Patriarchy Theocracy and Tragedy: the Dark Shadow of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes
Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report: a mirror held up to the power of dominance, socialised diffidence and our own need to ‘de-link’ and connect.
On the 5 February 1984, people across Ireland – and throughout that worldly ‘other’ Ireland – the diaspora of millions living in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff, New York, and right across the mapped circuit of the globe – read of the death of 15 year old Ann Lovett, and of her not-even-moments born, baby son, in Granard, County Longford, under the shade of a grotto shrine, like so many in Ireland, dedicated to Mary, both mother of God, and virgin; known to many Irish, in a kind of intimate-distancing, as ‘Our Lady’. I recall my own 15-year-old self, reading the story in the pages of the