We mightn’t be perfect now but we’re a lot better than we were

“So, what in the world's come over you?

What in heavens name have you done?”

The opening two lines from the chorus of the John Prine song ‘Speed of the Sound of Loneliness’ probably best remembered for the Nanci Griffiths recording around 1993, but as I get older it’s a line that often resonates with me in the context of the Ireland we transitioned into after our hard-fought battle for independence against the ‘Auld Enemy’.

A few years back, I remember watching a most informative but disturbing film ‘Pray for Our Sinners’, a story told by Navan film-maker Sinéad O’Shea about her home town and the shocking treatment that women had to endure if they were single and got pregnant, not just back in the darker days 1930s, ‘40s  or ‘50s but through a lot of our latter decades as well.

The film had kind of gone out of my head until on a quieter night of The Races last week in ‘The Local’ when, on a repeat showing, I found it hard to takes my eyes off the television on a night when the general chat was about losing dead certs that evening at Ballybrit and the hope of unearthing a winner for The Hurdle.

Years back, I remember listening to tales from an uncle of mine, which I often took with a pinch of salt, of people of very sound mind being incarcerated for the rest of their lives in St. Brigid’s Psychiatric Hospital in Ballinasloe, always referring to it as ‘The Mental’, while he would also recount the odd tale of women here and there who got ‘pregnant out of wedlock’. He’d recall that some of them were never seen again either after getting work in ‘the laundry’ or ‘taking the boat to England’ but little did I realise at the time, that this was just the tip of one gigantic iceberg.

Thanks, mainly to the work of one Catherine Corless, the countless tragic death of babies – and some mothers too – at the home in Tuam, ran by the Bon Secours Sisters, has been documented and will now be a sad, but very important, chapter in the history not only of Tuam and North Galway, but the entire country as well. To think that around 800 babies lie buried and unaccounted for in unmarked graves or chambers on the old workhouse site is . . . well, unconscionable.

How, as a people, we got so entrapped with warped views on sexuality and intimacy, is kind of beyond comprehension. Pregnancy, motherhood and the young being babies being loved by the women who have brought them onto this earth is of course the most natural thing in the world but in our independent new Ireland, any single female who found herself pregnant, faced into a real Hell on earth. There really were no escape routes but the complicity and direct involvement of the Church and clergy in the ostracization of those unfortunate women, was worse than shocking . . . inhumane, unchristian and at times pure evil.

Pictured: Tuam’s ‘house of horrors’ for mothers and babies from 1925 to 1961.