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Cruel legacy of Ireland’s mother and baby homes | Letters

Readers share their own family experiences of life in Ireland, in response to an article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s article on the enduring pain caused by the church-run mother-and-baby homes in Ireland was a powerful read, leaving me full of anger and indignation (Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes are a stain on the Catholic church – but this latest refusal to atone is a new low, 13 April). The stories resonated with me too. These “homes” played a role in the Dublin childhoods of my aunt and mother. My aunt’s experiences were heartbreaking: in the late 1960s, she was effectively imprisoned in a home for “fallen women”, her baby taken from her for adoption almost immediately after birth. It’s a loss that stayed with her for the rest of her life.My mother’s experiences reflected the general poverty and cruelty of Irish society in the late 1940s. Desperately hungry and neglected, brutalised by her brother who’d returned from the second world war with PTSD, she ran away from home and presented herself at a Magdalene laundry. Although she was subjected to a demeaning medical examination to see if she was pregnant (she wasn’t) and made to work long hours, the laundry provided her with a better standard of living than she’d hitherto known – regular meals, a bed free of vermin and, paradoxically, given the reputation of the laundries, freedom from physical violence. Her life must have been truly miserable if a laundry was preferable to her family home. Continue reading...

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