Opinion
No country for young men or women either
Country Living with Francis Farragher
There was a glorious summer’s evening last week after the silage was cut and the cows were looked at in the callow field when I strolled through one of those sites that are dotted around the Irish country – a small plot of risen ground pickled with flat stones and now home to a majestic ash tree.
This Lisheen, known in some places as a Lios or a Cillíní, was according to my father a place where many, many infants were buried from the 1800s and well into the 1900s as well.
It was a course a reflection of the high infant mortality rate in Ireland and while this situation did improve somewhat as the State began to grow through the mid-20th century, the change was only marginal.
Due to the work of local Tuam historian, Catherine Corless, the issue has featured in newspapers and TV stations all over the world, with her chronicling of the deaths of 796 children at the home ran by the Bon Secours nuns from 1925 to 1961.
The location of a septic tank in close proximity to the site on Tuam’s Dublin Road of course was ‘into the barrow’ of headline writers with the image being conveyed of the infants and children being buried indiscriminately in a most inappropriate place.
The septic tank, and indeed the houses that straddle Dublin Road and the Athenry Road on the site of the burial ground, have no real relevance but overall the sheer scale of infant and children deaths was reflective of what was going on in Ireland at the time.
In many ways, Ireland wasn’t a very nice place to live or grow up in during our first half century of independence, especially if any individual was unfortunate enough to ‘stray outside the Pale’ in terms of their so called moral standards.
Unmarried mothers or people with mental health problems were at particular risk of, at best, social isolation and at worst, incarceration at institutions that could have been taken straight from Dickensian times.
Catherine Corless’s work in detailing the records of those buried at the Tuam site was assiduous and dignified but she must have grimaced many times when the national and international press got their hands on the story.
The image of children’s being dumped in a septic tank was conveyed in many of the stories, but the truth is that across Ireland in a large middle chunk of the 20th century, thousands of infants and young children died due to now entirely curable ailments such as TB, measles, flu, bronchitis and meningitis.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.