I don’t yet fully know how I feel about a rape victim being forced to continue with a pregnancy until a caesarean birth was imposed. That this victim of rape, pregnancy and birth was abused by legislation I supported, makes sorting out my feelings that bit more difficult.

During the fraught passage of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, I opined that no one with suicidal thoughts should go near this legislation. What I failed to understand, was that poor women, girls in the care of the State and those mired in the asylum-seeking system, would have no choice but subject themselves to the vicious clauses of this law. A law I supported.

Now that this glaring inadequacy has been revealed in its nasty imposition, I am left hoping that this government, this government which I support, will do something. I am left hoping that a class of men and women, defined by cowardice and an aversion to controversy, will ameliorate the fully realised implications of this law.

It is not that this law denies choice, it is that this law only denies choice to the poorest and most vulnerable. A law I supported. Does this mean that I’m urging our politicians to finally grasp the nettle of the Eight Amendment?

No. I may as well urge a leopard to change its spots. The government I support will not risk the ire of those who now applaud forced pregnancies. I can understand why. It will only lose votes in this. Principles are of no use in opposition or worse, when one is without a seat.

But there is a way to demonstrate some kind of recognisable morality, while maintaining the sick practice of out-sourcing Irish abortions to the UK, but that also keeps the forced births brigade almost quiescent. All this government must do, this government I support, is pass legislation which recognises and ensures all women, whatever their circumstances, financial, legal, nationality, mental state or age, have an equal right to access reproductive services in the UK.

There will be dramatic consequences to this I know. Children accompanied by carers, women in handcuffs, women being means-tested, all accessing abortion paid for by Irish taxpayers. It’ll mean expediting all requests by asylum-seekers to prevent the risk of forced births. It might even go as far as requiring the State to purchase a clinic in the UK, for the sole purpose of providing abortions for women being supported by this State.

I would prefer living in a reality where our politicians thought to ask the people their opinion on the Eighth Amendment. I would support asking that question. I just don’t see it happening before more women are forced to continue with unwanted pregnancies for no other reason than a lack of funds or the freedom travel routinely between EU States.

In the absence of principle and backbone, I would be more than happy to support our politicians throwing money at this problem. It is a temporary solution (though politicians may think otherwise), but it is at least more realistic, for now.

Ever since Tuam, the overnight sensation that took 40 years to break, broke there have been calls for investigations and enquiries. Making me wonder, to what end? I’m not suggesting we leave the past in the past. Far from it. I just want to know what it is we want here?

Do we want an investigation to merely compile a list of all those survivors (and their descendants?) who must get compensation? Would we be looking for reasons why our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents appeared to hate sex so much? Or was it women they hated? Do we hope to discover even more incidents of Roman Catholic amorality? Will we finally know how little the State cares for the poor? Are we looking for reassurance that we are better people now than we were then? Do we think if we just know everything that happened, we can be certain to not repeat those mistakes? Or is it merely a macabre need to know all about those particular baby bones in Tuam.

I’ll be honest, my interest is mostly Discovery Chanel, Police Procedural, Mystery Novel reading, morbid curiosity. I want a forensic pathologist or perhaps a forensic anthropologist (I don’t know what the difference is) to lead a team of experts, who will carefully retrieve, catalogue and investigate each of the bones in whatever that is in Tuam. Then I want them to work with archivists to create a broad picture of what happened in that unhappy place and put together a data base of every single person who went through the doors of that particular institution.

After that, the sociologists, historians, apologists, politicians, lawyers, bloggers and talk-show hosts can begin the task of generating interpretations and consequences. What will most likely happen (and what in fact is happening, and I say this as a wannabe columnist) is the commentary will come before the science. So much heat and noise, that we’ll have no energy, interest or resources to do the actual forensic work. For example, has a single bone been examined by a scientist? Not that I’m aware of.

I’m as guilty of this as everyone else. I’ve written one blog post on Tuam and have written 3000 words of another blogpost on the same topic and yet no one with a white coat, white wellingtons and little trowel and brush is slowly unearthing those bones.

Must everything we do in this country be half-arsed? What is the point of a Departmental paper search, or a Judicial Review or even a list of death certificates? There is a pit of possibly human remains that may date from as recently as 60 years ago and the response has been bureaucracy. No, a parody of bureaucracy.

I love pointing the finger at Roman Catholic cruelty. I get a kick out of pointing out the inherent nastiness of conservatism. I enjoy seeing wronged people given justice. I think history is vital to understanding the present. I think sociology has a lot to teach us. And I love the sound of my own voice.

But just this once, can our dim-witted State send in a few bloody experts to actually see what, and possibly who, is buried in Tuam. If not the State itself, let it invite the Discovery Channel or Time Team or the archeology Department in Trinity to do the work. I bet they’ll be a damn sight cheaper and infinitely more useful than the gravy train of an ‘official enquiry.’ Most importantly, they might actually find some truth.

It’s not easy coming to terms with mass graves. A mass grave always denotes a tragedy of some sort. Be it war, genocide, epidemic, famine, earthquake or tsunami, it takes a disaster of epic proportions for us to dispense with the individual care our species routinely pays to its dead.

In Tuam there is a mass grave of babies. The pit in which they were disposed was a septic tank.

The normal response to such a departure from common decency is shock and horror. Followed by a call for justice. Who were these monsters who would fling dead infants into a shithole, a pit already clogged with the tiny bones of hundreds of dead babies? Let these demonic creatures be named and shamed and the sick philosophy which inspired them, be enjoined to perpetual silence.

A mass grave of babies. What ravening savages could visit such wanton destruction to common decency?

That is the difficulty here. This wasn’t an invasion. This wasn’t alien. This was the work of hundreds of ordinary women. This was the work of hundreds of women who were taught a thing no one should ever be taught. They were taught to not feel empathy. Difficult to do?

People are generally not cruel to people. In World War II, the Germans didn’t gas people, they killed untermensch. In Rwanda the Hutu did not massacre people, they killed cockroaches. Christians didn’t murder people, they burned heretics. Americans didn’t wipe out people or keep people as slaves. They civilised savages and owned livestock.

In Tuam and in an unknown number of other locations, ordinary women were taught that the children in their care were other, were less. The ordinary rules of empathy and decency need not apply. As each creature died, it could be disposed of without the ritual and reverence we would give the meanest murderer.

Ordinary women. Ordinary women taking babies from other ordinary women. Throwing dead babies into pits. Ordinary people being extraordinarily callous.

How far is the journey from normal empathic responses to a vulnerable baby, to dismissing it as a farm animal, or a demon or an insect? I do not like the term ‘evil’ as it has supernatural connotations, but if I had to use it, it would be to describe that journey.
Imagine looking after babies. Ordinary, noisy, smelly, snotty, perpetually hungry babies. Then imagine if you can, the kind of teaching that would be required to make you see those children as slightly less than human. Just ‘other’ enough that their cries of illness or hunger never quite reach you as the cries of a ‘normal’ baby would. Just ‘lesser’ enough that when it dies you could dump it into a septic tank and still sleep well that night.

Now we have a mass grave filled with the tiny bones of dead babies. And I am left wondering about all those ordinary women who filled it up with infant corpses. I am left pondering that all too short journey from common decency to throwing babies into a mass grave.

Empathy is a truly wonderful quality in our species, but it’s terrifying how easily empathy can be switched off and for the mass graves to appear.

I’ve a certain sympathy for Priests but…

I worked with children in Residential Care for about ten years. I began my career around the same time that the Madonna House scandal broke. It was discovered that this institution, this refuge for those most in need of protection, was a place where the sexual abuse of children was rife. For those of us starting out in the profession of Social Care, it was a body blow to our enthusiasm and our sense of ourselves as carers and advocates for society’s most vulnerable.

It was not without some positive effects. We quickly had to rewrite the rules of engagement. No longer was it acceptable to just trust a colleague. We had to put policies and procedures in place that made the abuse of children in our care, not just unlikely, but almost impossible (almost being the operative word, nothing is foolproof).

There were some missteps. For a time we believed no child would lie about being sexually abused. When it became apparent that an emotionally damaged child was capable of using allegations of sexual abuse, we became very wary of ‘mandatory reporting.’ I’m still uncomfortable with it to be honest. Our aim became making things so safe, for both service-users and staff, that if an allegation was viewed as credible, then no obligations would be necessary. That would be a career in jeopardy, whether innocent or guilty.

This need to be safe and to be seen to be safe impacted on a great many facets of our care, the way we hugged the children (only ever side-on), how we said goodnight (one foot outside the bedroom door at all times) and even how we spoke in private with them (staff detailed to ‘inadvertently’ walk into rooms where a staff and a child were having a meeting). It was a lesson in paranoia that I learned well. So internalised that even ten years later, I am still uncomfortable around children when there are no other adults around. I even hear alarm bells watching TV programs if I see an unaccompanied adult male with children.

It is a paranoia born of negative reinforcement. The fear of losing one’s career and the dread of having an allegation hanging over your head that could not be one hundred percent disproved. To be known as a possible child-abuser, the lowest of the low. So we became very consistent in our practice. And it paid off. The children in our care were safer. The culture of insidious impunity ended.

I know I was damaged by the process, but I do not regret that. I was part of a service that was evolving. It could not aspire to perfection, but it did aspire to safety and I think it largely achieved that. Of course, like with everything, vastly increased resources (even on top of the vastly increased resources we did receive) would have made the lives of a great many children, so much better.

I embrace that damage, because it was necessary. We were undoing a culture of abuse, while caring for the victims of that abuse and simultaneously attempting to find an intellectual basis for the policies and procedures we were trying to intuitively evolve. And always, trying to create therapeutic environments in those overcrowded houses.

I lasted ten years. I’m proud of about six or seven years of that. The balance was spent unaware that I had hit the wall. If I had it all to do again, I wouldn’t. It was terrifying and emotionally scarring. And I was exposed to the depravity that lurks in our species. But it was vital work. If I live to be a hundred, I will never again be involved in such a noble task. Can there be anything as important as caring for children?

I am proud of my efforts and I am proud of my profession. I am proud, despite knowing that my profession attracts more than its fair share of men and some women whose sole purpose is to prey on children. Every profession that brings adults into contact with children, is going to be targeted by predators.

As Tom Meagher says in this wonderful piece, the perpetrators of horrible crimes are for the most part, seemingly ordinary people. High functioning individuals who blandly go about their business of destroying lives while still part of society.

The Roman Catholic Priesthood with its unnatural strictures against sex and family was obviously going to have an above average number of sexual deviants. They should not be condemned for that. I can’t condemn them for those numbers because my profession has similar numbers. Some of our sick people even had partners and children of their own.

What then is different between me and a priest? It’s a question of loyalty. There is no one in my profession, even if they are a friend of 20 years, who I wouldn’t without hesitation, throw under a bus, if I suspected or knew they had abused a child in their care. That is not some kind of professional credo. In fact it’s goes beyond a question of loyalty. It’s a duty of care. It’s a morality that always and everywhere, puts children first.

Unfortunately, the apologists for the Roman Catholic Church continually fail to understand why they are perpetually condemned for the sexual abuse of children carried out by its priests. It is not the individual abusers that are the problem. It was and is, the continued prioritisation by the Roman Catholic Church of the Roman Catholic Church over and above all other considerations. Over and above children and over the evolved morals of the twenty-first century.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the paranoid priest. He is a man I can respect. I can relate to that paranoid priest. That is a man who knows he has a job to do and that he must do it in very fraught circumstances. He will examine the policies and procedures that govern his interaction with vulnerable people. He will do all to ensure that every ‘t’ is crossed and every ‘i’ is dotted in those polices and procedures. He will ensure his parishioners are aware of the policies and procedures and he will endeavour to be very public in his adherence. Ensuring the safety of all but also ensuring the education of all. Ensuring that a standard will be set that his successors will be obliged to meet.
Thing is though, that priest no matter how conscientious, still regards himself as having the right and the duty to keep the secrets of child abusers. That pernicious arrogance, that perverted morality, makes a mockery of any child protection policies and procedures. No one would trust their child with a child abuser, that’s obvious. But how many of us would trust our children with men who do not feel obliged to bring child abusers to earthly justice?

I do not think priests should be forced to break the Confessional Seal. There are just too many people in this country who believe in the magical properties of Confession. Further, a frontal assault would just reinforce the culture of martyrhood the majority religion likes to don. We are left then, with the simple hope that this ‘perverse belief’ will in time, simply dissipate under the weight of its own ugliness.

Till then I mourn for all the children that secrecy condemns and has condemned to continued abuse and rape. I mourn for the good men who have had their sense of decency so perverted that they place a duty to their god above their duty to children. That is a wound no one has ever been made answer for.