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Republic of Shame by Caelainn Hogan

Caelainn Hogan's Republic of Shame tells us what we all knew. Everyone knew.  Everybody knew and either denied that knowledge or explained away their actions as they took part in it.  Everybody knew but determined that it was a inescapable act of nature, like the rain.  And when we say everyone knew, not only did everyone know women where being unlawfully imprisoned in mother and baby homes and Magdalen Laundries, everyone knew (including the state) that the rates of death in these mother and baby homes far exceeded that of babies and children in any other place in Irish society at the time.  Church, State and public knew they were dying of neglect.  But when circumstances changes and when children could be sold, they stopped dying, then they had a value and could be sold to 'good' families.  As one survivor ruefully observes,  
'When we illegitimate Irish Bastards were suddenly worth more than the cows on the farms, we stopped dying by the thousands.'  

Many of us who grew up in rural Ireland also grew up with septic tanks. A mysterious pit at often at the bottom of the garden, which would occasionally overflow. We were told, effective horror stories about children, who fell in. As I read this book a memory came to me of my father acquiring a dead cat. I don't know where he got it. He explained that he got the dead cat to 'unblock' the septic tank and that the rotting carcass would help rot the impacted shit. Now we learn that, the nuns in Tuam had an overflowing septic tank (there are records of local residents making complaints) and where were the bodies found? Now two and two may not make four, but then again. They claim that the septic tank was no longer in use when the bodies were dumped there. But they do have a history of being thrifty with the truth. Such is the barbarism.  

It is tempting to think of the past as  “a foreign country: they do things differently there,” and there is a large degree of truth to that.  Ireland was a theocracy, where the rule of the church trumped the rule of law.   However what is also true is our collective blindness to our present evils.  In Peter Singer's 'Famine, Affluence and Morality', Singer (convincingly) argues that ordinary people are evil.  We know people are held, on a flimsy legal basis in 'direct provision centres' in Ireland, we know others are drowning in the Mediterranean.  It turns out that we don't need the Catholic Church to be evil, but it did add a flamboyant layer of hypocrisy.  

This is your God fearing Ireland, this is the lost past some still pine for.

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