Review of the film 'Stolen', on Irish Mother and Baby Homes

[scolairebocht]

Stolen, a film on Irish Mother and Baby Homes by Margo Harkin, and funded by a raft of state agencies north and south of Ireland, was first broadcast nationally on RTE1 on the 26th of August 2024. As well as a few specific points, there are maybe two overall general themes in this film that are addressed at the beginning and end of this review.


Feminism

The beginning point is that, frankly, this is a feminist propaganda film. While an interesting example of that type of work nobody should make the mistake of thinking that these type of massively ideologically driven and man hating videos, contain dispassionate and hence sober, truthful or honest accounts of the history they purport to examine. You can see how it veers into that type of propaganda by the use of these kind of phrases:
– These Institutions were set up for “the discipline and containment of women and children” (7:53)
– “Pretty much every major human rights scandal that has occurred in Ireland has related to women and children. To me there is an inherent misogyny at the heart of the Irish state right through from its very foundation.” (10:44)
– “Mother and Baby Homes are really a reflection of the focus on women’s sexuality, on their indiscretion, and on curtailing women in the Irish Free State.” (11:24)
– “There is an idea now that 1921 came along, the Irish Free State, and everyone just started hating women. A lot of people hated women, and especially poor people and poor women, long before that.” (45:04)
– “Some scholars say that patriarchy is a sign of weakness, that its a kind of tyranny that men who don’t have much control over the world around them, you cannot control the economy, you cannot control foreign affairs, you cannot control your relationship with the former coloniser, so you turn inwards and you discipline women and children. And so you start to see that the early legislative program is very concerned with sex.” (56:48)
– “And for a while indeed it seemed as if in Ireland our women had the amazing capacity to self impregnate...” (18:09)

That last quote is actually from Taoiseach Enda Kenny TD, and his point there might be more apt than people realise. This whole film, and actually to a large extent the Commission of Inquiry report itself, talks a lot about sex, but absolutely always, without the slightest exception, the women were completely and totally innocent of any wrong doing in that regard, whatever happened was always exclusively the fault of the men. Furthermore the mothers involved always loved to the nth degree and at all times their children conceived out of wedlock, both when unborn and afterwards. Actually the evidence shows, that unfortunately some of the women with these ‘unwanted’ pregnancies (unfortunately the phrase is mostly accurate) tried even to kill their children after their birth in these Homes, although to be fair that would not be at all the majority.(1)

As stated, the same is true of the Commission report, which includes a vast litany of stories like these in its ‘Confidential Committee’ section, a very large number of women were interviewed for it and all were totally and utterly innocent in every regard. The fathers of these children were simply never interviewed, their experiences are sneered at constantly but not actually recorded anywhere. Consequently you can see what I mean by describing both these works, the Commission report and this movie, as in large measure feminist tracts?


Mortality Rate

Margo Harkin:

“We now know the horror of what happened in the Mother and Baby Institutions, at least nine thousand babies died between 1922 and 1998, a death rate that was over five times the national average.” (7:31)

The whole issue of the death rates in these Homes has been gone through before, but just to recap again:
– Firstly you have to examine the other side of the equation when you are comparing these Homes to the national Infant Mortality Rate. For the early years of the Irish state, registration of infant deaths was very patchy, so this national statistic is underestimating the real degree of infant mortality in Ireland, and hence the contrast with the Home rate is not as wide as that reported.
– The other statistical trap some are overlooking, is that when comparing the national rate with the mortality rate in a given Home, most are calculating the latter as:
the number of deaths there in a given year / [divided by] the number of residents in the Home on average during that year.
But these Homes were very transient institutions, the babies and infants were passing through, either infants were taken out by their mothers, or fostered or adopted out, all the time. The point is that in these cases you can be sure that ill infants are not going to be transferred out, they will leave ill babies in the institution. Also they will even transfer back to the Home those who got seriously ill while been fostered out:

“It is evident from records of children boarded out by Galway County Council that it was not uncommon for children to be returned to Tuam in cases of illness...” (2)

But this makes a vast difference to the statistics, because then the equation for the above statistic should now read:
the number of deaths in a given year / [divided by] the total number of children who at any stage passed through the Home in that year plus the whole number of those already fostered out.
If you consider it for a minute, that makes sense because that is the real pool of people out of whom a given number of sick children are going to die in the Home in that given year, since, as you just read, even those who were earlier fostered out but got ill would regularly go back into the Home. This factor is very likely to make an enormous difference to the real statistics.
– Then you have the ‘hospital effect’. While these Homes were not acute hospitals, they were hospitals of a type for chronically ill children, not by any means just illegitimate children. Hence for example one newspaper article from 1930 refers to the upcoming building at the Tuam Home of a:

“shelter for delicate children that they are about to erect at the Children’s Home.”(3)

And in reference to St Patrick’s on the Navan Road:

“...it also admitted children with serious physical or intellectual disabilities and children who discharged from hospital with untreatable conditions...Some of the children who were in Pelletstown were there because they were seriously ill and nothing further could be done for them in the children’s hospitals...From the late 1950s Pelletstown was increasingly used as a long-stay institution/hospice for children with serious and untreatable medical conditions such as spina bifida, or Down syndrome children with serious heart diseases and many of these children died.” (4)

Obviously you are going to have a huge mortality rate in chronically ill children, transferred into those places because they could do no more for them in the acute hospitals.


Other issues

Catriona Crowe, archivist and broadcaster:

“Women became the targets of this creepy obsession with sexuality of the Irish Catholic Church. Sex was really dirty in Catholic Ireland, probably worse than murder.” (10:57)

Máiréad Enright, Professor of Law, University of Birmingham:

“And so you start to see that the early legislative program is very concerned with sex. With its visibility, with hiding it, with concealing it, with stopping people from talking about it, and with punishing people who don’t get away with it.” (56:48)

Its amazing that so many consider Ireland of that time as having a ‘creepy obsession with sexuality’ when its modern Ireland that spends huge amounts of time teaching it in schools, parading down public roads broadcasting ones sexuality, and turning so many events or public entertainments, like the Eurovision and even the Olympics, into occasions of explicit sexuality. This was not the case a few years ago in Ireland, and yet it was they that were ‘obsessed’ with it?

Alison O’Reilly:

“So a decision was made by the former Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, who was born in a Mother and Baby Home herself and adopted, to release the names, and thats when we decided to publish all of the names a few weeks later in the Mail on Sunday...” (14:04)

Its very mysterious how much that story, the origin of the compilation of the 796 death certificates of children who died in the Tuam Home, has changed over the years. First it was that Catherine Corless, heroically and expensively, on her own got all these death certificates from the public registration office. But that was never possible because the certificates are not indexed by place of death, it would be impossible for an outsider to track down that number of certificates. Then it was supposedly with the help of a named person in the Galway office in charge of these. Now its the Minister who authorised it, is there mysterious state aid behind the scenes of the Corless story that we seem to get only bits of?

Alison O’Reilly:

“But the causes of death were things like Marasmus, which is hunger, I mean how did that happen?” (14:04)

The ‘Marasmus is hunger’ racket has been flogged to death at this stage, for which see the current writers book and also the book and talks given by the Galway historian Eugene Jordan.

 

[scolairebocht]

Anna Corrigan:

“This is one very very important document, its the inspection report that was done on the Home in April 1947...What I find absolutely astounding at the end of it is: ‘The care given to the infants in the Home is good, the Sisters are careful and attentive, [relayed in a sarcastic voice:] diets are excellent.’” (19:34)

Isn’t that a very strange way of handling evidence, as stated here only a few seconds apart in reference to the 1947 report of Miss Alice Litster? If Anna considers her report so ‘very very important’ then why be so dismissive when she states very clearly that the nuns were excellent in the care they gave in the Home? Incidentally she was Protestant – as were so many in senior positions in the newly independent Irish state –, so you cannot give us all this nonsense about the power of the Catholic Church bullying people here, etc etc.

Alison Lowry, Glass Artist:

“In the 20th century in Ireland one in every hundred people were institutionalised, and that was through asylums, through the prison sector, which was small, but mostly in the Mother and Baby Homes, the Industrial Schools and the Laundries. So one in a hundred, that is close to Stalin levels of institutionalisation of a population.” (23:41)

I hope they are not working on older inaccurate figures here. It was admitted a longtime later, that the government’s Ryan report on the industrial schools had vastly overstated the levels of institutionalisation:

“In a statement from its chairperson Mr Justice Sean Ryan on Monday [2019], it corrected a report issued in May 2009 – which it says contained a “seriously erroneous statistic”. While it was initially believed 170,000 attended industrial schools between 1930 and 1970, it says this figure is actually closer to 42,000.”(5)

Oral Evidence

Máiréad Enright, Professor of Law, University of Birmingham:

“I was surprised at how often the Commission says, in its findings, ‘we found no evidence of such and such an abuse’, or ‘little evidence of such and such an abuse’, and when I was first reading the report I remember vividly feeling very confused.” (1:32:10)

Catriona Crowe, archivist and broadcaster:

“The three things that were most complained of, by survivors and their advocates, were:
– The Commission found that there was no physical abuse in the institutions, totally conflicts with the evidence we have, in the report itself.
– No forced adoptions, totally conflicts with the evidence we have.
– And third, that it was the women’s boyfriends, the fathers of the children, and the women’s own families who were responsible for what befell them, although the Church and State did collude.” (1:34:04)

What they are getting at there is the elephant in the room, which Catherine Corless has also now acknowledged,(6) that actually the Commission never found any real evidence for all the accusations that over the last decade they have thrown at the Mother and Baby Homes. No, or ‘very little’ evidence of physical abuse, certainly no sexual abuse, no evidence of incarceration of any type as regards the women and children entering and leaving the Homes (it was always their voluntary decision, as it was to keep the baby afterwards if they wanted, and actually many did), no evidence of the nuns making any money out of the Homes or the fostering or adopting, etc etc.

Ah, so this is a bit of a problem, so what they are also talking about here is their get out clause. They are claiming that the ‘evidence’ is all there in the Confidential Committee part of the Commission report. By that they mean the oral evidence, or rather some of it because the report contains a large amount of direct oral evidence testifying to the good conditions in the Tuam Home, and the great care of the nuns.

Again this subject of this oral testimony has been gone through before, but just to recap some points:
– a lot of the oral evidence they are referring to, is actually from the mothers as relayed only by their offspring, and it is quite likely that evidence like that will exaggerate the degree to which these mothers wanted to hold onto their children, and how they supposedly only gave them up under pressure from the religious orders.
– The ‘survivors’ always knew that if they exaggerated conditions in the Homes, they would get a correspondingly higher ‘redress’ payment. The bias therefore is very obvious and of course is a very big factor contaminating this evidence.
– As this movie acknowledged, this evidence was never tested by the Commission, it was just relayed to the Commission as a kind of story, never cross examined in any way. They could have challenged this testimony if it conflicted (as it nearly always did) with the evidence they had in their possession about the Homes, but they didn’t. The resulting picture might thereby have been way more reliable, but actually none of it was ever questioned and hence a lot of it is, to those who know this history well, hopelessly implausible and unbelievable actually.


Anticlericalism

The final point that I wanted to bring out, the second great theme of this movie and similar ones, is anticlericalism, hatred of the Church. The basic point they are constantly making, is that the Church had overwhelming power in the Independent Irish state, and could impose its will to effectively outlaw sin. This whole idea is just nonsense, that was never true as this writer has tried to articulate elsewhere,(7) but rather than going over old ground it might interest some to see what a ‘Catholic’ state, and its constitution, really looks like, and to see what attitude the Irish Church had towards it.

Spain under Franco, did have some characteristics of a kind of institutionalised ‘Catholic State’, and since that is the same time at issue in our state, what attitude did Irish people, and specifically the Church here, have towards that model? I will leave you then with some long quotes on this by Ivor Kenny writing in the mid 50s in Christus Rex, which was ‘An Irish Quarterly Journal of Sociology’ but heavily geared towards Parish Priests and the Church in general, as the Latin title indicates:

 

[scolairebocht]

“Another article of the convenio [between Rome and the Spanish government] bound the government not to legislate on mixed matters or on matters which would concern the Church without previous agreement with the Holy See.
...
The constitutional Fuero de los Espanoles was ratified in 1945, after consultation with the Holy See. In it Catholicism was declared the State religion and accorded official protection. Private worship was allowed to other cults. Only the Catholic Church could hold external ceremonies.
...
A law was passed concerning primary education. The preamble stated that primary education would be based on the principles enunciated in papal encyclicals. A law of 1943 had declared that the State university was Catholic and would be guided by Christian morality and dogma and by the sacred canons...Church and State would arrange between them [via a Concordat] a patrimony to ensure an adequate subsidy for the clergy and for worship. Church marriages were granted full civil recognition.
...
The effect of this legislation on the very small Protestant minority is that their organisations have no official status. They may not proselytise and must confine indoors all manifestations of their religion. They do not have the right to print Protestant literature and publication would require an imprimatur from the Catholic authorities. They may not hold Protestant ceremonies at burials in civil cemeteries.

Cardinal Segura, in a pastoral letter of 20th February 1952, maintained that Protestant missionary activities would disturb not only the religious, but also the political unity of the State. He said that as religious toleration could easily be used for subversive activities, suppression was essential to the common good.
...
Peculiar historical circumstances have led to the Church’s being intimately linked with the present regime which is not universally acceptable in Spain and which uses authoritarian methods to ensure stability. The resulting relationship against the Protestant minority is intolerant.
...
A final criticism and, as we shall see later, perhaps the most important, is that the concordant takes too much for granted the religious unity of Spain. The majority of the working class is without religion...
...
The question arises: if as Christians we believe that the solution best suited to the fundamental order of society is a union of Church and State, what should be our attitude to modern political constitutions, our own included, in which the Church is separated from the State?
...
Likewise, to endeavour to impose the ideal solution on a society not truly Christian would be to defeat the purpose of the solution: the harmonious relations between Church and State. The artificial imposition of the true order could lead only to injustice. There are some elements of this fault in parts of the Spanish relationship. The true order cannot be imposed from above.
...
The freedom and dignity of the individual may never be violated by force. Leo XIII emphasises that it has been the constant care of the Church to ensure that no one is forced to embrace the faith against his will for, as Augustine says, “man can believe only with free will.” When ecclesiastical power was at its highest, Gregory IX wrote that Christians ought show to the Jews the same kindness they would wish for themselves in pagan countries. The ideal of religious toleration is proclaimed in this principle.
...
If the Church does not, in fact, safeguard, so far as it is within her power to do so, the religious liberty of the individual, she cannot fulfil her ministry which has been entrusted to her. Her ministry is essentially spiritual. The weapons she uses must be spiritual weapons. Her coercion is a spiritual coercion.
...
If the Church hinders the exercise of the individual’s free will, religious belief will have no roots and will eventually wither.

The obligation of practical civil toleration finds its expression at a political level in the State’s assurance of full religious liberty to all the denominations with its jurisdiction. Religious liberty consists in the ability of these denominations to exist and to organise, internally and externally, in conformity with their dogmas and their tradition. It is a liberty which must go farther than mere interior individual liberty. To refuse public liberty of a cult, as in Spain with the Protestants, is a denial of the very nature of the interior religious conviction. There must be freedom for public profession of faith and freedom to express that faith in prayer and worship.
...
A Christian political order cannot be imposed artificially.”(8)

Footnotes
1. Brian Nugent, @tuambabies (Corstown, 3rd edition 2018), p.335-337.

2. The final Commission report p.897.

3. Connacht Tribune 25/1/1930, p.5.

4. The final Commission report p.30-31, 71.

5. https://www.newstalk.com/news/number-children-industrial-schools-revised-100000-929019 .

6. https://www.boards.ie/discussion/20...evidence-against-tuam-home-only-oral-evidence .

7. Brian Nugent, The Irish 2018 Abortion Referendum (Corstown, 2019) chapter 5 and much of this is summarised at:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmRdPj0vSzc
.

8. Ivor Kenny, Spain and the Separation of Church and State, in, Christus Rex vol xi no 3 July (Naas, 1957), p.603-9.

 

[Hermit]

The basic point they are constantly making, is that the Church had overwhelming power in the Independent Irish state, and could impose its will to effectively outlaw sin.

They make it sound like people were living in state of perpetual terror of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Church, terrified that their every word or thought could soon result in their doors being kicked in by Gestapo-like priests, followed by severe punishment and a lifetime of ostracisation from which they could never recover. Hyperbole and outright lies typical of liberals.

 

[Mods vs Roc_ers]

They make it sound like people were living in state of perpetual terror of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Church, terrified that their every word or thought could soon result in their doors being kicked in by Gestapo-like priests, followed by severe punishment and a lifetime of ostracisation from which they could never recover. Hyperbole and outright lies typical of liberals.

The hyperbole and lies is all yours, and can be clearly seen in this dishonest sheer misrepresentation.

The above is not what people are pointing out, or representing to people like you.

Rather they point out the abuse of power.

The abuse of authority.

The damaging effects of narrow catholic morality.

The specific ideological agenda on the part of the bishops, and their determination to secure passive acquiescence from the population.

The imposition of their own vision of what life is and how it should be led.

The hegemony manifest in the uncomfortably close relationship between Church and State.

Their will towards ensuring passive obedience.

And, of course the terrible personal tragedies and evils that all stemmed directly from that.

 

[Wolf]

The neck of the 2 mutilated jew fanboys on this site.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/diaspora-pedophiles-increasingly-use-israel-as-a-haven-activists-charge/

Israel becoming 'safe haven for paedophiles,' activists claim

Jewish Community Watch says 32 paedophiles moved from countries around the world to Israel over past decade

www.independent.co.uk

Israel, ground zero for filthy pedophiles.

 

[scolairebocht]

I can tell you, SaintJavelin, that more and more people are questioning the Corless line as time goes on. A few years ago it was a lonely struggle but now much less so!

 

[SwordOfStZip]

They make it sound like people were living in state of perpetual terror of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Church, terrified that their every word or thought could soon result in their doors being kicked in by Gestapo-like priests, followed by severe punishment and a lifetime of ostracisation from which they could never recover. Hyperbole and outright lies typical of liberals.

Indeed it is hyperbole and outright lies a large majority of the time however I think we have to still analysis why they come out with such but maybe that should be left to another thread.

 

[Wolf]

Indeed it is hyperbole and outright lies a large majority of the time however I think we have to still analysis why they come out with such but maybe that should be left to another thread.

From what I've seen it's mostly projection.
The pedophiles have moved from the dead Irish church and they have to be somewhere.
The two jew fanboys here are deflecting hard, probably because they know we know what they are.
Pedo central Mk 2.
We have the receipts.

 

[Myles O'Reilly]

The two jew fanboys here are deflecting hard.

I think one of them is actually Jewish. I asked him yesterday but he wouldn't confirm or deny.

 

[Wolf]

I think one of them is actually Jewish. I asked him yesterday but he wouldn't confirm or deny.

They never do.
It's the shame.
#jewguilt