O'Donnell Redress: Ireland's Institutions and Transitional Justice

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7390863-5-0
Verlag: UCD Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

How will Ireland redress its legacy of institutional abuse? What constitutes justice? What is Transitional Justice? How might democracy evolve if survivors' experiences and expertise were allowed to lead the response to a century of gender- and family separation-based abuses? REDRESS: Ireland's Institutions and Transitional Justice seeks the answers. This collection explores the ways in which Ireland - North and South - treats those who suffered in Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes, industrial and reformatory schools, and in a closed and secretive adoption system, over the last 100 years. The essays focus on the structures which perpetuated widespread and systematic abuses in the past and consider how political arrangements continue to exert power over survivors, adopted people and generations of relatives, as well as controlling the remains and memorialisation of the dead. As we mark the centenary of both jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, REDRESS: Ireland's Institutions and Transitional Justice forensically examines the two states' so-called 'redress' schemes and investigations, and the statements of apology that accompanied them. With diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection considers how a Transitional Justice-based, survivor-centred, approach might assist those personally affected, policy makers, the public, and academics to evaluate the complex ways in which both the Republic and Northern Ireland (and other states in a comparative context) have responded to their histories of institutionalisation and family separation. Importantly, the essays collected in REDRESS: Ireland's Institutions and Transitional Justice seek to offer avenues by which to redress this legacy of continuing harms. The Editors are donating all royalties in the name of survivors and all those affected by Ireland's carceral institutions and family separation to the charity Empowering People in Care (EPIC).

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Donnell, Katherine

Leseproben

One Testimony
Mary Harney, Mari Steed, Caitríona Palmer, Terri Harrison, Rosemary Adaser, Conrad Bryan, Susan Lohan and Connie Roberts1 What follows are excerpts from a public roundtable discussion among individuals with experience of Ireland’s institutional and gender-based abuses and moderator James M. Smith at the international conference entitled Towards Transitional Justice: Recognition, Truth-Telling and Institutional Abuse in Ireland, held on 2 November 2018 at Boston College.2 All of the discussants have previously written and spoken publicly about their experiences, and all have provided the editors with their consent to publish their contributions to the roundtable. The participants were Mary Harney, Maine resident and civil-rights activist, painter and educator; Mari Steed, Virginia resident, co-founder of Adoption Rights Alliance and executive committee member of Justice for Magdalenes Research (JFMR); Caitríona Palmer, Washington, DC, resident, journalist and author; Terri Harrison, Dublin resident, musician and community organiser; Rosemary Adaser, London resident, activist and founder and CEO of the Association of Mixed Race Irish (AMRI); Conrad Bryan, London resident, activist and member of the AMRI; Susan Lohan, Dublin resident and co-founder of Adoption Rights Alliance; and Connie Roberts, New York resident, poet and lecturer at Hofstra University. Terri, Rosemary, Conrad, Mary and Susan were, at the time of the conference, members of the Collaborative Forum for Former Residents of Mother and Baby Homes and Related Institutions established by Ireland’s Department of Children and Youth Affairs in 2018. The Government published the Collaborative Forum’s summary recommendations on 16 April 2019, although it declined to publish the forum’s report in full. Readers will note references to the Collaborative Forum in the text below. The audience for this discussion included not just the conference participants and attendees but also survivors and other members of the public who watched via live stream on the FJMR Facebook group page and engaged in their own conversation in response over Facebook and Twitter. I. Mary Harney
My name is Mary Harney. I am the proud daughter of Margaret ‘Peggy’ Harney. I was born in Bessborough in 1949. My mother and I stayed together in the Mother and Baby Home for two and a half years. When I was born, I apparently almost died, and I was put into what was known as the ‘dying room.’ But my bawling and my crying and my gurgling apparently kept me going until the morning, and I was handed to my mother the next day. My mother chose to do some of the most menial tasks within the institution like sluicing out the babies’ napkins (in America you call them ‘diapers’) so that she could sneak in to see me and pick me up, because women were not allowed free access to their children at any time of the day. I suffered whooping cough and measles while I was there, and therefore I was not eligible to be trafficked to America. Those were communicable diseases, and in getting children to America, they had to be free of such prior conditions. A bit like America today, really. My mother was given a half an hour’s notice to get me ready to have me taken from her. She and the other women used to knit for their children. And she had made me a little – I guess you could call it – a coat-type thing and a little bonnet. And when she got me dressed, she put me in those clothes. She walked me down to the nun who took me from her, and basically that was the last time my mother was ever supposed to see me. Within half an hour of being taken away from her, the nun came back and threw the little knitted clothes back at my mother and said, ‘She won’t be needing those where she’s going.’ I was illegally fostered by an elderly couple who knew nothing at all about children, and they took me to a house in Cork that was terrifying in its tininess. I had been in an institution, a Mother and Baby institution, and now I was in a small house. I was put into a wooden bed that had above it, on the side wall that I could see quite clearly, a picture of St Michael the Archangel with his trident shoving the snakes back into hell. It had a flickering light in front. This is one of my very early memories. It flickered at night and I could see the flames coming out of the snakes. The nightmares and the terror – of just being locked in that room alone – are still with me today. Because of their neglect, and also because I was probably suffering from malnutrition, a neighbour called the authorities and I was taken from the foster parents in 1954. I was brought to the courthouse in Cork, and the judge sentenced me to twelve and a half years in the Good Shepherd Industrial School at Sunday’s Well in Cork City. I was taken to the industrial school where the doors were locked as soon as I was put in. My childhood there was years of intermittent abuse, but severe in many cases. We were deprived of food if we disobeyed rules. We were always deprived of water; we had no free access to water. We were beaten and we were abused sexually, emotionally and physically. I bear some physical scars, but for many years I bore the mental and emotional scars of my time there. It was there that I learned how to begin to resist. When I refused to lean down and tie my shoes and when I got severe beatings, I would not cry. It was there that I learned that I am Mary Harney. I am not Number 54. I am not ‘pig.’ I am not ‘smelly pig.’ I am Mary Harney, the proud daughter of a mother that I traced on my own when I was 17 years old. I traced my mother with threats. Not with questions, not with gentleness, but with threats that I would publish my story in a newspaper called The News of the World, which is equivalent to your Enquirer [in the United States]. Within two weeks of sending that letter, I had – I still have it today – a tiny letter, two pages, telling me my mother’s married name, that I had two half-sisters, and my mother’s address. Without any Freedom of Information Act, without any GDPR or whatever they call it in the United States, I found my mother with the help of a Catholic priest who was a good person and a magnificent support for me. He brought us together. It was one of the biggest shocks of my life. I had dreamed of a mother that was Greta Garbo and Betty Davis mixed together, holding a long cigarette. What I got was a small, fat Irish woman with two children running around and a long streak of misery for a stepfather. Without any counselling, without any support, it is very hard for mothers and children to reunite. I could not put a bond of 17 years back in place. Neither could she. We had a 31-year relationship, and I loved my mother, but it was the same as if I loved someone else’s mother. There was something missing. There was no closeness. My mother did not hug very much. I wanted to, but I realised that she needed to and could not. My journey through ‘recovery,’ as I call it. I am not a survivor. I am a small, yet mighty, resisting worker for justice. And I have spent 50 years finding that out. I buried my mother in 2013 or 2014. Sorry, Mammy, I can’t remember. But I honoured my mother, I respected my mother, I loved my mother. She is my hero for what she went through as a mother. For that I will always be grateful. I dedicated my Master’s thesis at NUI Galway – I wrote about the Irish industrial schools and forced labour – to my mother and all the women who went through such things. I have a tote box, a plastic tote box, at home filled with redacted information and redacted letters. I have found that my personal truth-telling has been a part of my pathway to healing and recovery, but forgiveness has not yet come for me. I’m working on it. I sometimes feel that I am truth-telling to a government that does not listen and that speaks – as one of our very famous men here in America says – ‘fake’ all the time. I think someone talked about it this morning, this fake shame and fake explanations of ‘we are going to do so much to move this along.’ It’s fake because there is no action. I want to see action because we are telling our truths and the government is not telling us the truth about our identity. That, I think, is where there is a big gap in this truth-telling exercise. We, the people who have been through it, are telling our truths at last. The government is hiding behind the Freedom of Information Act, all sorts of personal-privacy legislation, and the adoption bill. They are all being created to impede access, if you like – to enable the government to once again abdicate its responsibility to its children and women by denying us the knowledge of who we are. I serve on the memorialisation subcommittee of the Collaborative Forum. As Mari so aptly puts it, we don’t need any more statues for pigeons to shit on. We do need memorials. And one of the first things I believe we must do is identify the dead and give the dead names, so that we can memorialise the children and the mothers that died in these institutions before we do anything else. One other legacy, which comes out of Holocaust studies, is that...