The Catholic Church is often held up as the primary culprit, but it is not the only guilty party in this story. It acted in partnership with the state and elites, creating an institutional nexus that rejected social-democratic solutions to poverty and pushed back against women’s liberation. Instead, the effects of poverty became transformed into moral issues to be solved by institutionalization — a process that undergirded Ireland’s carceral state and profoundly impacted the treatment of women and children in the country. [...]
Yet many of the hopes of this period were dashed. Politically, socially, and economically, the 1920s and ’30s were full of setbacks: censorship was introduced, legal divorce was abolished, women were banned from sitting on juries, the civil service marriage bar was introduced along with quotas for women working in industry, and contraceptives were banned. The radical women of the revolution — like many of their male counterparts — disappeared from public life or were silenced. [...]
Their children were usually adopted illegally from the homes, and as historian Michael Dwyer has demonstrated, some babies were even used for medical testing by universities and pharmaceutical companies. One company, Wellcome, conducted vaccine trials from 1930 to 1977 in children’s institutions in Dublin, Cork, and Tipperary that were sanctioned and overseen by state-salaried medical officers and academics.
Women’s supposed “immorality” was a welcome red herring, distracting from the realities of poverty, unemployment, poor housing, and high infant mortality. In debates on the state provision of a social safety net, women were depicted as “blackmailers” and “temptresses,” and while the married mother was revered in popular culture, the unwed mother was deemed “illegitimate.” Oliver St John Gogarty summed up the situation well in 1928, declaring to the senate: “it is high time that the people of this country find some other way of loving God than by hating women.” [...]
The unwillingness to recognize the central role of class, poverty, and sexism in policing Irish families obscures the connection of past abuses to present ones. The state’s relationship to Ireland’s Travelling community is illustrative. Here again the extraordinary poverty of Travellers has been cast as a cultural and moral issue — eliding the need for state social services, jobs programs, and anti-discriminatory legislation.
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