Caelainn Hogan: On the social impacts of mother-baby homes

Caelainn Hogan has worked in places like Nigeria and the Middle East, and written for Vice and The New York Times. In 2017, she began having extensive conversations with people who had been confined to mother-and-baby homes and laundries, and realised that the dark legacy from these systems was very much alive.

“As soon as I started talking to people, it became clear how recent all this was,” says the Dublin-born Hogan. “I realised that everyone had a story from these institutions. Everyone had been affected in some way. I knew of the Laundries and the mother-baby homes, but I still had a lot of questions. There’s been incredible work done by journalists and researchers and survivors. But there’s still people who aren’t aware of how ongoing this legacy is.”

At the start of the book, Caelainn writes that moral judgement about what happened during this period of Irish history is the “easy part”. The hard part is getting into the mindset of the people who created and operated these institutions, as well as the people who supported them.

“I wanted to understand how this can happen,” she says. “There are a lot of parallels today in the way we institutionalise vulnerable people in systems like direct provision and emergency accommodation. So I think it’s important to understand how ordinary people became complicit in this. This was a system that operated from roughly the ’20s to the ’90s – one institution was open until 2006 – and no one had a gun put to their heads. So it was about asking, ‘How was this allowed to go on?’ How did a system like this, which treated women as offenders for being pregnant outside of marriage, become so normalised. People often said to me, ‘It was the times we lived in’. But what does that mean? This went on for decades and people were responsible for it – it wasn’t just a case of it being ‘the times’.”

One of the youngest people Caelainn spoke to was Barq singer Jess Kavanagh, whose mother was born in a mother-and-baby home.

“Her mother was born in Castlepollard,” says Caelainn. “We only found that out together when we investigated. This was part of the generational thing – even if you weren’t born in these institutions, your life might in some ways have been affected.”

One of the effects has to do with its serious impact on people’s mental health. What happens in society can – especially if the State colludes in the oppression of its citizens – lead to deeply-rooted anxiety and depression.

“It still is affecting wider society in Ireland,” she adds. “Almost every woman I spoke to who’d given birth in an institution – they told me they never stopped thinking about their child. It never left them. That pain, carrying that silence, the weight of that and how it remains with you, was something that I didn’t fully understand until I started doing this.”

There is a tendency to dismiss all this as the past, or to allow headlines and figures (the 800 babies found in a septic tank in Tuam) to be the story. But Caelainn’s book brings real people to the fore.

“There’s still a living history here,” she explains. “A lot of people who’ve spoken about Tuam were born there. I met a woman who’d given birth in Tuam twice, was sent to the Laundries, and was described as a ‘penitent’ just for having children. It was really important to share her experience.”

That the stranglehold exerted by Catholicism and by religion in general, was bad for the mental health of the nation seems indisputable. The book includes interviews with members of religious orders. But far too often Caelainn was met with silence.

“The individual religious sisters that I spoke with really did want to share their perspectives,” Caelainn argues. “We’re told that the people who worked in these institutions are mostly dead and gone. Yet I was able to find a midwife who worked in the biggest mother-baby home in Ireland and talk to her. But on an institutional level, there’s still a culture of silence.

I reached out to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in England and was initially given a list of names of sisters who were still alive and I could speak to. But very soon, I was told that they had spoken with their lawyer and the conversation very quickly shut down. So it’s not that there aren’t people who can give answers, it’s that there’s an ongoing silence.”

In a particularly poignant section, various survivors and members of the religious orders try to rationalise the abject cruelty of burying the Tuam children in an unmarked sewage tank. Theories include: money-saving; the fact that the children hadn’t been baptised and therefore their remains didn’t matter; and the optics of having hundreds of marked graves outside a home. But Caelainn offers the starkest theory – that those who were viewed as stained by sexual sin occupied a moral category all their own. Neither they nor their children were entitled to a proper burial. The general point being that sexually active women, for the Church, were beyond the pale.

“I had to think about that a lot,” Caelainn says. “Women being pregnant outside of marriage was proof that they’d had sex outside of marriage, which was a challenge to the authority of the Church. And so, confining these women and concealing that reality was a way to maintain their authority, even it meant concealing the reality of their children as well. But what option did it leave? There was Church opposition to contraception and there was no educating people about pregnancy, so there was very little that women could do to protect themselves.”

In June 2018, over 200 women who had previously been in Magdalene laundries were invited to a reception at Áras an Uachtaráin, where President Michael D. Higgins formally apologised for their treatement. Seeing that, does Caelainn think, ‘Ireland has changed’?

“There’s still a lot that we need to do to provide answers for survivors,” she replies. “Our current legislation is denying people the right to information. Also, many people are only beginning to search for answers, because the silence of stigma lasted for so long. We need to listen to survivors and what they need. I think a lot of people hear these stories and think, ‘What can I do?’ Well, there’s still legislation affecting people’s lives today. Survivors have asked for the government to provide DNA testing, so that people can try and find their relatives or identify where they’re buried. We need to help these people find their answers.”

It’ll take a long time to heal the psychic wounds – but that, at least, would be a start.

Republic Of Shame is out now, published by Penguin Ireland.