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Alternative Mother and Baby Home Report

July 14, 2021 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

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.

Debunked

Post-Truth Era Afflicts Irish Universities

June 28, 2021 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

The Post-Truth Era hit Ireland earlier than most other nations. Women’s studies at the universities provided a fertile breeding ground for false histories. In no time, the notion of the ‘misogynistic nation’ took hold and grew into a full-blown conspiracy theory. One article in particular from NUI, Galway published in 2016, provides us with the exemplar of the post-truth affliction within Irish academia as it contains nearly all the spoofs which masquerade as genuine Irish history. Troublingly, these spoofs appear to be taught to students at university, thus ensuring that new generations of history teachers will pass on such spoof, thus providing more evidence that the universities claim to be able to teach critical thinking skills continues to be rendered bogus.

Most Irish universities are busting their gut to rise in the university world rankings but try as they might, NUI, Galway’s ranking has plummeted again this year. It would plummet further down the order if the veracity of its output was included in the ranking’s assessment process. However, NUI, Galway is not the only university to be affected by post-truth menace and for students affected by poor standards, should be entitled to a return of their fees.

In the fifth chapter of the book the writings and claims of various academics are compared to the historical evidence. Here is an extract from that particular NUI, Galway article. Judge for yourself if the pursuit of objective truth is currently beyond the capability of most Irish academics.

Abuse – The Catholic cure for Poverty

I could present no more exceptional exemplar of all the maladies that infringe upon quality history writing than within the one article entitled, ‘The Catholic cure for Poverty’ written by Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley working as a history lecturer at Galway University[1]. A classic of the genre, where a highly partisan interpretation of historical events is used to promote a current agenda. To her credit, Buckley manages to wrap several agendas into one invective piece, killing many birds with as many stones to hand. The article is a left-wing supremacist attack on what she sees as the right-wing establishment; her artillery cannons are loaded with ‘straw man’ shrapnel, aiming the barrage at the Catholics, the Irish political classes and the Irish people. Named after the huffing and puffing, big bad wolf in the Three Little Pigs story, a straw man attack is where the views, actions and arguments of the opposing side are misrepresented, and these misrepresentations are then attacked. It is a recognised informal logical fallacy that aims to discredit and humiliate the opposition using tactics ranging from the exaggeration of small facts to complete fabrication of falsehoods; it is regarded as dishonesty, which serves to undermine rational debate.

That is a definition, and I am not accusing Buckley dishonesty, she is not the first author to fail to put the mother and baby homes story in its correct historical context and is merely repeating the fallacies of other writers without checking their veracity. While her agenda clearly shows elements of Marxist socialist, feminist and anti-Catholic tendencies, she lets the sisterhood down by failing to credit the various women’s movements for their input and considerable influence on the moral and social hygiene movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Failure to recognise women’s achievements is an all-too-common feature of extreme feminism, which prefers to resort to false historical self-victimisation to both support their raison d’etre and promote self-notoriety. All built on a ton and a half of falsehoods. In this section, I will get through some of the claims made in Buckley’s article and I will do the job of a historian and place these claimed events and arguments in their historical context. I am sure that I will be attacked, and stand accused of promoting my own agenda, but at least I fully inform my readers of all the issues surrounding these historical events, even if they oppose whatever agenda I may stand accused of promoting. Readers of history are entitled to be permitted to formulate an informed opinion rather than have it manipulated through cherry-picking small bits of information, filtered through present-day understandings and misunderstandings. Accordingly, I have gone back to the original documents, which historians refer to as primary sources, have included the relevant extracts below so that my readers can judge for themselves whether or not the history is based thereupon has been subjected to impartial interpretation.

As one author builds the mistakes of another, adding embellishment on top embellishment without dissent, myths grow into those of epic proportions that incrementally creep further away from the grain of truth towards having no basis in reality, thus becoming complete conjectures.

Carrigan Report Myths

One of the common myths that have emerged in recent years goes under the title ‘the suppression of the Carrigan Report’. In reality, the Carrigan report’s findings were not suppressed and incorporated into law through the Public Dance Halls Act 1935 and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, which raised the age of consent and banned contraception. If Dr Buckley read the report, it states that it was never intended to be made public. The myth arises because of a memo sent to the cabinet on October 27th, 1932 from the Minister of Justice, James Geoghegan TD, which was severely critical of the report and insisting that it was too one-sided. He was right, the report was one-sided, even for the mentality of the 1920s, blaming motorcars, cinema and dance halls for the rise in illegitimate births. Highly selective extracts from the report have over recent decades, provided the propagandists with fertile soil from which to propagate all sorts of fallacies. Even where the report provides no soil, the fallacies still manage to grow but in keeping with the laws of nature, can only grow with the application of more manure.

Buckley writes, ‘the Carrigan Report revealed abuse was rampant in Irish institutions.’[2] Nowhere in the Carrigan Report does it say any such thing. It is a blatant falsehood or a mistake of monumental proportions due to her qualifications in academic history. We all can make mistakes and a single elementary failure to look up a document, which she herself has hyperlinked in her article, might be forgivable but for the plethora of other historical falsehoods and misinformation peppered throughout her invective article. [3] Published several years ago in May 2016, the article has remained uncorrected since then, and no erratum has been prefaced to the online article to date. It reveals that Dr Buckley remains unaware of the mistakes and that the article has not been subject to competent peer review until now.

Dr Buckley mistakenly claims that the Carrigan committee’s report dates from 1935, in reality, it delivered its findings on August 20th, 1931, and its report was circulated to members of the Cabinet on December 2nd, 1931. The report offers an essential insight into the mentality and the concerns of the élite and middle classes regarding the specific problem of protecting girls and women in 1920s, not just in Ireland but also worldwide as evinced through this statement contained within the report.

The Secretariat of the League of Nations, at the instance of the Department of External Affairs, supplied us with official publications and a summary of the legislation in different countries on subjects pertinent to our investigation. The Secretariat also prepared for us a special Memorandum, drawn up by one of its members, Dr Max Habicht, comparing the provisions of Stead’s Act [the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885][4] with existing international conventions having for their purpose the protection of women and children.[5]

Note: the primary purpose for establishing the Carrigan Commission was ‘the protection of women and children’. Note also, a fundamental of clurichaun syndrome requires that Ireland be treated in isolation from all other countries, thereby falsely promoting the notion that Irish find solutions to Irish problems without reference to the international context. Moreover, when comparisons are made, they tend to be with Britain rather than another country similar to Ireland, which faced similar social problems. In the period under study, Britain was the richest country in the world and Ireland one of the poorest with just over half the GDP per capita of Britain. In light of such, hardly any comparison to Britain concerning efforts in mitigation of poverty is valid. Research validity requires academics to be able to work outside the Anglophone, and that seems to be well beyond the capability of most social historians and sociologists working Irish academia. Note again, however, in the above extract; the committee was concerned to look at what is now called best practice in other countries for the protection of women and children. However, Buckley states that ‘the Carrigan committee was tasked with investigating the ‘moral state’ of the country.’[6] The Carrigan report again, begs to differ.

Under the terms of our Reference we had to consider the secular aspect of social morality which it is the concern of the State to conserve and safeguard for the protection and well-being of its citizens. We looked upon it as our duty in the first place to collect sufficient information from such authentic sources as would enable us to determine whether the standard of social morality is at present exposed to evils, which the existing laws of the Saorstát [Free State], for the suppression and prevention of public vice, are inadequate to check and should they be in our opinion inadequate, to proceed, in the next place, to consider how best they can be made effectual and to recommend [changes to the law] [7]

Interpreting ‘social morality’ as the ‘morality of the country’ is an easy mistake to make, but anyone who reads the report will see that it was primarily concerned with the protection of women and girls from sexual predators, to analyse the dangers faced and recommend action. The report was not in the modern sense moralising nor accusing women of immoral behaviour. If anything, the report authors can be accused of it is philogyny (opposite of misogyny) and misandry (prejudice against men). Only one small section of the report mentions the need to protect boys who were as we know today just as much if not more in danger than girls from sexual predators.

Buckley’s claim that ‘the Carrigan Report revealed abuse was rampant in Irish institutions’ is not only not supported by any statement in the report but is directly contradicted. The report is full of praise for intuitions like industrial schools and even calls for the establishment of penal borstal intuitions, which were already imposed on boys, to be extended to girls.

For girl offenders between 16 and 21 years of age we recommend the adoption of the proposals favoured by the majority of the witnesses, who were examined by us on the subject. They appeared to us sound and practical and can be given legal effect without difficulty by the application, with suitable adaptations, of Part 1. (Reformation of Young Offenders) of the Prevention of Crime Act, 1908, under which the Borstal system was established, which on the whole has proved satisfactory for dealing with male offenders between these ages.

At present, in the numerous cases of girl offenders, which would be most judiciously disposed of by sentences of detention under the Borstal system, if it were available… [8]

As for the ‘Catholic cure for poverty,’ the cure is striking secular in the Carrigan Report:

In explanation of the numerous cases of outrages upon young females, the Commissioner pointed to the fact to which attention was directed by other witnesses, that in this country the children of the poorer classes are less protected than in Great Britain. In Dublin the necessity in the case of many families living in tenements, for the parents, both father and mother, to leave the children to look after themselves in the day time while they themselves went out to earn their livelihood, was a constant source of danger. In rural districts girls of 14 years are sent out to service, which deprives them of the protection they had with their parents.[9]

The report expressly states that children are left on their own or forced to work as servants, depriving them of parental protection due to poverty. The mother and baby homes commission confirmed that most of the women in the homes were previously employed as domestic servants. The landlord classes (both Irish and Anglo Irish) have been abusing young girls and boys for centuries, but it seems to have escaped the attention of Buckley et al. Also escaping attention is the role which women, and in particular women doctors played in analysing the problem of unmarried mothers and how to protect them and children from venereal disease. The Carrigan Commission was keen to seek out the opinion of knowledgeable women and report it accordingly.

The period of 16 to 19 years of age is regarded as the dangerous age for girls, being the period when they are most susceptible emotionally and least capable of self-control. In a pamphlet issued by the [British ] National social Purity Crusade, of which the author is Miss Helen Wilson, a prominent member of the Association for Moral and social Hygiene and an advocate for raising the age of protection for girls in England to 18 years, at least, figures are given showing that in the examined cases of 401 women, who were professional prostitutes, 231 had first lapsed between 16 and 19 years of age and of 317 similar cases 194 had become prostitutes between these years. The Poor Law Commission of 1927 reported (clause 259) that mothers of firstborn illegitimate children, who seek relief in this country, are commonly between 17 and 21 years of age and it recommended that the age of consent should be raised to at least 18, if not 19 years.

We concur and would add that the necessity for the better protection of girls has become more acute since the Report of the Poor Law Commission was published. We accordingly recommend that it shall be an offence to have carnal knowledge of a girl under 18 years of age.[10]

Language and the connotations associated with certain words has changed over the decades, and if such a passage were written in the same language as today, it would be sternly rebuked, and the authors would have probably gotten George Hooked. The snowflake generation is particularly sensitive to certain words’ connotations as they have grown up in an environment of political correctness and sometimes, to borrow a tired old expression, political correctness gone mad. However, snowflaky connotations are anachronisms and can have no place in history, but this ignorance has many harmful consequences. A case in point was that of the elderly Irish radio presenter, George Hook, who, perhaps ham-fistedly but with avuncular intent, proffered advice to women about not putting themselves in danger of sexual attack. He was hysterically accused of victim-blaming and ended up being hounded out of his job. Many of us, men included, have developed strategies to avoid situations, potentially putting us in danger. There are certain streets, specific venues that I would not visit alone or even venture near, late at night. I would also advise my daughters and wife on avoiding putting themselves in danger and any stranger I think might be in danger. Not only that, I would do the same for my son and my male friends too, but I will also put their safety before the hypersensitivities of the snowflakes and make no apologies for doing so.

Interpreting historical documents like the Carrigan Report is where the role of the historian assumes its primary importance, translating such documents into today’s parlance so that they can be easily understood by the people of the present, including the snowflakes. The commission was not casting a slur on girls of 16 to 19 years of age it is an observation written in the archaic language of the 1920s where the connotations on such words as illegitimate, ignorant, morality, purity did not carry the attached extra emotional meanings of today. The next extract is illustrative of that when it refers to ‘ignorant girls’. Ignorance would be replaced with the phrase innocent and naïve in similar reports of today, and that was what was meant, not thick or stupid.

Reason : The evidence satisfied us that the uncontrolled freedom the promiscuous entertainments in which town and country girls are now in the habit of participating, such as Dance Halls, Picture Houses and ‘joy’ drives in motor vehicles, are designedly resorted to ‘and availed of by male prowlers’ as they were described, to bring ignorant ‘girls to ruin’; and to render them easier prey, intoxicants, as well as drugged drinks, not infrequently are given to them.[11]

Without knowledge of the past, any person attempting to read through historical documents can easily make mistakes by doing what comes naturally, filtering information through the prism of current understandings.

The contributors to the Carrigan Report and others in similar reports during the Free State period did not see poverty as a moral failing as Dr Buckley implies, nor were they advocating a Catholic cure for poverty. Such an allegation is untrue especially because the Anglican Church also stands accused of ‘slaughtering’ poor babies. Accordingly, would Buckley’s article not be better retitled, the Christian cure for poverty?

Extract from: Jordan, Eugene. The Irish Attack on Christianity – The Case for the Defence. Tafannóir Press, 2021. Available here

Endnotes

[1]   Buckley, The Catholic Cure for Poverty.
[2] Ibid.
[3]   A hyper-link is highlighted text within an electronic document when clicked brings readers to another (linked) web-page.
[4]   Book (eISB), Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes. [14th August 1885.].
[5]   Knitter, ‘Days In The Life’.
[6]   Buckley, The Catholic Cure for Poverty.
[7]   Knitter, ‘Days In The Life’.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.

References

Book (eISB), electronic Irish Statute. Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes. [14th August 1885.]. Accessed 19 December 2019. http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1885/act/69/enacted/en/print.

Buckley, Sarah-Anne. The Catholic Cure for Poverty. Jacobin, 2016. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/catholic-church-ireland-magdalene-laundries-mother-baby-homes

Knitter, The. ‘Days In The Life: The Full Carrigan Report’. Days In The Life (blog), 24 June 2005. http://the-knitter.blogspot.com/2005/06/full-carrigan-report_24.html.

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Critical Thinking Skills Absent at Galway University

March 12, 2021 Eugene Jordan Leave a comment

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.

A typical meeting of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

False History