We were not all at it . Not everyone let babies die cruelly in mother and child homes . Just as we were not all responsible for the reckless behaviour that later broke banks and cost Ireland billions. Blaming society in general is a means of avoiding accountability.
It is wrong for the official report on mother and child homes to claim that responsibility for harsh treatment meted out to single mothers and babies rests mainly with the fathers of the children and their own immediate families . To add simply that institutions of the State and church supported , contributed to or condoned that treatment is a cop-out.
It s certainly a long distance link, but the hit TV series The Crown offers a clue to some of the many agonies caused by our mother and baby homes tragedy.
Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease that ravaged Ireland at the beginning of this century.
Tuberculosis used to kill more than 10,000 people per year in Dublin alone. There was a stigma around getting tuberculosis in those days and it was known as a “poor person’s disease.”
Even though the disease did not just affect the poor, lack of sanitation, overcrowded conditions, poor food-hygiene and the widespread practice of spitting in the street enabled it to spread like wildfire throughout the population.
The coughing followed by bright-red blood on a handkerchief was the classic sign that someone had contracted the deadly disease.
Image: RollingNews.ie
DR NOËL BROWNE, a controversial and complex politician in Irish history, is without a memorial in Dublin – something councillor Pat Dunne wants to change.
“I was alerted by a couple of constituents coming from different perspectives who were surprised that there’s no public memorial for Noël Browne in the city,” the Independents4Change councillor recently told
TheJournal.ie.
“When I did a bit of research I found out that Noël Browne was born in Waterford and there is a memorial garden for him there, but apart from that I could see nothing else,” said Dunne.
And the vaccine is a planet-saving enterprise. Godspeed to all who guide it.
John Williams
As we start road to recovery, it’s worth taking a look back
It is timely, as we enter a new year and hopefully a healthy era, to consider the life-saving value of vaccines.
The history of the eradication of TB from Ireland’s recent past is most relevant as a template for the crucial part played by inoculation.
Since the late 19th century, 750,000 people died in Ireland from tuberculosis right up to and including the 1950s.
Medical archives tell us this was due to poor housing/malnutrition, and general rudimentary health treatments for those times.