Category Archives: MABH

Ireland’s surge of distorted historical narratives finds its roots in the realm of “women’s studies,” birthing a literary genre that depicts Irish women as victims of a malevolent society. However, these assertions lack a solid foundation in evidence or reason, relying instead on the embellishment of misfortune and disdainful critiques. The mother and baby homes scandal has emerged as the epitome of this narrative, even though the Government’s investigative commission into these homes discovered that numerous allegations had scant or no grounding in reality.

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Dublin Universities Involved in Illegal Clinical Trials on Children

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The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes named the following people for conducting vaccine trials on children without obtaining permission. The trials were carried out through an arrangement with doctors in charge of various mother and baby homes. The authorities who ran these homes had no idea that children in their care were subjected to clinical trials. Yet they are falsely made to shoulder the blame, when in fact it is the universities who should get all the blame and pay compensation. However, not one has bothered to issue an apology since they were named in the commission report released in January 2021.

  • Professor Patrick Meenan Department of Medical Microbiology, University College, Dublin
  • Dr Irene Hillery, Department of Medical Microbiology, University College, Dublin
  • Dr Victoria Coffey, Trinity College, Dublin the first female president of the Irish Paediatric Association, the paediatric section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (RCSI)
  • Dr Margaret Dunleavy, the first female president of the Biological Society of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland

The commission concludes that in many of the trials conducted by these university researchers:

  • There was no import licence in place for the vaccine.
  • The researchers did not have a research licence which covered research carried out in the children’s institutions.
  • There is no evidence that consent was properly sought or received.
  • The results of the trial were not published.

In 1968: Dr Victoria Coffey, ran a trials of Glaxo Laboratories measles vaccine, at Pelletstown, Dublin. The commission say of this trial:

34.124 It is clear that this trial did not conform to the ethical and regulatory standards in place at the time. There is no evidence that Dr Coffey applied for or received a research licence under the Therapeutic Substances Act. There is no evidence that the relevant consents were sought or given.

Dr Victoria Coffey was also the institutional medical officer at Pelletstown and facilitated other vaccine trials:

34.70 The Commission has seen no documentary evidence to suggest that the researchers informed the matron or the Dublin Health Authority that children resident in Pelletstown were to be used as research subjects in a vaccine trial. It would appear that Dr Coffey may have been solely responsible for providing Professor Meenan and Dr Hillery with access to Pelletstown.

Nonsense Journalism

Even after the commission’s report was published, biased reporting continued with alacrity. The Irish Examiner published an article on 14 January 2021 where the claimed ‘there were at least 13 vaccine trials carried out on more than 43,000 children, according to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation.’ The entire article is littered with phrases cherry-picked from the report, conflating information from different areas of the report with as many negative facts as the author can find. I cannot find the total number 43,000 mentioned anywhere, and I doubt if the author summed up all the numbers, as the final report is a compilation of a series of individual reports. The report mentions a figure of 47,000 children who took part in a vaccine trial in Britain in 1964/65, and I surmise that the author mistakenly took this paragraph to be about Ireland and, even then, manage to get the figure wrong.

The author fails to mention that the early vaccination trials of the 1930s were done with the authorities’ support due to ‘one of the worst diphtheria epidemics ever recorded in Europe’. Instead, he continues to weave a tangled web, carefully selecting his facts, taken out of context, and conflating comments about the University College, Dublin studies of the 1960s/70s with earlier studies.

The journalist also fails to mention the commission’s conclusions to each trial: ‘there is no evidence of injury to the children involved as a result of the vaccines.’

 

EJ

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Alternative Mother and Baby Home Report

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Many academics were made to look foolish because the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes rubbished many of the allegations they presented as historical fact. Consequently, and to save face, 25 academics have produced an alternative mother and baby homes report or at least and alternative or reinterpreted executive summary.

However, the re-interpretation relies on feminism and the misleading application of today’s morals and standards — which did not exist in the past — but should have existed and had been applied by society and the government. It is a crime against history and the intellectual tradition.

Here are the six factors which the academics say indicates the State is to blame for mother and baby homes, with my observations. Note, blame is deliberately put on the state to force it to pay compensation.

 

1: The State funded all institutions in some way;

No news there. Perhaps the state should not have cared about the plight of unmarried mothers and their children and consequently not have funded care institutions. The commission of investigation also stated that the conditions were worse in secular institutions like county Homes but only the religious run homes have been singled out

 

2: The State regulated mother and baby homes through local government, inspection, funding, criminal, human rights, constitutional and administrative law. They add that where religious authorities objected to more intensive regulation and reform, State agencies preferred to negotiate rather than enforce regulatory arrangements;

That was not always the case. The state acted when appropriate and with the force of the laws in place at that time.

 

3: The State was aware of dangerous and degrading living conditions in many institutions, but did not use its statutory powers of prosecution and did not sanction institutions by depriving them of funding,

The living conditions of the poor in Ireland and elsewhere were far worse than found in any mother and baby home. Unmarried mothers under the British workhouse system in place before 1922 were treated far worse. Only Tuam and Kilrush, former workhouses were singled out by the commission of investigation as being below the standards of other buildings. However, its commentary was biased through an invalid comparison with the standards of today. Anachronistic issues like curtains between the beds in dormitories and a lack of central heating were cited as evidence of poor living conditions.

 

4: Irish law punished family foundation outside of marriage and showed no concern for reproductive justice;

‘Reproductive justice’ is a term which was never heard in the past as the concept is brand new. Applying such terms and concepts by arguing that they should have applied — even though they did not exist at that time — is not revisionism it is just tomfoolery.

 

5: The law criminalised aspects of access to contraception up to 1933 and almost all abortion up to 2019, making it almost impossible to avoid unwanted pregnancy;

Unwanted pregnancy can be easily avoided through abstinence. Besides in other countries where contraception was available continued to produce large quantities of unwanted children.

 

6: Irish law still inhibits efforts to seek accountability for abuses in the institutions by restricting affected people’s access to records of institutionalisation and family; their own records and those of close family members.

Pregnant women entered the homes on the basis that their anonymity would be guaranteed. Many of these mothers do not want to see their children and are primarily responsible for the halting their children from tracing them or contacting them.

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What the MABH Commission got wrong!

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Dear Taoiseach, when appointing an independent ‘expert’ or new commission of investigation, it is imperative that ‘experts’ and members of the commission possess the ability to use modern scientific methods of investigation, have a strong commitment to the continuation of the intellectual tradition and use of impartial investigation techniques. All investigations must be set up in a way to mitigate, in as far as possible, all our natural cognitive biases but in particular, for researcher bias, hindsight bias and presentism in historical investigations. Science has evolved several techniques to combat bias, including a demand that contradictory evidence and contrarian views be evaluated, in order to limit the effects of confirmation bias, thus enable the production of better-quality reports.

Not one of these imperatives was a prerequisite for any commission of investigation set up by the Irish government. In particular, the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes — despite investigating allegations based on medical evidence — had no relevant knowledge or expertise. The result was a report, while not entirely incorrect, was mostly incompetent in its pronouncements on medical matters.

The commission ignored entirely — despite the evidence jumping out from the pages of its report — the causal relationship between poverty and high infant mortality rates. The scientific literature is currently awash with such studies and has been investigating the causal relationship which has been indicated by correlation for decades.[1]

The commission’s lack of basic mathematical/statistical knowledge also caused them to make one of the most basic errors in statistical interpretation. They proceeded to base many of their conclusions and speculations on the ‘false causes fallacy’. Every data scientist and statistician is taught — in their first week — that correlation cannot be used as evidence for a cause.

A correlation is simply a ‘co-relation’ between measurements that appear to increase or decrease at the same time, when one goes up/down, another goes up/down or when one goes up, the other goes down. For example, in warm countries, there is a strong correlation between the number of ice-cream sales and the number of admissions to hospital due to heatstroke. Heatstroke is not causing the increase in ice-cream sales, and neither is the increased volume of ice-cream sales driving the higher number of heatstroke victims. In the terminology of statistics, correlation does not imply causation. Accordingly, statisticians are taught to look for other variables/measurements which might be causing the correlation. In the case above, the hidden variable is hot weather.

The commission — unaware of procedures to be followed in basic statistical interpretation — imagined that there was a correlation between poor quality healthcare and high infant mortality rates. Despite having little or no figures for the healthcare side of the equation, the commission did — what anyone could do — use their imagination to fabricate assumptions to fill gaps in their knowledge.

Consequently, the commission has presented to the nation one of the most incompetent conclusions ever arrived at by a commission of investigation in the history of the State.

In Paragraph 12 of the executive summary, the commission pronounces and speculates:

In the years before 1960 mother and baby homes did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact, they appear to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival.

There is absolutely no mention that these children were in a high-risk category and intuitions — even today — which deal with high-risk individuals, have higher mortality rates.

Higher Infant Mortality Rates — multiples of the national average — continue to exist in Ireland under your own leadership.

Using the same logic of the commission, we could state emphatically that the mere fact of children who were born to Traveller women seems ‘to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival’. Judge Catherine McGuinness of the Children’s Rights Alliance, tells us that the ‘infant mortality rates for Traveller children are 3.6 times that of the general population.’

In the interests of fairness and justice, the government must now appoint a commission of investigation to avoid any charges of bias for singling out the Christian community for castigation by a government suffering from a scurrilous lack of medical/scientific knowledge.

While you are at it Taoiseach, there are many more cases of high infant mortality rates which you might also want to investigate.

Children unfortunate enough to be born to women over 35 years of age seems to have ‘significantly reduced their prospects of survival’.

Would you believe the fact that children who are born to unmarried mothers in this day and age has ‘significantly reduced their prospects of survival’. The CSO has not yet measured child mortality rates for this cohort, but the Office for National Statistics has measured it in England and Wales. It found that children born to unmarried mothers suffer from a mortality rate forty per cent higher than those born to married parents.[2] Studies from Finland show similar results.[3]

Research in Ireland shows that babies born to mothers under 25 years of age suffer from a mortality rate twice for those born to mothers aged 25 to 29. Children born to women aged over forty also suffer from mortality rates twice that of the mid to late twenties cohort.[4] Can we infer, as the commission has done, that these ‘appalling’ rates are due to poor quality care, or should they have looked for other causes?

You cannot — in light of your comments — fail to launch an investigation or act upon these ‘distressing’ statistics, unless you want your inactions to be the subject of a criminal investigation in 35 years’ time and your name besmirched.

You said:

It is deeply distressing to note that the very high mortality rates were known to local and national authorities at the time and were recorded in official publications. However, there is little or no evidence of State intervention in response to these chilling statistics and deaths. In fact, a number of reports actually identifying the problems were not acted on. [5]

Lazy or incompetent reliance on imagined statistical correlation also forms the basis for your apology or more correctly, your attack on the Irish people. No national leader in history has attacked the entire population in the manner in which you have done. Yet you think that you can label all the people of the past as having ‘a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy’ while holding ‘a perverse religious morality’ and that these labels do not apply to your mother and grandmother.

What is the point in naming Dublin Airport after Seán Lemass when you say that he, along with ‘the agencies of the State showed little or no interest in addressing these crimes’. You say crimes, but did you even bother to read the commission’s report or provide evidence for these alleged crimes.

As can be proved, beyond any reasonable doubt, poverty was the primary cause of high infant mortality rates, and that the issue was completely missed by the commission. Accordingly, all of their conclusions based on such rates are null and void.

While you repeated many of the falsehoods within the commission report, one, in particular, stands out. You went on Taoiseach to repeat another falsehood that illegitimacy was an ‘egregious breach of human rights’. William Duncan, — a human rights lawyer with little or no knowledge of history — went back 1,000 years to tell a lame story, scurrilously declaring a breach of human rights that continued for the duration of a full millennium. Rights that did not exist until very recently. That is not history, it is not even pseudo-history, nor indeed would it qualify as counterfactual history.

History is about what happened not what might have happened but most of all Duncan never once told us about the 2,000-year history of the church saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of unwanted and illegitimate children. He never told us that illegitimacy was designed to protect the inheritance of the children of the queen from potential claims from the children of the king’s concubines. Duncan, however, mentions an Irish bishops’ conference in 1974 which recommended that there should be no distinction between a legitimate and illegitimate child before the civil law, evincing that the discrimination had a mainly secular basis. However, the thrust of his contribution continues to blame the church entirely for its instigation and continuance. It was in fact English ‘common law’ which imposed the ‘abuses of human rights’. Common law strongly supported the primogenitor system and was stringent in order to protect large blocks of property and power, from division and weakness through partible inheritance. Canon law was much more lenient in comparison and even allowed for the subsequent legitimisation of births.

Confirming one’s own biases is common throughout the authorship of the report and is evident in quite a few of the witness statements too.

The commission points out:

A number of witnesses gave evidence that was clearly incorrect. This contamination probably occurred because of meetings with other residents and inaccurate media coverage.[6]

Judge Harding Clarke had the luxury of access to impartial evidence, which when used, showed that one third of the women claimants, who applied for compensation to the symphysiotomy ex-gratia payments scheme, were fraudulent. These women never had the operation and X-Rays were used to prove it.[7]

Many of the witness testimonies supplied to the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes stretches credulity to levels that would not be tolerated by any sensible person or administration. Yet many Irish politicians were forthright in claiming that children were starved to death at the Protestant run Bethany home, before going on to include all catholic run institutions, The politicians — speaking on parliamentary record — included:

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald (Sinn Féin), Deputy Niall Collins (Fianna Fáil), Deputy Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Sinn Féin), Deputy Robert Dowds (Labour Party), Deputy Seamus Healy (independent), Deputy Ciara Conway (Labour Party), Deputy Seán Crowe (Sinn Féin), Senator Marie Moloney (Labour), Deputy Lisa Chambers (Fianna Fáil), Deputy Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Sinn Féin), Deputy Mick Barry (Irish Solidarity–People Before Profit), Senator Catherine Noone (Fine Gael), Senator Gerald Nash (Labour Party) Deputy Kate O’Connell (Fine Gael)[8]

All of these politicians, and more, relied on the use of the medical term ‘marasmus’ on death certificates. Yet — this is important — infants and children died of marasmus at every Irish maternity hospital. Why were they not subjected to a commission of investigation? The answer is ignorance and prejudice. The commission has also rubbished such claims but has any one of these politicians come out in public and admitted to making a mistake? I surmise their reluctance is reflective of the era we live in.

There is no doubt that we are living through a time of mass hysteria and that the truth has been its first victim. I have no business defending the Catholic church or even the Anglican church. They can defend themselves. I cannot stand back, and watch lies and injustice flourish in a nation that has no regard for competent investigative methods including the use of the scientific method where appropriate.

Andreas Schleicher of the OECD reported recently, that ‘a key challenge for Irish schools will be getting students to think for themselves, and develop a strong sense of right and wrong’.[9] The corollary is that students are not currently taught to think for themselves, consequently, they have to let others do their thinking for them.

All of Europe knows that our education system is bad and that it has been in steady decline for decades. This entire scandal is based entirely on bad education which in turn allowed our cultural prejudice of self-loathing to run riot.

Ask yourself one question, why is it that the organisation which fought for the rights of unwanted children not to be killed, throughout two millennia, — and in the absence of action by the secular authorities — took practical steps to provide lifesaving care, education and establishment in employment for unwanted children, should now stand accused of operating a baby-killing and disposal service.

There is something very rotten in Irish education, I wonder will you be the leader who begins to stop the rot or will it be left to someone else, further down the line. If you are going to appoint an expert to review witness’ testimony you need someone — like the Garda commissioner — from outside the state. We certainly have no one with the relevant expertise within the Irish university system.

Without the right people in place, with the right expertise, the taxpayers and citizens of the nation will be forced to pay for the Disneyland thrills of highly paid investigators going round and round on their merry-go-round. Without leadership and competent impartial investigators the country will be stuck for decades in the home of Mickey Mouse.

 

Is mise le mas

Eugene Jordan,
Science Historian BA BSc MInfoTech

 

Footnotes

[1] Wickham et al., ‘Poverty and Child Health in the UK: Using Evidence for Action’.

[2] Reid et al., ‘Vulnerability among illegitimate children in nineteenth century Scotland’.

[3] Remes, Martikainen, and Valkonen, ‘The Effects of Family Type on Child Mortality’.

[4] Corcoran et al., ‘Perinatal Mortality in Ireland: Annual Report 2017’.

[5] Dáil Éireann debate – Wednesday, 13 Jan 2021 Vol. 1003 No. 1

[6] Commission of Investigation, ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’. P12 / 2405

[7] Broadsheet, ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’.

[8] Jordan, ‘Irish Political Fantasists – Children Starved to Death’.

[9] O’Brien, ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’.

 

References

Broadsheet. ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’. Broadsheet.ie, 23 November 2016. https://www.broadsheet.ie/2016/11/23/confabulation-false-memories-and-conspiracy-theories/.

Commission of Investigation. ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’. Irish Government, 30 October 2020.

Corcoran, P., E. Manning, I. B. O’Farrell, and R. A. Greene. ‘Perinatal Mortality in Ireland: Annual Report 2017’. National Perinatal Epidemiology Centre, 2019. https://www.ucc.ie/en/media/research/nationalperinatalepidemiologycentre/NPECPerinatalMortalityinIrelandAnnualReport2017.pdf.

Jordan, Eugene. ‘Irish Political Fantasists – Children Starved to Death’. False History. Accessed 13 June 2021. https://falsehistory.ie/political-fantasy-chidren-starved-to-death/.

O’Brien, Carl. ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’. The Irish Times. 22 March 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/irish-schools-need-to-modernise-20th-century-approach-to-learning-warns-oecd-1.4516222.

Reid, Alice, Ros Davies, Eilidh Garrett, and Andrew Blaikie. ‘Vulnerability among illegitimate children in nineteenth century Scotland’. Annales de démographie historique 111, no. 1 (2006): 89–113. https://doi.org/10.3917/adh.111.0089.

Remes, Hanna, Pekka Martikainen, and Tapani Valkonen. ‘The Effects of Family Type on Child Mortality’. European Journal of Public Health 21, no. 6 (1 December 2011): 688–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckq159.

Wickham, Sophie, Elspeth Anwar, Ben Barr, Catherine Law, and David Taylor-Robinson. ‘Poverty and Child Health in the UK: Using Evidence for Action’. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2016, archdischild-2014-306746.

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Bias and Prejudice Unbridled on Children’s Committee

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When welcoming the report, it was obvious that Kathleen Funchion had not read it… Speaking in the Dáil  Éireann debate on the 13th of January, the day following the public release of the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes, Kathleen Funchion (Sinn Féin), Chair of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on children… etc. stated.

KF: ‘Mother and baby homes were not homes, they were detention centres’.

Funchion had not managed to read as far as paragraph eight of the executive summary:

  1. There is no evidence that women were forced to enter mother and baby homes by the church or State authorities.

KF: [Women were] forced to give birth in the most appalling conditions, often without medical support or even basic pain relief

The commission wrote:

  1. There is no evidence that the women who gave birth in mother and baby homes were denied pain relief or other medical interventions that were available to a public patient who gave birth in a Dublin or Cork maternity unit. There is evidence of women in mother and baby homes being given pain relief, and being stitched following birth.

Had she been aware at that time that the commission’s report directly contradicted what she was about to say at the Dáil, there is no doubt that she would have attacked the commission’s findings, there and then. Now however, six months later, when she and others realise that the commission have rubbished many of her claims, she now says that ‘the report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission cannot stand and must be repudiated’.

As it slowly began to dawn on her that her allegations are not supported by evidence, she has followed the only option available — to maintain any semblance of credibility — by calling for the report to be repudiated.

She has been howling from the rafters of Leinster House for the former members of the now disbanded commission to appear before the Oireachtas committee, of which she happens to be the chairperson.

However, given the obvious bias and prejudice which she showed and her motivation to keep her credibility intact, would any sensible person allow themselves to be publicly grilled and abused by political grandstanders.

Clearly many of the witnesses have made false allegations — allegations which stretch credulity to levels where only some sections of Irish society can reach — and the commission have stated, — in an overly polite disposition — that ‘a number of witnesses gave evidence that was clearly incorrect. This contamination probably occurred because of meetings with other residents and inaccurate media coverage’. The amount of inaccurate media coverage has been alarming. It is not really the sheer volume of falsehoods which most alarming, but the ease by which beliefs could be fabricated by the politicians and media, which any normally functioning society would have remained sceptical.

She also said that Irish women operated these institutions as if they were prisons.  We ignored the cries of women and children subjected to ‘torture, deprivation and humiliation on a colossal scale’. She clearly holds the opinion that Irish women are particularly faulty and cruel, all wanting to join an organisation so that they could go about the business of torturing women and children. What was in it for them! Is that not the first question any sensible person would ask not to mind a professional investigator?

There is only one motivation put forward, and the entire scandal rests on this one foundation, women hated unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. That is what motivated them to kill and torture vulnerable people, not money, not prestige, not notoriety, carrying all that risk for nothing! The risk of excommunication, risk of execution for murder, risk of reputational damage, risk of banishment etc. All that risk for no gain whatsoever.

The science of motivation holds that two things drive human actions: necessities — food, sleep, avoidance of pain; and rewards. There is no reward for killing a baby, unless you happen to be its mother. That is the very reason mother and baby homes were set up in the first place.

In most countries politicians can fool some of the people some of the time, but in Ireland they can fool all the people all of the time because we are too nice and trusting.

EJ

References

Dáil Éireann debate – Wednesday, 13 Jan 2021 Vol. 1003 No. 1
Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes: Statements

Link – page search: funchion

Deputy Kathleen Funchion (Sinn Féin)

Mother and baby homes were not homes, they were detention centres. A home is somewhere where one should feel safe, loved and protected, not a place where one is tortured, imprisoned and forced to give birth in the most appalling conditions, often without medical support or even basic pain relief. These walls hid torture, deprivation and humiliation on a colossal scale. Human rights did not exist in these centres. As a mother, daughter, sister and Irish citizen, I cannot countenance this cruelty. The cries of children and tortured mothers were ignored and trivialised by cruel nuns [women] and others who were involved in these institutions, who ran the institutions as if they were prisons.

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Letter to United Nations re the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

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Dear Mr Salvioli, When miscarriages of justice occurred in Ireland, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties was strangely silent. Contrast their behaviour to the achievements of the National Council for Civil Liberties, now called ‘Liberty’, in Britain, which has been instrumental in exposing miscarriages of justice and in the release of innocent people from jail. On the other hand, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has little work to do in Ireland and so has taken to fighting with the dead, a behaviour common in Ireland due to the nation’s cultural biases and often expressed as a national self-loathing. The actions of the ICCL border on sectarian prejudice and are nearly always exclusively aimed at the catholic church. However, the most disturbing actions of the ICCL are their arguments calling for the fundamental principle of justice and human rights to be set aside.

Recently the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes has found that many of the allegations made by and/or endorsed by the ICCL were not supported by evidence.[1] A major embarrassment one would think, but the ICCL has attempted a counterattack by writing whimperingly to you at the United Nations. Their chief weapon is the anachronistic application of human rights law to the past, a time when no such rights were protected by law. An action akin to banning cars from a city centre, and then accusing drivers who drove on those streets before the ban of breaking the law and seeking to fine them or have them arrested.

The mother and baby homes scandals are primarily founded upon the issue of historical high infant mortality rates, thus bringing into play the investigative tools of science and mathematics, tools not normally available to historians. That is specialist historians with knowledge, or at least a basic understanding of pathology, aetiology and epidemiology.

These are subjects not normally taught to historians and lawyers, yet the Irish government appointed such ill-equipped people to investigate the causes of historical high infant mortality rates. When knowledge is absent, assumptions are imperative to fill in the gaps, thus facilitating the arrival at conclusions that would be otherwise impossible.

The size of the assumption is directly proportional to the size of the knowledge gap. Accordingly, the bigger the assumption the greater the distance it is in essence from reality. Consequently, the commission has made several substantial mistakes which all fall on one side in favour of the abuse hypothesis, the same side as the ICCL. However, these errors are easily exposed using current scientific understandings.

The lawyers and the personnel at the ICCL have demonstrated time and again that they have no such specialist knowledge of vintage medicine or science and are forced to base their arguments and allegations entirely on assumptions. However, in their specialist area of law, they also astonishingly wander away from the principles of good justice.

They argue for a ‘survivor-led approach’ to the evidence, effectively urging the government and observers to dismiss evidence, and accept all allegations as fact without the slightest test for credibility. The fundamental principle of justice is that allegations can only be proven if they are supported by evidence. All allegations must therefore be tested for credibility. Many of the allegations made by the ICCL and others are reliant on historical and logical fallacies, and on ‘hearsay’, a legal term, which is tightly controlled in a court setting using the rules of evidence, because of its potential to cause injustice. Moreover, the ICCL seeks to deny the accused of their rights which are guaranteed by the Irish constitution, namely, ‘equality before the law’ and ‘the right to fair procedures’.

During a previous Irish government enquiry, when scientific tools were available to subject witnesses’ allegations to impartial credibility tests, one-third of applicants were found to have provided false testimony.[2] The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes has also encountered false testimony but has failed to publicly quantify its extent. The number of such testimonies is likely to be substantial in number, judging from the many accounts appearing in the Irish media, which rely on pushing credulity to heights never before seen. Given that there are huge sums of money on offer as compensation, it is no surprise to find a lot of people are willing to chance their luck, as there is a lot to be gained and little to be lost. As in other cases, many of the accusers work on the premise that the more exaggerated their allegations, the more they will be paid in compensation. In effect, Ireland’s legal system has a long record of rewarding dishonesty, often at the expense of genuine cases made by honest persons.

Unlike its neighbouring countries, Ireland has a compensation culture that is so pervasive and the awards so high, that the country’s insurance costs are astronomical. It has become so problematic for society, that the government has recently gotten the Irish judiciary to agree to new guidelines to reduce the amount given in financial settlement of personal injury claims.[3]

Nonetheless, the courts are full of compensations claims with a not insubstantial number of cases based on allegations that range from the mistaken to the fraudulent. There is little to mitigate against such claims, as judges are inclined to give the benefit of any doubt to the plaintiff and law firms are more than willing to advertise their services on a ‘no win, no fee basis’. The substantial financial sums on offer produces a level of temptation for people which not only outweighs or blinds them to the potential losses, through the awarding of costs against them, but it encourages a substantially higher number of people to take a chance. After all, if Johnny and Mary down the road could get €150,000 and appear to be perfectly okay after their accident, why can’t we get my hands on easy money.

Despite the allure of vast sums in compensation, many people who are former residents of mother and baby homes have testified to the commission about the many good aspects of the homes and of their good treatment. Their voices have not been heard over the cacophony of the wild and the lurid claims, which are the only type appearing almost daily in the Irish media.

Allegations like those discussed at the Irish houses of parliament where several parliamentarians stated unequivocally that women starved babies to death. First, it was alleged to have occurred at the Protestant run Bethany home and later applied to all Catholic-run homes. All allegations were reliant on an ignorant and inept interpretation of the medical term ‘marasmus’, which appeared on a small number of death certificates.

Death due to this exact cause occurred at all of the nation’s maternity hospitals in the past. Accordingly, it would be an imperative of justice that a commission of investigation be established to bring to bear scrutiny on these hospitals and also on the Irish Medical Council and on An Bord Altranais, respectively, the regulatory bodies for doctors and nurses.

If the same evidence that is used to accuse women of murder and abuse can be found at all maternity hospitals, then the singling out of Christian run institutions would in itself be a cause for concern. One would reasonably expect an organisation like the ICCL would be at the forefront in sounding the alarm about the potential for injustice and the breach of the human rights of the accused.

The ICCL citing the commission’s final report wrote that ‘babies and young children were reported to have died from malnutrition, a form of neglect.’ The Commission state:

33.5. Some commentators have concluded that infant deaths which occurred in mother and baby homes due to marasmus indicates that infants were neglected, not appropriately cared for, and/or wilfully starved to death in these institutions.

However, marasmus was a frequently cited cause of infant deaths in institutional, hospital and community settings in early twentieth-century Ireland. The Commission considers it unlikely that deaths in hospitals and family homes were due to wilful neglect and so cannot conclude that the term marasmus denotes wilful neglect in mother and baby homes. The more likely explanation is that marasmus as a cause of death was cited when an infant failed to thrive due to malabsorption of essential nutrients due to an underlying, undiagnosed medical condition.

Accordingly, this lack of balance is strong evidence that the ICCL has not the skillset to investigate matters historical not to mind matters medical, but more importantly, it demonstrates that they have no commitment to ensuring justice prevails. What about the justice for those who were falsely accused of murder, they may be dead now, but what kind of ‘rights advocacy’ organisation thrives on, and promotes injustice?

The ICCL’s arguments under the following headings are equally not supported by the evidence and were mostly dismissed by the commission of investigation.

· Arbitrary Detention · Violations of the Right to Life
· Torture and Ill Treatment · Modern slavery or servitude or forced labour
· Enforced Disappearance · Violation of Private and Family Life Discrimination

It might seem obvious to state, but the allegations made by the ICCL have been subjected to a seven-year-long investigation by a government-appointed commission, which after examining one million documents found no evidence to support most of their allegations. Consequently, the ICCL might see it as a survival imperative and to maintain their credibility have to seek to rubbish the commission’s findings. A more competent organisation might admit its mistakes and concentrate on the commission’s findings which may be close to matching their allegations, but such aptitude is hard to find in Ireland.

The Irish nation has a remark for the intellectual failings of the Irish elite which goes ‘only in Ireland’. Only in Ireland could there be a ‘human rights organisation advocating for actions which run contrary to the principles of justice, do so in the name of justice, and get away with it. The ICCL would be better renamed the Irish Council for Civil Loathing because that is their modus operandi. They, like many of their compatriots, are prisoners of cultural artefacts inherited from their impoverished ancestors, who were so deprived of social advancement, took to the denigration of others to create illusions of social superiority.

Denigration combined with the ‘colonial mentality’ has left the Irish nation with a set of self-loathing biases, which the Irish often pass off as self-deprecating humour. However, one has only to look at its malignant influences to see the real-world consequences for the nation.

No politician has to date, apologised for making false allegations of starvation against the women who managed and worked in the mother and baby homes. Not one.

Like the ICCL, many of the scandal propagating politicians have posited further scurrilous claims and continue to do so even after they were dismissed by the commission of investigation. The reason for their actions is simple, self-loathing, it is important to a large portion of the Irish nation, who use it to create illusions of social superiority and are naturally reluctant to have their notions of self-worth destroyed by evidence. Accordingly, they will support anyone who advances their prejudices and ignore those who might challenge them.

The ICCL uses presentism with alacrity to promote its agenda. Presentism is the anachronistic use of present-day perspectives to analyse past events. It usually results in the castigation of the past’s decision-makers who made wrong decisions because of not using information that belonged to their future.

The supreme irony of using presentism is that the former residents who were born or raised in institutions were the result of a crisis pregnancy and in this age, it is likely they would have been killed before their birth. Irish women produced a minimum of 181,434 unwanted children in the thirty-five-year period between 1982 and 2017 inclusive. The figure includes 15,094 children who were given up for adoption.[4]

In a corresponding thirty-five-year period, while the Tuam mother and baby home was open from 1925 to 60, Irish women produced 64,290 illegitimate children and 13,431 of these souls were lost due mainly to rampant levels of dire poverty.[5]

The number of births in both periods was remarkably similar 2,199,777 compared to 2,187,967 for the later period. Compare the sad loss of 13,431 infants to the 166,340 children who were aborted before birth and we can begin to see what period of history the baby holocaust belongs to.[6]

It is a mark of insanity to suggest that all the illegitimate children born in the early period were wanted by their mothers. It is a sad fact of life that many babies were unwanted by their mothers then and now. Witness accounts, within the commission’s report, stand as testimony to the efforts made by several mothers who self-harmed in order to cause the loss of their baby.

Moreover, when these children grew up and went in search of their birth mother, it would be the height of insensitivity to reveal to such a person that they were in reality, an unwanted child. Accordingly, and with compassionate intent, they are told that they were a wanted child, but nefarious forces made the mother give them away. It is a story that saves face for the mother and provides comfort for the abandoned child, but it is not necessarily a true version of events, no matter how much people want to believe it.

The issue of unwanted children remains very much with society today, only the method of dealing with the issue has changed. Throughout recorded history, humanity has created vast numbers of unwanted children and it continues to create such children today. Alas, thanks to an unlucky technicality, human rights lawyers are deprived of much business, due to the now commonly accepted precept that human rights only begin when a child makes it out alive from its mother’s womb. If those who are not that fortunate are counted as unwanted children, then it puts a more rational perspective on history.

All societies where poverty is high have higher mortality rates than more affluent societies. Infant mortality rates have been correlated with poverty for decades but only in the last three decades has the causal relationship been definitively established. The United Nations are very well aware of the influence of poverty on mortality rates and appears in what must be thousands of official publications and through its agencies like the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, which estimates that:

On current trends, that 56 million children under age 5 will die from 2018 to 2030, half of them newborns. […] while children from poorer households in low-and-middle-income countries remain disproportionately vulnerable to early death – under-five mortality rates are, on average, twice as high for the poorest households compared to the richest.[7]

How can the United Nations not be able to join the dots with its own information and think it can have any semblance of credibility? The Irish nation was once a deeply impoverished society with high infant mortality rates which were directly correlated to the levels of poverty. The commission has noted that infant mortality rates at their highest during the 1930s and 1940s.

The 1930s was a time of great social deprivation across the globe. ‘Hunger marches’ took place in the richest country in the world, Britain, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against their living conditions. In the 1940s, Ireland was hit by a supply crisis which caused food shortages and hit the country’s poorest people the hardest. The catholic church in Dublin provided the city’s poor people with 8 million meals per year, saving tens of thousands of lives.[8] Yet, they get no credit thanks to Irish ignorance of their own history.

In anticipation of any argument put forward to the contrary by a devotee of the ‘dismal science’, let me point out that GDP per capita is no measure of individual well-being, just ask Joseph Stiglitz et al, but is often used by the self-loathers to insinuate that things were not that bad in Ireland.

However, when wealth distribution is factored in, the true picture reveals itself. In 1931 a staggering 81% of the population of Ireland had no measurable wealth. 1% of the population controlled 59% of the nation’s wealth. The legacy of colonial rule did not disappear overnight. Post-independence, Britain placed a financial burden on the Irish nation which was greater than those imposed on the Germans due to the war reparations post WWI. These payments were known as the ‘land annuity’ and ‘RIC pensions’. In 1932 the Irish government attempted to halt the British financial drain of the Irish economy by withholding the land annuity payment. At that time, they amounted to a staggering 14% (£4,764,767) of the nation’s total tax income of £35.5million.[9]

Britain retaliated by placing tariffs on Irish goods, a time now known as the ‘Economic War’. It placed great hardship on the Irish population and in particular on the poor and infant mortality rates remained high. In 1938 the trade war ended with the Irish government paying out £10 million in a final settlement. However, only a few years later, the British again carried out an economic attack on Ireland, through the withdrawal of vital supplies, in reprisal for the country refusing Churchill’s invitation to join the war on the side of Britain.[10] As a former colony, the Irish economy was left heavily dependent on exports and imports from its former colonial masters. The British Historian Bryce Evans puts it more dirrectly writing that Britain used ‘hunger as a weapon of war’ against Ireland during the 1940s.[11]

There is absolutely no question that poverty was rampant in Ireland and that government efforts to solve it were hampered by external forces and events. There is equally no doubt that poverty was the main cause of high infant mortality rates. It is however ignored in the commission of investigation’s report due to ignorance, despite the issue jumping out from its pages.

Returning to the ICCL, Michael Feichín Hannon was convicted in 1997 on charges of sexual assault had his conviction was declared a miscarriage of justice on the 27 April 2009. The three-judge court, in granting the certificate, described the case as ‘alarming and disturbing’ and said an entirely innocent man was convicted by a jury. His accuser, a young girl, had found God as an adult and as a result, admitted to making up the whole story.[12]

In 1999, Nora Wall became the first woman to be convicted of rape in the history of the Irish state. She was also the first person (male or female) ever to receive a life sentence for rape. The rape occurred 20 years earlier at a time when she was working as a nun at an orphanage. She held open the legs of a twelve-year-old girl in her care, to facilitate her rape by a male employee of the same orphanage. It turned out to be Ireland’s first case of a conviction based on repressed memories, an entirely concocted story, made by a woman with mental difficulties. Nora Wall was released from prison after serving only four days of her life sentence. It was the fortunate result of evidence emerging into the public domain, which should have been kept hidden from public view, as stipulated by Irish law. Her conviction was certified as a miscarriage of justice in 2005.[13]

In both cases the ICCL, founded in 1976, was silent. It made no comments on what improvements might be made to the rules of evidence and/or to court procedures to protect innocent people from false accusations and propose strategies that would make such miscarriages of justice less likely to happen again in the future.

In the parlance of the UN, there is no evidence that as a result of these miscarriages of justice that the ICCL has advocated or campaigned to:

  • Prevent the recurrence of crises and future violations of human rights.
  • Promote truth and memory about past violations;
  • Reform the national institutional and legal framework and promote the rule of law in accordance with international human rights law, and restore confidence in the institutions of the State;
  • Ensure social cohesion, nation-building, ownership and inclusiveness at the national and local levels; and promote healing and reconciliation;

The ICCL not only does not live up to these ideals but has actively promoted untruths and unlike the women it attacked, or the organisation to which they belonged, it seems that they have never protected a single human right nor prevented the abuse of any person’s rights.

The ICCL press briefing on the report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission dated March 2021, is chiefly remarkable for its reiteration, as fact, all the allegations which have been disproven or found not to be supported by the evidence by the commission of investigation. [14]

Just take one exemplar, the ICCL state emphatically that women were detained against their will, yet in reality, women had to apply to get into a mother and baby home. Taking my earlier point about stretching credulity, think about how many people are currently standing outside Mountjoy Jail in Dublin applying to get it.

Human rights lawyers cannot in reason or logic base their opinions on false allegations nor can false or dubious allegations be used to attack innocent people, dead or alive. Such would be representative of a significant failure in the intellectual tradition of humanity.

Dubious allegations might be easily revealed when they bear all the hallmarks of misogyny, it was women who starved babies to death, women who abused children, women who abused mothers, women who trafficked babies, women who kidnapped women, women covered up abuse, women perpetrated a holocaust against babies, ad inf.

One simple question exposes the falsity of the allegations, what benefit would accrue to these women for their actions and what would outweigh the risks. Risks like their imprisonment, castigation, dismissal and excommunication. When rational investigative questions are asked, the road to the truth begins to thaw out and the myths unravel, but why have these questions not been asked by the Irish media, the ICCL and more importantly, by the United Nations.

Irish universities have been engaged in ‘grade inflation’ for the last number of decades. That is the practice of making exams easier for students to gain higher marks, thus creating the illusion of improving standards of education. It works to fool politicians, but the multinational corporations based in Ireland are not impressed with the Irish educational system and have made their dissatisfaction known directly to the Irish government. The top executives of Google, Hewlett-Packard and Intel met with the Minister of Education, Bat O’Keefe in 2012. He was told that Irish graduates do not have the level of skill their qualifications suggest.[15] Despite promises, no corrective action appears to have been taken to date. In recent weeks the OECD has also castigated the Irish education system. Dr Andreas Schleicher stated:

Just 15 per cent of Irish 15-year-olds can distinguish fact from opinion in a reliable way. So, you know, what value is literacy, if you can’t navigate ambiguity? If we can’t manage complexity? [16]

As the output of ICCL seems to evince the same inability that afflicts young adults, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that problems unique to the Irish education system, could be a contributing factor in the apparent lack of skills and abilities at the ICCL.

Natural justice demands that the United Nations should at least subject allegations to a test for veracity rather than gullibly accepting the word of accusers, including that of self-appointed watchdogs. Notoriety seeking is prevalent among individuals today and it, along with groupthink can occur in any organisation or social group, and each malady has the potential to be one of the progenitors of injustice and human rights abuse. These malignant effects always need to be mitigated through competent evaluation of BOTH sides, especially the contrarian viewpoint which should always be sought out and given a fair hearing. Leave the one-sided arguments to the Irish, and let them engage in their time-honoured pastime of self-loathing, and not drag the United Nations down to their level.

The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes was led by a judge, a barrister and a historian. They were not wrong in all their findings, but their reports contain many errors due to inadequate controls for cultural biases, cognitive biases and a lack of expertise in statistics and medicine. Many of its conclusions will not withstand rational investigation as they are riddled with presentism, statistical fallacies and prejudice.

The Irish nation is badly served by its élite, so we would all welcome a UN investigation, but only if carried out by people with a strong commitment to impartiality, empowered with strategies to control for prejudice, cognitive bias, and has expertise in history, science, historic medicine, statistics and placing historic events in their correct historical context. On request, I can supply comprehensive details of what the commission got wrong and what it got right.

The Christian churches, supported by the Christian community, has been in the business of saving the lives of unwanted children for nearly two millennia. For all of that time, not one institution has been accused of operating a baby-killing facility or a post-natal life abortion service. Such flights of imagination can happen… only in Ireland.

It is time to wake up and smell the manure.

Finally, I provide more detail on all the arguments I used here in my new book and e-book.

The book’s epigraph is a quote by Albert Einstein:

‘Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.’

Einstein did not have the ICCL in mind, but he provides a good explanation of what might underpin their thoughts and actions.

Eugene Jordan, BA BSc MinfoTech,
Science historian.

 

References

[1] Commission of Investigation, ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’.

[2] Broadsheet, ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’.

[3] Correspondent, ‘New Guidelines on Personal Injury Awards to Take Effect “within Weeks”’.

[4] Jordan, The Irish Attack on Christianity.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Hug et al., ‘Levels & Trends in Child Mortality’.

[8] Bryan, ‘Rationing in Emergency Ireland, 1939-48’.

[9] Jordan, The Irish Attack on Christianity.

[10] Evans, ‘What Ireland Ate and Drank during the Second World War’.

[11] Ibid.

[12] ‘Sex Attack Case Ruled a Miscarriage’.

[13] Carolan, ‘Ex-Nun Nora Wall Settles Damages Case for Miscarriage of Justice’.

[14] ‘ICCL Press Briefing on Report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission’.

[15] Flynn, ‘How Ireland Dumbed Down’.

[16] O’Brien, ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’.

 

Full References

Broadsheet. ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’. Broadsheet.ie, 23 November 2016. https://www.broadsheet.ie/2016/11/23/confabulation-false-memories-and-conspiracy-theories/.

Bryan, Ciarán. ‘Rationing in Emergency Ireland, 1939-48’. National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2014.

Carolan, Mary. ‘Ex-Nun Nora Wall Settles Damages Case for Miscarriage of Justice’. The Irish Times. Accessed 26 July 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/high-court/ex-nun-nora-wall-settles-damages-case-for-miscarriage-of-justice-1.2645707.

Commission of Investigation. ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’. Irish Government, 30 October 2020.

Correspondent, Jennifer. ‘New Guidelines on Personal Injury Awards to Take Effect “within Weeks”’. The Irish Times, 9 March 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/new-guidelines-on-personal-injury-awards-to-take-effect-within-weeks-1.4504682.

Evans, Bryce. ‘What Ireland Ate and Drank during the Second World War’. Brainstorm – RTÉ, 25 May 2020. https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0525/1140447-ireland-emergency-second-world-war-food-drink-black-loaf-tea/.

Flynn, Sean. ‘How Ireland Dumbed Down’. The Irish Times. 6 March 2010. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/how-ireland-dumbed-down-1.633741.

Hug, Lucia, David Sharrow, Kai Zhong, and Danzhen You. ‘Levels & Trends in Child Mortality’. New York: UNICEF, 2018.

‘ICCL Press Briefing on Report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission’. Irish Council for Civil Liberties, March 2021. https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Press-briefing-ICCL-analysis-of-MBHC-report.pdf.

Jordan, Eugene. The Irish Attack on Christianity – The Case for the Defence. Tafannóir Press, 2021.

O’Brien, Carl. ‘Irish Schools Need to Modernise “20th Century” Approach to Learning, Warns OECD’. The Irish Times. 22 March 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/irish-schools-need-to-modernise-20th-century-approach-to-learning-warns-oecd-1.4516222.

‘Sex Attack Case Ruled a Miscarriage’. The Irish Times. 27 April 2009. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/sex-attack-case-ruled-a-miscarriage-1.839613.

 

Latest -Press Watch, MABH

Critical Thinking Skills Absent at Galway University

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IT IS THE YOUNG WHO BELIEVE US

This headline was probably the most significant comment made during a Zoom presentation hosted by An Cumann Staire, the history society of NUI, Galway last evening 11th March 2021. The event featured speeches by four former residents of Irish mother and baby homes who all agreed that it was mainly the young who believed their story and who support them. It might seem obvious to state that the young people do not have much knowledge of the past and are therefore vulnerable to believe stories and claims which older people do not believe. Old fogies like me, could see that all the speeches contained significant errors, and some of the claims made were so fanciful, that only the most gullible people could find them credible.

The attendees were nearly all female and at times the host and event co-ordinator, Neasa Gorrell, could be observed fighting back tears as she listened to stories told by the various speakers. The history society Auditor, Grace Carolan also admitted afterwards that see too was actually crying, off screen, during the presentations. When emotion is present, reason is absent, and so on a wintery March night, the current sorry state of the Irish university system was on full display due to the absence of critical thinking skills.

The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes does not believe many of the testimonies supplied to it, and this was the primary grounds for complaint amongst all the speakers present. Aside from former residents, the speaker list included two journalists, both authors of books on Irish institutions, one university PhD student and a representative of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

Alison O’Reilly, the journalist who broke the Tuam story in 2014, continued to make claims which have been disproven along with the university researcher who claimed that children were starved at these homes. Jamie Canavan, a female PhD student researching the topic of fostered children spoke in an American accent on the subject of the wider context of old Irish institutions. She continued to make claims which the commission of investigation have stated categorically are not supported by the evidence. ‘Coercive confinement’ was one of these claims which is no doubt built on the declaration of one of her university mentors, Sarah-Anne Buckley, who wrote that Ireland built ‘a brutal carceral state’ to confine women. However, the reality is that mothers had to apply for admission to mother and baby homes and were never places of incarceration. Canavan went on to posit the full gamut of falsehoods which have been thrown out by the commission of investigation and did so without ever presenting the evidence to show why she thought the commission was in error. Both she and O’Reilly mentioned that ‘marasmus’ on death certificates indicated that illegitimate children died due to hunger. However, the commission, after consulting with medical experts say that it was a general term used by medics for ‘defects in the mucus membrane of the intestine which prevents absorption of food’. Consequently, the commission used the term malabsorption throughout its report to clarify the meaning of marasmus. O’Reilly ignored it completely and went on to state that ‘in terms of children dying in appalling circumstances such as hunger, you know, gastro problems, babies being referred to as congenital idiots all these horrifying terms, nobody reacted’. ‘Idiot’ was at first a medical term which has made its way into popular language as an insult. However, medics were not using it as an insult and the term also appears on many death certificates of legitimate children. Clearly Alison O’Reilly has no education in the area of medical terms nor vintage medicine, nor does it appear do many writers including academic writers who write on the subject.

Caelainn Hogan, author of a book which apparently is based mostly on the testimonies of former residents of Ireland’s intuitions, complained that their stories were contradicted by the commission’s report. The commission stated that the homes were refuges and provided some form of service and that women were not forced in there. Hogan disagrees as it appears out of fear that the allegations made in her book are could be rendered invalid.

Sharon McGuigan, a former resident of a mother and baby home, told how she was made pregnant by a friend of the family when she was only 15 years of age. Her parents would not have the child in their home, and so they arranged for her to stay at the Dunboyne mother and baby home. She recollected that the treatment she received at the home was good but her only complaint was that that she got no emotional support while there. She claimed that her treatment at the National Maternity Hospital, Holles St in Dublin was ‘absolutely terrible’, for no other reason than she was unmarried mother. The hospital was secular in ethos, even though all the hospital’s masters were protestant until the 1990s. She claims to have given birth on her own, alone in her cubicle, to a premature baby girl born on 25 Nov 1985. She stated that the treatment she got from her family was worse than she got any where else. She signed adoption papers but did not know what she was signing. She made contact with her daughter, now 35 years old, who replied that she does not want to meet her. In spite of all of her negative comments about the secular system, she maintains that ‘if it were not for the church and state the parents would not have been able to put their children in there’. ‘I lived with shame from people in the village, they didn’t say anything, but you knew that they were talking behind your back’. I am sure that that is her honest perception and in certain psychological states we can perceive information which may not be realty. Other than her perception we cannot know if people were actually talking about her behind her back.

Grace Tierney development officer with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties also spoke in an American accent. She delivered a speech which claimed that human rights were violated, even human rights which did not exist in the past. The Irish Council for Civil liberties is a one of the strangest organisations on the planet. In a country which had a great deal of civil liberty until the corona virus lockdown, they had nothing to do but to go back into the past and pick a fight with the dead. For me, the council are reminiscent of Monty Python’s Peoples Front of Judea, an organisation run by a committee, which sits around all day, argues endlessly about irrelevant issues and gets stuck in a rut of useless bureaucracy and ineffectual action.

Many young Irish people today speak with American accents which is a manifestation of Irish cultural prejudices and I would contend the strength of the American accent is directly proportional to the severity of cultural prejudice. The old Irish prejudices of self-loathing are abundantly manifest in the entire scandal. A topic I explore in more detail in my forthcoming book.

Two male former residents of mother and baby homes representative of the babies recounted being only vague memories or no memories at all. One man with vague memories said he stayed in bed all day and got no education and when brought to foster parents at four years of age he killed all their Turkeys because he did not know what they were. He had never seen them before. Another man recalled that he had been born at a hospital which was not built at that time. He could not recall any bad treatment while in the Tuam home but had memories of his foster father who he described as a brute. He continued to live with the brute until the age of 33. On one occasion he described how his foster father was going to murder him but for some inexplicable reason he did not carry it out. In recent times he found out he had a sister who was born at the Tuam home who died shortly after. According to him, her death was certified, not by a doctor but by a woman working at the home.

That has been a common falsehood doing the rounds in the media. Bina Rabbite was not certifying the deaths; her name is recorded on the certificates as ‘the informant’. That is the person who brings the doctor signed death certificate to the registrar’s office to have it entered on the register.

A thread running through all the claims of the former residents was the issue of their poor education and that of an almost complete lack of personal awareness.

Terri Harrison said that did not really know she was pregnant and went to England not telling the child’s father. She puts her behaviour down to an unawareness life in general and remarks that she was living in ‘cuckoo land’ at that time. ‘I thought I left the narrow mindedness, all the ‘catlick’ profound hurt and pain, no matter where they go in the world, they bring it with them’. In 1973 while firmly ensconced in cuckoo land, in London, she had an accident and went to hospital where the medics revealed to her that she that she was pregnant. Before you could say boo, a priest and nun showed up in a black car and were let into her bedsit. When she arrived back to the bedsit, they forcibly took her out of her flat. She shouted at them and they shouted back at her and she shouted for help, but no one came to her aid. She was then escorted through security at Heathrow airport with a priest holding on to her tightly. She struggled to get away, but the airport police did not intervene. She was never on a plane before, had a fear of flying and suffered a panic attack. She alleged that the priest thumped her on her back, presumably to force her on to the plane. She asked the air hostess where the plane was going, and she said Cork. Two nuns met her at the airport and brought her to the Bessborough home. She claims to have escaped Bessborough but was found in Dublin and put into the St Patrick’s Home on the Navan road. She says that some nuns were not unkind but were totally indifferent to her, you were just not a person. She alleged that some of the nuns told her she was a whore, dirty, filthy and that nobody wanted her.

Later she said that the noise of the Angelus bells was used by a paedophile ring to cover the noise of screams of the boys while they were being raped. Angelus bells have a duration of one minute, and I am not sure if one minute of sex is long enough to gratify a paedophile.

Terri Harrison certainly appeared overly keen to promote anti-Catholic myths, but her biggest complaint was that despite having gave evidence to the commission of investigation, her story was not deemed to be credible. Nonetheless, the meeting host, Ms Gorrell, was visibly close to tears while she was telling her story. Clearly, she believes Terri over the commission of investigation.

I don’t think it is possible to be forcibly removed from a country through an airport, as all passengers came in close contact with airport security. In 1973, all ports in Britain were subject to tight security due to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the police special branch was also deployed to ports to look for suspicious persons. Any person could easily go up to security personnel or shout loudly to ask for help. In relative terms, flying was extremely expensive in the early 1970s and was only for the wealthy, it would have been far cheaper and much easier to forcibly transport a person by sea. Although getting through seaport security was less of a challenge, it was not entirely without risk.
She claims that after the birth of her son in hospital she was ‘wrapped in tin-foil’ due to bleeding. However, mylar or space blankets were not likely to have been in use in Irish hospitals in the 1970s and are not used in hospital settings today to treat hypovolemic shock.

‘Sunday shoppers’ was the term Terri used to describe people who came to the institution to ‘buy babies’ after mass. However, babies were a hard sell, and even a cursory glance at the history of childcare, shows that unwanted babies were produced in such numbers, that it was difficult to find enough foster parents to care for them. Thus, the need for orphanages and care homes.

I don’t believe that the nuns/women who were in charge of the care of unmarried mothers ever abused her in the way she described. It looks like the commission were also sceptical of her allegations, hence her anger directed at it. Moreover, one would have to have a deep knowledge and understanding of the time to be able to spot errors or mis-recollections. This greater knowledge is in possession of older people and that is why they remain far more sceptical than young people.

Galway university claims to be able teach its students ‘critical thinking skills’ but time and again, this claim is rendered bogus, as there was no evidence that any of the students or academics involved, had subjected witness testimony to critical evaluation. Furthermore, there is evidence that group think is present and that the quality control mechanisms to prevent this and other maladies like confirmation bias are completely dysfunctional.

Irish academia has left the job of critical thinking entirely to the commission of investigation. ‘The Commission has no doubt that the witnesses recounted their experiences as honestly as possible. However, the Commission does have concerns about the contamination of some evidence. A number of witnesses gave evidence that was clearly incorrect. This contamination probably occurred because of meetings with other residents and inaccurate media coverage.’

It would seem that the campaign currently run by NUI, Galway to repudiate the findings of the commission is imperative in order to save academia from one of its greatest embarrassments.

 

EJ

A typical meeting of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

MABH, Uncategorized

The Perverse Morality of Micheál Martin – Taoiseach sneers at his mother.

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During the second decade of the twenty-first century, under the rule of the Taoiseach/Prime minister Micheál Martin, children born to a cohort of mothers suffer from infant mortality rates that are multiples that of the average. High infant mortality rates present in a previous era of Irish history were referred to by the Taoiseach as ‘disquieting’, and he went on to attack the apparent lack of action on behalf of the authorities, labelling it ‘distressing’. Yet, the same statistics and apparent inaction are very much in evidence during his tenure as the nation’s leader. As we will see, it would be an example of gross hypocrisy if it was not for the presence of ignorance. The Taoiseach was given his opinion by the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes. It appears that the commission thought that they had sufficient expertise in the areas of vintage medicine, pathology and medical statistics that they did not need to consult with experts in such fields. Accordingly, the commission used assumptions in places where it could have used evidence and consequently arrived at wildly inaccurate conclusions. On top of these assumptions, the Taoiseach used his own assumptions and used them to accuse his mother and grandmother; he said they ‘embraced a perverse religious morality and control, judgementalism and moral certainty’. They ‘had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy, and young mothers’. There you have it; the entire Martin family were sneering at unmarried mothers and oppressed women and children. The Irish view their own history and society through cowhight tinted glasses, accordingly Micheál Martin was not able to see the contemptuousness he holds for his own family, because in Irish society, one can sneer at everyone else and not think that such sneers apply to oneself nor to one’s kin.

In societies where the intellectual tradition is not dead, there is a commitment to the scientific study of problems to improve the conditions for its citizens and humanity. In countries like the UK and Sweden, researchers continue to study high infant mortality rates and look for causes. Even today, the evidence shows that the infant mortality rates for children born to unmarried mothers are significantly higher than for children born to married parents. Ireland does not measure or at least does not publish such statistics, but if they were ever made public, they would likely show the same problem exists in Irish society.

The Taoiseach can quite happily rule over a nation where the infant mortality rate for traveller children is over three and a half times that of the average. It is likely that the English rates of 40% greater infant mortality for children of unmarried mothers also applies to Ireland, then our Taoiseach is gravely in error to attack the dead when he is in no position to grasp the significance of the statistics lying on his own desk.

Erudite research, both scientific and social, continues to show that the causes of high infant mortality rates and high mortality rates, in general, are due to deprivation and poverty. The commission of investigation was unaware of this present-day research and so used the assumption that high infant mortality rates were due almost entirely to the spread of disease. They took no account of that the use of the word ‘congenital’ on deaths certificates which meant that a disease or a condition was present at birth. Consequently, they assumed that deaths were due to overcrowding and cots too close together. They might not have reached such conclusions if they visited the nursery in a modern maternity hospital and observed the current practices with cots close together. The commission also tells us that Tuam was never overcrowded, yet the home’s high infant mortality rates triggered the whole scandal.

No competent statistician would draw inferences from crude statistics like the Irish mother and baby homes commission has done. It has long been known that hospitals that deal with high-risk individuals have higher mortality rates. An example would be the recent media reports that several of Ireland’s biggest hospitals had high mortality rates for different conditions. In 2017, the National Audit of Hospital Mortality (NAHM) found a higher mortality rate was recorded at Cork University Hospital (CUH) for ischaemic stroke than anywhere else in the country. At first glance, it might appear that if you were suffering from a stroke, CUH is the last place you would want to be. It is natural to equate high mortality statistics with poor quality care, but such an inference cannot be made from basic statistics. All statisticians and data scientists are taught how to avoid the logical fallacy of ‘false causes’ from the very beginning. Essentially, in this case, it means that one cannot use high infant mortality rates to imply poor quality health care without looking for other causes.

CUH has a specialist stroke unit, and so patients are sent to it from other hospitals and directly from the community, avoiding other hospitals. Consequently, CUH has many more patients at risk of dying from a stroke than any other hospital. That is why it has a higher mortality rate, not because the patients received poor quality treatment. A hospice is a hospital with mortality rates of close to 100 per cent. Hospitals offering palliative care have high mortality statistics than those with none. What can be inferred from these ‘appalling mortality rates?

Crude statistics are so useless an indicator that statisticians have tried to effect improvements by factoring in differences in the population and their risk of death. These called standardised mortality ratios (SMR), and ones designed explicitly for hospitals, are Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR). The intention is to try and spot hospitals where the treatments could be improved.

In a scandal that bore many striking similarities to the Irish mother and baby homes scandal, high HSMRs were spotted at the UK’s Stafford Hospital, Staffordshire, in 2009. ‘The regulator condemned “appalling” standards of care and reported there had been at least 400 more deaths than expected between 2005 and 2008.’ Patients came out of the woodwork and claimed that they had been mistreated. An enquiry was set up, ‘it heard accounts of almost unimaginable neglect – with patients left in soiled sheets, others crying out in pain and some so dehydrated they drank from flower vases.’ The team went through more than one million pages of evidence. In his report, published in February 2013, Sir Robert found there were failings from the top to the bottom of the NHS, commenting, ‘this is a story of appalling and unnecessary suffering of hundreds of people. They were failed by a system which ignored the warning signs and put corporate self-interest and cost control ahead of patients and their safety.’[1]

The British prime minister issued an apology on behalf of the government.

The whole sordid affair has been the subject of debate within science ever since. It turns out that the scientists are sure that conditions at Stafford Hospital were no worse than at other hospitals and that the statistics were pretty useless. One team of researchers stated:

Using the HSMR [hospital standardised mortality ratios] to identify ‘good/bad’ hospitals is analogous to the practice of dowsing—the search for water without scientific apparatus—it is time to abandon this screening test and search for a better one.[2]

If the standardised statistics we use today are deficient, then the reliance on raw statistics of the past to imply causes is amateurishly inept.

The evidence is clear; the commission of investigation and many mother and baby home commentators have no expertise in statistics, medical statistics, epidemiology, nursing care or in vintage medicine. Yet they take it upon themselves to make pronouncements which no expert could make.

The leader of the Irish nation, Micheál Martin, has not got the time, expertise, or the wit to know anything about statistics. Like many others, he launched a scathing and scurrilous attack on his own people based on no more than an ignorant and inept interpretation of the evidence.

Michael Martin used the word ‘we’ to include my family and relations in his outburst. I say sneer at your own family before you sneer at others. See if they like it. Open your eyes to the high infant mortality rates under your own nose, and then accuse yourself of a ‘perverse morality’ and of being ‘distressingly’ indifferent to the plight of these children.

EJ

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-50836324

[2] Mohammed, M. A., R. Lilford, G. Rudge, R. Holder, and A. Stevens. ‘The Findings of the Mid-Staffordshire Inquiry Do Not Uphold the Use of Hospital Standardized Mortality Ratios as a Screening Test for ‘Bad’Hospitals’. QJM: An International Journal of Medicine 106, no. 9 (2013): 849–54.

 

Debunked, Latest -Press Watch, MABH

The Imprisoned Mothers Myth – Does Truth Matter?

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Sinn Féin has suddenly dropped its false claims of deliberate starvation of children and women at Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes but insist that women were imprisoned at such institutions. The notion enjoys the support of at least one feminist historian who puts it more academically, Ireland built ‘a brutal carceral state’ to contain ‘unmarried mothers’. The Commission rather politely say that there is no evidence to support these allegations. Does the truth matter to feminists and others?

Dáil Éireann debate – Wednesday, 13 Jan 2021 Vol. 1003 No. 1
Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes: Statements

Deputy Kathleen Funchion (Sinn Féin)

Mother and baby homes were not homes, they were detention centres. A home is somewhere where one should feel safe, loved and protected, not a place where one is tortured, imprisoned and forced to give birth in the most appalling conditions, often without medical support or even basic pain relief. These walls hid torture, deprivation and humiliation on a colossal scale. Human rights did not exist in these centres. As a mother, daughter, sister and Irish citizen, I cannot countenance this cruelty. The cries of children and tortured mothers were ignored and trivialised by cruel nuns and others who were involved in these institutions, who ran the institutions as if they were prisons.

Not true Kathleen and not supported by evidence. Engage brain or read the report before opening mouth.

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald (Sinn Féin)

I want to conclude with the words of a good friend of mine, Joan McDermott, who was imprisoned in Bessborough for eight months. She was made to cut the grass of the grounds with scissors. Joan gave birth to a baby boy whose name is David. He was taken from her without her consent or her knowledge. She did not see him again for five long decades.

Not true Mary Lou, your friend had to apply to get in and was only there with her consent. Engage brain or read the report before opening mouth.

The commission of investigation had dismissed this myth in their final report under discussion at

8.         There is no evidence that women were forced to enter mother and baby homes by the church or State authorities.

The commission are again far too polite in their dismissal of falsehoods.

7.1       Her efforts to secure admission to a mother and baby home, and countless other stories in this chapter, call into question the widely-held opinion that women were sent to these homes against their will. Mother and baby homes were often the only shelter available to unmarried mothers

For years before, the myth had been perpetrated with one history lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Galway, claiming in 2016 that Ireland built a brutal carceral state. The article is chiefly remarkable for the elementary errors and stands as a work of pseudo-history. More details in the book.

The paragraph numbers correspond to the paragraphs in the Commission of investigation into Mother and Baby Homes Final Report

EJ

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The Single Claim of Misogyny in the Commission’s Report

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Despite newspaper reports that Ireland was once a ‘deeply misogynistic’ society, the word makes only one appearance in the commission’s report. The commission do not use the word directly, instead they quote a feminist historian, Lindsey Earner-Byrne. However, Earner-Byrne’s opinion is not justified in the context of the debate.

On page 45 the report states:

Earner-Byrne states that the Minister for Justice, James Fitzgerald Kenney, who introduced the legislation ‘presented a disturbingly misogynistic approach to welfare’, presenting the unmarried mother as ‘temptress and blackmailer’.

It is clear from the debate that James Fitzgerald Kenney was not labelling all unmarried mothers as Earner-Byrne has described. He was referring to different types of people who might take advantage of the new law as it was then proposed.

The law in question was a philogynistic attempt to help unmarried mothers to get maintenance from the putative father. It required the unmarried mother to go to court and name the father who then would be issued with a court order for maintenance of the child. A debate took place on whether it was better to hold the cases with members of the public present, or with only the press present or completely in-camera.

As would be expected when formulating new laws, various types of scenarios were imagined and thrashed out. One concern was that unscrupulous persons might use the courts to blackmail innocent men, especially if the cases were heard in public or the names of individuals were published in the press. In this scenario, a man could find himself deliberately targeted by a ‘temptress’ whose primary motivation was money. It often happened, in Ireland and abroad, that well-to-do men were often targeted in such a way, and in many cases the child was not even his.

However, the point James Fitzgerald Kenney was articulating was that he believed that when a man was wrongly charged and the case dismissed by the court, the name of his accuser should be published as deterrent against false charges and that a wrongly accused man should have his good name vindicated in public.

The parliamentary record shows that James Fitzgerald Kenney was replying to a question about amending sub-section 6 (a) of the Act, which dealt with the naming of individuals in the case. In the end, the decision was to hold courts with no members of the public present, but press reporters were permitted to attend. Accordingly, the names of the plaintiff, defendant and court officials could appear in public, but they were prevented from publishing details of the proceedings, other than if significant points of law arose.

This acceptance of another person’s opinion without any check for its validity or truthfulness is a problem persistent throughout the commission’s report and has a significant malignant effect on the on many of the report’s conclusions.

Taking the word of academic historians as gospel, also points to significant failings within Irish academic history. Scholars are too frightened of feminist historians to challenge claims, even when they might appear to be totally incorrect.

The assumption of academic inerrancy is a failure of biblical proportions, and the commission’s report is peppered with false assumptions.

 

You can read the original debate here.

https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1930-06-11/30/

EJ

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High Infant Mortality Rates are not Evidence of Abuse

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Infants in 21st century England, who are born to unmarried mothers, are 30% more likely to die than those born to married parents. The Irish think that because infant morality rates were high in mother and baby homes that children were abused and murdered. Why are the English not accusing their unmarried mothers of abuse and murder of their children through interpreting statistics the same way as the Irish? The answer is simple, a high IMR is not evidence of poor quality care.

Illegitimate infants in past times are generally considered to have been among the most vulnerable population groups: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, children born out of wedlock were around twice as likely to have died before the age of one year than those born to an official union. The illegitimate penalty decreased as overall infant mortality rates fell in the twentieth century, yet today, in the early years of the twenty-first century, illegitimate infants in England and Wales are still 30 per cent more likely to die during their first year of life than legitimate infants. Even those reported to be illegitimate but registered by both parents living at the same address are 17 per cent more likely to die in infancy.

This is not a mistake, the authors reference the UK publication ‘Health Statistics Quarterly, 2004’, which I have checked and can confirm the accuracy of the statement. If this UK statistical gathering proves anything, it is that Irish social and medical research is disconcertingly deficient and the consequences are manifest through misinformed beliefs and assertions, which are nearly always expressed with oikophobic belligerence.

EJ

Ref:

Reid, Alice, Ros Davies, Eilidh Garrett, and Andrew Blaikie. ‘Vulnerability among illegitimate children in nineteenth century Scotland’. Annales de démographie historique 111, no. 1 (2006): 89–113.