Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman in the Dáil yesterday

This morning.

Ahead of a vote in the Dáil later on a Social Democrat motion to extend the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation by 12 months…

…an open letter to TDs from Tuam campaigner Breed Murphy:

They told us they couldn’t find anything; that there is no trace of the mother. Imagine reaching your eighty-eighth year and not knowing who you are? Or when your grandchild looks into your eyes and says “Grandad tell me about your mammy” as they often do when they experience unconditional love and presume that Grandad’s experience was just like theirs.

Imagine that is your child asking your father to recall what he cannot.

Our State has done that to our people. Time and again we have failed survivors of Ireland’s institutions. It is the eleventh hour and you can change that. Power is invested in you, each one of you because you too are social justice advocates just like me.

Over six years ago I began working full time, on a voluntary basis as a post-graduate student with experience of three different disciplines, on the issues related to Mother and Baby Homes. I attended the very first meeting in Galway in 2015 where I met with survivors; shy, reserved yet resilient people they came together to begin the process of discovery. A process that is ongoing.

I had met people just like them on the streets of Camden and Cricklewood where I conducted research for my thesis on the ‘Forgotten Irish’ in 2009. I found, to my dismay, Ireland had neglected them not just in their now latter years but in their childhood where in the Institutions they were housed, survival of the fittest against many odds where abuse and neglect as discovered in the Ryan report was “systemic, endemic, arbitrary, excessive, chronic and pervasive.

The most recent publication of our dark chapter in the Commission’s report dilutes survivor testimonies to the point where they are not recognised as the truth-teller, the witness, the whistle-blower. We are told the institutions provided a ‘refuge’ which translates as a place of safety or shelter. Testimonies from survivors tell us otherwise.

The Commission found that there was very little evidence that children were forcibly taken from their mothers and while it accepts mothers did not have any other option it says is not the same as ‘forced adoption’.

One has to ask the question how much evidence is enough?

Surely if one or ten or a hundred say they were not allowed care for their own child, it is enough. One translates to two lives ruined and an aftermath of intergenerational trauma to a wider circle.

Again, in relation to adoption the Commission reports women who claimed their consent was not full, free or informed are reminded that it may not be their view at the time of the adoption. Because the Commission is looking for hard evidence but admits evidence is thin on the ground.

Like the story of Jackie Foley who was forced to sign a fictitious name when aged 15 on the adoption of her baby. Or the case of Tressa Reeves and her son Patrick Farrell who settled their case in 2018 against the State some fifty seven years after his illegal adoption. Evidence is there – sometimes staring in the face. Then to cap it all, those same survivors are told their evidence is contaminated.

I honestly do not have words for this injustice though it is a continuum through decades, nothing historic about it. You have the opportunity to change the narrative in favour of survivors.

It takes courage and conviction but not nearly as much courage as it has taken for survivors to trust the system, step up to the mark and pour out their innermost fast held secrets because they, like me, felt you would believe them.

Please on behalf of the many people who were trafficked as early as 1926 in the case of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, from one institution to another; some spending formative years in two, three institutions or boarded out or picked by an American couple, please remember them in these dying days of the Commission.

Because they are not alone in Tuam, or Dunboyne or Roscrea or Kilrush or Newtowncunningham – they are scattered far and wide, throughout the globe and the length and breadth of our country, in your parish and mine.

They deserve equal recognition for what they endured and an answer as to how a report that places them central to the process lulling them to a false sense of security only denies them again.

On Tuesday, we spoke for some twenty minutes on a podcast with Deputy Jennifer Whitmore who put forward the motion. We are grateful to her and those of you who stood in the Dail to advocate today and on other occasions in both houses. Because as ever, when we do not acknowledge past failings we are bound to repeat them. We are doing so today.

Please do not let this be your legacy, that you stood on the wrong side in history. Lest that day comes when your grandchild sits on your lap and says “Gran(dad or ma), tell me what you did in Dáil Eireann”. Let your response be “there was a time when we treated women and little children badly and I stood up for them”.

Stand with us, for truth, for justice, for recognition and most of all for accountability.

Kind Regards,

Breeda Murphy

Activist on Mother and Baby Homes.

Yesterday: Time Is Not On Our Side

Darina Allen

This morning.

Chef Darina Allen has defended running cookery classes during lockdown for a group of international students at Ballymaloe Cookery School in east Cork.

Via The Irish Examiner:

The students, who had booked residential places on Ballymaloe’s almost €13,000, 12-week Certificate Course, which was due to start on January 4, flew into Ireland in late December for two weeks of quarantine.

But they were left in limbo when Taoiseach Micheál Martin announced a full level 5 lockdown on December 30, which came into effect the following day. The students were offered the opportunity to join the ‘Ballymaloe Bubble’ after their 14-day quarantine.

Ms Allen said when lockdown was extended at the end of January — by which point the students had been in the country for about five weeks — the school cancelled the 12-week course and decided to offer them a modified course.

Ms Allen claimed Ballymaloe is different to third-level institutions given its residential setting…

Fight!

Darina defends Ballymaloe over lockdown cookery classes (irish Examiner)

Getty

This morning.

Eugene Street, Dublin 8.

Members of the Gardai and the Garda Technical Bureau at the scene of a shooting which occurred last night around 11pm.

The 17-year-old victim is understood to have been getting into a taxi when a number of gunmen approached and fired five or six shots at him. He was hit a number of times in the upper body, including the neck area. He has been taken St James Hospital to be treated for serious injuries.

Leah Farrell/RollingNews

Behold: a spectacular view from the Hubble Space Telescope of nearby spiral galaxy M66. Open for business if you don’t mind the journey. To wit:

A spiral galaxy with a small central bar, M66 is a member of the Leo Galaxy Triplet, a group of three galaxies about 30 million light years from us. The Leo Triplet is a popular target for relatively small telescopes, in part because M66 and its galactic companions M65 and NGC 3628 all appear separated by about the angular width of a full moon. The featured image of M66 was taken by Hubble to help investigate the connection between star formation and molecular gas clouds. Clearly visible are bright blue stars, pink ionized hydrogen clouds — sprinkled all along the outer spiral arms, and dark dust lanes in which more star formation could be hiding.

(Image: NASA, ESA, Hubble, Janice Lee; Processing & Copyright: Leo Shatz; Text: Karen Masters)

apod

Dan Boyle

If you’re explaining you’re losing, so the political maxim goes. Government too often resorts to a failure to communicate effectively as being a reason for policies not succeeding.

To be criticised and to be open to criticism should be at a core of any democratic system. For the most part criticism is necessary, appropriate and is vital in bringing about accountability.

For the achievement of the best levels of accountability surely being able to critique criticism should also be part of the process.

Not to question motivation. It should always be assumed that criticism is levelled by those equally concerned in bringing about the best outcomes.

But where criticism can and should itself be criticised is on its quality. Is it informed? Is it consistent? Is it within context? Does it compare like with like?

Criticism, especially uncritical criticism (an intentional oxymoron) tends to get unquestionably accepted when a narrative gets created that those being criticised are so irredeemably flawed, that every criticism must be justified.

This is often achieved by fixating on singular aspects of wider, far more complex situations. We long for easy solutions. Such solutions are especially tempting at times of maximum frustration.

Often when we talk about communication failures what is being referred to is the inability to say what is wanted to be heard.

We all want it every way. We want progress to be achieved quickly but cautiously. We want bold action but reserve the right to say I told you so when the bold becomes seen as rash.

Those whose role it is to criticise, an important and vital role, carry a huge advantage in that their criticisms are rarely subject to the same degree of scrutiny of those they challenge.

This partially compensates for not having the same access to up to date information that who they criticise, and who they must criticise, hold.

The experience is that when those who criticise propose and do so in a grossly mistaken way, such errors are soon forgotten allowing for completely diametrical positions to be later taken.

For those criticised errors become accumulative.

The use of language is what is most important in the critical environment. There is a need for precision in the use of words, in what gets explained and how.

When questions get asked and how will elicit different responses. Such responses become conflated because the phraseology gets deemed to be incorrect.

To put it another way no wonder we have developed a system of politics where whatever you say nothing predominates. This is because, often, whenever something is said it then becomes creatively interpreted.

I suspect that when writing this I will be accused of ghosting about some issue du jour, be that management of COVID; trade agreements like CETA; or the handling of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission.

I’m not at least not specifically, but in general I am. These and any other issue we subject to critical analysis, as we should.

It isn’t the case of not being able to take the heat. Every issue needs to be tempered. If I’m arguing anything here it is that there should be a responsibility for intellectual honesty on both sides of every issue.

This is what is critical.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

A UK NHS boss has warned stars like Gwyneth Paltrow (above) of their “duty of responsibility” when talking about Covid treatments

The blog of a Hollywood star
Touts Covid solutions that are
Unlikely to work
And thus certain to irk
Doctors, who call them bizarre

John Moynes

Broadsheet.ie