asphyxiation, on the throat of Ireland, in which very few of its people could escape from the stranglehold of their poisonous ideology which produced toxic shame. Most of the children and their mothers in the Bon Secours Mother and Baby homes and other Religious Orders of Nuns were both sexually abused and physically abused. The children and their mothers were bullied, beaten, raped and murdered, made to feel that they were worthless. The working assumption of the religious orders in Ireland, and of the clergy generally, was that these filth, the vermin of unwed mothers were the product of sin, and should be punished accordingly, after all their mothers were proven whores, by having and conceiving the product of their sin, babies, the devil spawns.
The Bon Secours Sisters took the babies and children and sold them, trafficked the stolen babies and older children, and what they, The Bon Secours Sisters couldn't sell, they starved and neglected, the babies and the children in their care. The babies and the children in the care of the Religious Orders were denied to the point of their own disappearance from Irish hearts and from Irish sights, banished from Ireland and, in many cases, like the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, in county Galway, into dark eternal pits of hidden hell, shut out of mind, out of sight. The Nuns used to say to me as a young child, “old sins have long shadows”. Yes old indiscretions can continue to haunt and have consequences well into the future, really to the very end of your life. A frightened unwed mother, now in her 80s, whose baby was stolen by the Nuns, now sadly reflects, "We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the Nuns' ‘care’,” she added. "We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip... and we gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what you call ‘respectability’.” "No the nuns didn’t break into our homes to kidnap our children," she said – as if anyone had accused the nuns of breaking and entering to steal babies. It is burying the babies and children as if they were rodentia, filthy vermin, my god, who would believe, Nuns flushed the babies into septic tanks, we here in Ireland allowed the Catholic Church to do this heinous crime against our own babies, we were powerless in the face of such wickedness. Holy Convents where the remains of babies and children were thrown, without a shred of dignity or respect, like used toilet paper and then flushed, finished, out of sight out of mind. The appalling truth, is that this, is no longer a shock, the horrible reality, which so many children in Ireland had to endure, is that they were treated like vermin. The truth is, Children were brutalised in Ireland without the slightest compunction, by people into whose care they had been entrusted, and “shocking.” in one sense is an understatement.
Damningly, the scientific evidence is clear now, according to the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. The bones of the babies they dug up confirmed that the ages of the deceased babies ranged from 35 foetal weeks to two to three years. Damningly, the scientific evidence is clear that the remains date from the period during which the so called Mother and Baby home in Tuam was in operation, from 1925 to 1961. The Bon Secours Sisters always claimed that the babies were from the famine period, 1845 and 1852…as can be seen, even denying that the babies were from the period they The Bon Secours Sisters took over the running of the Mother and Baby Home in 1925. The Bon Secours Sisters couldn't acknowledge that they in fact knew that over 800 to 1,500 babies were their responsibilities, and the cruel and callous manner in which they disposed of the babies.
And the report of the Commission of Investigation went on to confirm that a number of the samples are definitely to date from the 1950s., this my friends is not ancient history, this will sadly tarnish the Hollywood image of Ireland, a quaint green land of plentiful happily married families with their dozens of red-heading children playing with gusto in lush green meadows of rural Ireland, and even benevolent Priests, like parasites, the emerald cockroach wasps, hiding, fishing in local streams, even still rustic chaste Nuns, pure, and untouched, all in virginal white, with their rosy cheeks, dancing and singing at the crossroads, as gently and musically church-bells, peel out. As Yeats said “Romantic Ireland is dead and gone, but he meant “Ireland was already ‘dead and gone’.Yeats evidently equated the death of ‘Romantic Ireland’ with the rise of an Irish generation that believed that ‘men were born to pray and save [souls]’ alone. …Pass the bucket please….Owen Felix O’Neill
The Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours a Roman Catholic religious congregation for nursing, whose stated object is to care for patients from all socio-economic groups and who, in many countries, operate for-profit private hospitals. These are the Nuns that are at the centre of disposing of hundreds if not thousands of babies and children into a Victorian Septic Tank, in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. The same Order of Nuns whose Mission Statement is “For us it was all about bringing people to wholeness and helping them know that there is a God who loves them” God love them, the babies and children that the Holy Nuns, flushed into a Septic Tank in one of their Mother and Baby Homes.
The same Order of Nuns whose net profit, tax free in running, hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare, like hospitals, nursing homes, hospital chaplaincy, home nursing, pastoral services. Their care business in Ireland alone was €230 million a year, and the profit in the bigger healthcare market in America tops $4 to $6 billion dollars every year.
Crimes against Humanity- Crimes against Children
The Importance of treating newly discovered Babies and Children in mass graves in Ireland must be handled with dignity and respect and each child must be identified, family found and the child respectfully re-interred.
In a Mother and Baby Home, run by the Nuns, the Sisters of Bon Secours in the town of Tuam, in County Galway, Ireland, a shocking mass grave, a septic tank, contained over 800 bodies of Babies and Children have been uncovered and confirmed. The mass graves of Babies and Children, must be followed up, exhumed and thoroughly investigated by the Irish Police and the Irish State, as an active crime scene. We are talking here of the deaths of over 800 of Babies and Children, flushed into a septic tank. In addition the Commission, “MOTHER AND BABY HOMES COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION” is also investigating another 17 other Religious Institutions were it is known that thousands of other Babies and Children were dumped into similar unmarked graves. It is now a fact, that Survivors had known for years that thousands of Babies and Children had disappeared within the Religious run, Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes and the Industrial Schools in Ireland.
In Tuam's, Mother and Baby Home in County Galway, Ireland, many of the Babies and Children appeared to be bound and tied at the ankles and hands and tightly wrapped in cloth or newspapers, some of the bound Babies and Children were mutilated. Some local people who happened to witness the discovery and knew of the bodies of the Babies and Children in the septic tank and the underground bunkers, now claim that the bodies of the Babies and Children were stacked like dusty wine bottles in multiple rows from floor to ceilings in 17 of the 20 bunkers. Some of local witnesses say the bodies of the Babies and Children had the appearance of marks of violence, some bludgeoned to death and some bore signs of both malnutrition and mutilation on them. The septic tank and the underground bunkers in the Mother and Baby Home in the town of Tuam, in County Galway, were the secret disposal site for unwanted Babies and Children.
The caring Sisters of Bon Secours, who ran the Mother and Baby Home had strongly denied any involvement in the deaths of the Babies and Children. The heartless Bon Secours Nuns had interred the Babies and Children’s bodies without prior notice, in secret and without informing State Officials who would never have ordered autopsies, or asked probing questions, after all the Nuns, the caring Sisters of Bon Secours, good word was sacrosanct, made holy by the fearful locals. But as is now known the Religious Orders had complete autonomy in all matters with the running of the Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes and the Industrial Schools in Ireland. Worse still, the sacrosanct Nuns destroyed the birth records where they could, preventing the collecting of crucial evidence which would have helped in identifying the Babies and Children. The ongoing official investigation by the Irish Government is a charade, as long as the powerful Irish Catholic Church denies all their documentations and does all in it’s considerable power to destroy all the known written records that incriminate them.
Saying sorry does not work any more, especially in the collective murder of Babies and Children in Irish Orphanages or any other Religious Institutions in which they feel, they, the powerful Irish Catholic Church have immunity in how they ran the Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes, and Industrial Schools in Ireland. The damnatory evidence uncovered by Irish forensic archaeological investigation into the Mother and Baby Home, run by the Nuns, the Sisters of Bon Secours in the town of Tuam, in County Galway, Ireland is incriminating.
This forensic archaeological compromising evidence of hundreds of Babies and Children flushed into a septic tank must be investigated immediately by the Irish Police, as a shocking mass crime against Humanity, the murder and criminal disposable of hundreds of Babies and Children. The Garda, the Irish Police needs to do its job in conjunction with the Irish Court system.
Let’s get this straight, the powerful Irish Catholic Church does not have nor should have immunity in the collective murder and disposable of Babies and Children in any of their Orphanages, Mother and Baby Homes, and Industrial Schools in Ireland that they controlled and ran.
Tuam, Mother and Baby Home in County Galway, Ireland should and must be a crime scene and all its actors should be held accountable, age or time gone, should not be a consideration in not to investigate. The Irish Police, the Garda, needs to do its job immediately free from political interferences and the ongoing Irish Catholic Church intimidation. The investigation should be open and above board, no matter how painful for all concerned, nobody in Ireland, especially the Catholic Church Clerics, high or low officials should be above secular law, the secular Law of the land of Ireland. If the Irish State or Irish Police, An Garda Síochána, feel they cannot do their job than the United Nations should step in Immediately. We are only talking about one Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, at the moment. What happens when the Commission “MOTHER AND BABY HOMES COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION” finds thousands of more Babies and Children dumped in other mass graves in each of the other Mother and Baby Homes in other parts of Ireland, we officially have 17 more Religious Institutions to discover and possible as much as 200 other Religious run Institutions, God help us.
A PERVASIVE SENSE OF SHAME
The Bon Secours Nuns email has now come to light…the email is damning in itself….The Bon Secours Nuns were telling lies to the world and covering up like pros, of course they had professional help by a well known PR. Firm here in Ireland. The Bon Secours Nuns hired Terry Prone, a PR and reputation management expert, to deal with the media.The little, holy Bon Secours Nuns email was indicative of a deliberate policy of disinformation and outright lies, quote from their email issued in their name…“you will find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, ‘Yeah, a few bones were found – but this was an area where famine victims were buried’in the 1840s. So move on please!!…” The language of the email was very clever. The local Gardaí were casting their eyes to heaven. Up there, The local Gardaí said, doubtless God was nodding his approval. How could anyone suggest such a thing of the poor holy Nuns, the wonderful, iniquity, Bon Secours Nuns? The tone of the email was essentially condescending to, and dismissive of, Catherine Cordless’ who found the 800 babies in the septic tank…
The Bon Secours Sisters are behind the biggest private hospital empire in the world, they take in billions of dollars profit a year. “The Bon Secours Sisters grotesque empire was built on the bones of the murdered Tuam babies and their unwed mothers plus another ten thousand or more babies and children, now dumped and buried in other mass gravel pit graves in Convents up and down this green country of Ireland. The Bon Secours Sisters not only did they steal the children from their mothers, they also sold and trafficked the babies out of Ireland. The Bon Secours Sisters were paid by the Irish State, 'headage payments' of up to $3,000 for each child sent to the United States.” at the time and huge sum of money in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. Let us be very clear on what I’m saying, please remember it was the good Nuns and their criminal antagonists in the Irish Catholic Church who illegally sold the babies, who trafficked in them and, in many cases, starved and neglected the babies and children to point of death.
The Irish Catholic Church had a oppressive asphyxiation, on the throat of Ireland, in which very few of its people could escape from the stranglehold of their poisonous ideology which produced toxic shame. Most of the children and their mothers in the Bon Secours Mother and Baby homes and other Religious Orders of Nuns were both sexually abused and physically abused. The children and their mothers were bullied, beaten, raped and murdered, made to feel that they were worthless. The working assumption of the religious orders in Ireland, and of the clergy generally, was that these filth, the vermin of unwed mothers were the product of sin, and should be punished accordingly, after all their mothers were proven whores, by having and conceiving the product of their sin, babies, the devil spawns.
The Bon Secours Sisters took the babies and children and sold them, trafficked the stolen babies and older children, and what they, The Bon Secours Sisters couldn't sell, they starved and neglected, the babies and the children in their care. The babies and the children in the care of the Religious Orders were denied to the point of their own disappearance from Irish hearts and from Irish sights, banished from Ireland and, in many cases, like the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, in county Galway, into dark eternal pits of hidden hell, shut out of mind, out of sight. The Nuns used to say to me as a young child, “old sins have long shadows”. Yes old indiscretions can continue to haunt and have consequences well into the future, really to the very end of your life. A frightened unwed mother, now in her 80s, whose baby was stolen by the Nuns, now sadly reflects, "We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the Nuns' ‘care’,” she added. "We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip... and we gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what you call ‘respectability’.” "No the nuns didn’t break into our homes to kidnap our children," she said – as if anyone had accused the nuns of breaking and entering to steal babies. It is burying the babies and children as if they were rodentia, filthy vermin, my god, who would believe, Nuns flushed the babies into septic tanks, we here in Ireland allowed the Catholic Church to do this heinous crime against our own babies, we were powerless in the face of such wickedness. Holy Convents where the remains of babies and children were thrown, without a shred of dignity or respect, like used toilet paper and then flushed, finished, out of sight out of mind. The appalling truth, is that this, is no longer a shock, the horrible reality, which so many children in Ireland had to endure, is that they were treated like vermin. The truth is, Children were brutalised in Ireland without the slightest compunction, by people into whose care they had been entrusted, and “shocking.” in one sense is an understatement.
Damningly, the scientific evidence is clear now, according to the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland. The bones of the babies they dug up confirmed that the ages of the deceased babies ranged from 35 foetal weeks to two to three years. Damningly, the scientific evidence is clear that the remains date from the period during which the so called Mother and Baby home in Tuam was in operation, from 1925 to 1961. The Bon Secours Sisters always claimed that the babies were from the famine period, 1845 and 1852…as can be seen, even denying that the babies were from the period they The Bon Secours Sisters took over the running of the Mother and Baby Home in 1925. The Bon Secours Sisters couldn't acknowledge that they in fact knew that over 800 to 1,500 babies were their responsibilities, and the cruel and callous manner in which they disposed of the babies.
And the report of the Commission of Investigation went on to confirm that a number of the samples are definitely to date from the 1950s., this my friends is not ancient history, this will sadly tarnish the Hollywood image of Ireland, a quaint green land of plentiful happily married families with their dozens of red-heading children playing with gusto in lush green meadows of rural Ireland, and even benevolent Priests, like parasites, the emerald cockroach wasps, hiding, fishing in local streams, even still rustic chaste Nuns, pure, and untouched, all in virginal white, with their rosy cheeks, dancing and singing at the crossroads, as gently and musically church-bells, peel out. As Yeats said “Romantic Ireland is dead and gone, but he meant “Ireland was already ‘dead and gone’.Yeats evidently equated the death of ‘Romantic Ireland’ with the rise of an Irish generation that believed that ‘men were born to pray and save [souls]’ alone. …Pass the bucket please….Owen Felix O’Neill
The Poor Sisters of Nazareth.
Mission Statement;- We, the Sisters of Nazareth, aim to share the love of God through our ministries of care and education and our openness to respond to the needs of the times. Whatsoever you do to the least of my people you do to me. Words of Jesus Christ (Matt.25:40) Core Values. We endeavour to live out the Gospel and our Core Values in everything we do. These values give the Nazareth Houses and all our ministries their special spirit. See how we reflect those core values in action, Love, Justice, Hospitality, Respect, Compassion, Patience.
The Historical Institutional Abuse report found that “the development of Nazareth House and Nazareth Lodge was motivated by the drive on the part of the Roman Catholic Church to provide services for Catholic children, so that they would not need to be admitted to workhouses, state institutions or homes run by non-Catholic organisations where the Church felt that their spiritual needs might not be met appropriately”. Nazareth homes were cold and cruel places offering the children no chance in life.
The Poor Sisters of Nazareth has been accused of lacking compassion after complaining of a “difficult year” as they are finally held to account for decades of child abuse. Nearly 300 abuse allegations made against Nazareth Sisters as hundreds of Survivors have come forward to give evidence about beatings, cruelty and sexual assaults at the Order’s Nazareth Houses.
The Nazareth Sisters ran homes for orphan children. Nazareth Lodge in Belfast and Nazareth House in Derry which accommodated more than 6,000 children prior to closure of both in 1998. Nazareth House, Portadown accommodated more than 1,000 infants before closure in 1984. A home they ran at Termonbacca, Co Derry, accommodated almost 2,000 boys before it closed in 1982. All four were investigated by the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry in Northern Ireland. Another Nazareth House in Sligo, for elderly poor people and for orphaned and destitute Catholic girls, closed in 1993.
The Nazareth Sisters have now admitted that children and babies were abused and raped in their care. The Sisters of Nazareth Nuns also admitted that girls and boys were subjected to physical and sexual abuse and rape in institutions in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic that they controlled. At our Nazareth Houses, according to the Sisters, we are committed to providing every resident with individual personalised care and attention in a safe, homely and warm environment, sadly it never happened, the personalised care and attention, except when pedophiles came to visit. The Nazareth Sisters opened their first Nazareth House in Ireland in Sligo in 1910, in Mallow in 1930, in Fahan, Donegal, Ireland, in 1941 and in Dublin in 1970.
The notorious paedophile Priest Fr. Brendan Smyth raped children while they were in the care of Nuns at the Nazareth House.The serial rapist was later convicted of dozens of child rape charges. More than 100 witnesses from Nazareth House and Nazareth Lodge in Belfast have come forward. Sexual rape of children that he, Fr. Smyth had raped children both in Nazareth House and in Nazareth Lodge in Belfast. A Nun, Ms Smith said: “ that the congregation accepts that FR. Brendan Smyth did rape children while they were in our care and continued to rape some after they left our care. "She also accepts that he visited and raped in both Nazareth House and Nazareth Lodge in Belfast.” Amnesty International's Northern Ireland director Patrick Corrigan said: "It has already been established that among the rapists was the notorious serial paedophile Fr. Brendan Smyth, who was allowed to use both children's homes as a personal playground for his depravity by the Nuns. "It is clear that the rape suffered by the children at these two Belfast homes represents a monumental failure by both religious and State institutions."
Mission Statement;- We, the Sisters of Nazareth, aim to share the love of God through our ministries of care and education and our openness to respond to the needs of the times. Whatsoever you do to the least of my people you do to me. Words of Jesus Christ (Matt.25:40) Core Values. We endeavour to live out the Gospel and our Core Values in everything we do. These values give the Nazareth Houses and all our ministries their special spirit. See how we reflect those core values in action, Love, Justice, Hospitality, Respect, Compassion, Patience.
The Historical Institutional Abuse report found that “the development of Nazareth House and Nazareth Lodge was motivated by the drive on the part of the Roman Catholic Church to provide services for Catholic children, so that they would not need to be admitted to workhouses, state institutions or homes run by non-Catholic organisations where the Church felt that their spiritual needs might not be met appropriately”. Nazareth homes were cold and cruel places offering the children no chance in life.
The Poor Sisters of Nazareth has been accused of lacking compassion after complaining of a “difficult year” as they are finally held to account for decades of child abuse. Nearly 300 abuse allegations made against Nazareth Sisters as hundreds of Survivors have come forward to give evidence about beatings, cruelty and sexual assaults at the Order’s Nazareth Houses.
The Nazareth Sisters ran homes for orphan children. Nazareth Lodge in Belfast and Nazareth House in Derry which accommodated more than 6,000 children prior to closure of both in 1998. Nazareth House, Portadown accommodated more than 1,000 infants before closure in 1984. A home they ran at Termonbacca, Co Derry, accommodated almost 2,000 boys before it closed in 1982. All four were investigated by the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry in Northern Ireland. Another Nazareth House in Sligo, for elderly poor people and for orphaned and destitute Catholic girls, closed in 1993.
The Nazareth Sisters have now admitted that children and babies were abused and raped in their care. The Sisters of Nazareth Nuns also admitted that girls and boys were subjected to physical and sexual abuse and rape in institutions in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic that they controlled. At our Nazareth Houses, according to the Sisters, we are committed to providing every resident with individual personalised care and attention in a safe, homely and warm environment, sadly it never happened, the personalised care and attention, except when pedophiles came to visit. The Nazareth Sisters opened their first Nazareth House in Ireland in Sligo in 1910, in Mallow in 1930, in Fahan, Donegal, Ireland, in 1941 and in Dublin in 1970.
The notorious paedophile Priest Fr. Brendan Smyth raped children while they were in the care of Nuns at the Nazareth House.The serial rapist was later convicted of dozens of child rape charges. More than 100 witnesses from Nazareth House and Nazareth Lodge in Belfast have come forward. Sexual rape of children that he, Fr. Smyth had raped children both in Nazareth House and in Nazareth Lodge in Belfast. A Nun, Ms Smith said: “ that the congregation accepts that FR. Brendan Smyth did rape children while they were in our care and continued to rape some after they left our care. "She also accepts that he visited and raped in both Nazareth House and Nazareth Lodge in Belfast.” Amnesty International's Northern Ireland director Patrick Corrigan said: "It has already been established that among the rapists was the notorious serial paedophile Fr. Brendan Smyth, who was allowed to use both children's homes as a personal playground for his depravity by the Nuns. "It is clear that the rape suffered by the children at these two Belfast homes represents a monumental failure by both religious and State institutions."
