Poetry bears testimony in denial-fed lack of redress for Mother and Baby Home victims

It was with sadness that I read Arthur Breesley’s article in the Irish Times entitled “Just one religious order has made ‘serious offer’ of cash redress to mother-and-baby home survivors.” Reluctance to atone mystifies.

When the Irish Government’s Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes commenced a decade ago, the Republic’s population stood at just over 4.6 million.

Although the population has risen since, Ireland is still a sparsely populated country, and it's rare to meet an Irish person who doesn’t personally know of a woman who was incarcerated in a Magdalene Laundry, or religious institution, or of a child born, or buried, within those oppressive walls.

At a recent Cercle Littéraire Irlandais event, Celebrating Women with Words, I had the opportunity to hear poet Anne Fitzgerald speak. She presented her fifth publication, "Not to Scale," her latest poetry collection, which was her powerful response to the final 2020 report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes.

The collection comprises four poems and photography and is dedicated “to all who have passed through the gates of Irish Catholic institutions, both public and private.”

Nobody was left unmoved when she read aloud the four movements of the long-form title poem "Not to Scale." The poem centres on Ralph Byrne, the architect of many of Ireland’s 20th-century religious institutions’ buildings. It examines links between Irish architecture, religion, and politics during those institutions' heyday and names players, such as Éamon De Valera and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.

The “architecture of containment” surrounding former incarcerated single mothers and apple robbing ‘wayward’ girls, in Fitzgerald’s opinion, is still in existence.

Her thought-provoking poetics and haunting imagery, read in her composed, cadenced voice, highlighted that ‘containment.'

The other three poems in the collection examine the plight of an unmarried mother in "Granard, Co. Longford," and of children born outside wedlock in "Climbing Machu Picchu," while the poem "Dinner Dance, 1946" pays homage to Licensed Vintners.

In January 2025, Ireland's Office of Public Works obtained permission to convert the State’s last Magdalene laundry, which was shut in 1996, into a ‘national site of conscience’.  Survivors fear the Sean McDermott Street, Dublin 1, project could become 'A Vanity Project for Academics.'

Their apprehension is understandable; the survivors themselves need to be heard. The voices of artists, who themselves were victims of the dark legacy, might build bridges.

Anne Fitzgerald was born in a private nursing home opposite the Archbishop's Palace, Dublin and adopted through Saint Patrick's Guild. The guild operated as a Catholic adoption agency, circa 1920-1990, alongside its better-known role as a religious goods supplier.

Singer, composer, and writer Maria Doyle was born in a Mother and Baby home. Maria’s grandmother found and rescued her and her mother before the date ‘decreed’ that she could be adopted, without her mother’s consent. Maria’s life story was published in French. Hopefully, one day it will exist in English.

Paintings by Bernard Canavan exposed in his extraordinary exhibition "Theocracy" are a biographical depiction of a stolen childhood. As a newborn baby, Bernard was ripped away from his unmarried parents.

Fitzgerald’s own photography, intermingling with her poetry in "Not to Scale," also offers the reader “another way in” to a harrowing subject. A photograph of the towering Donnybrook Laundry chimney, a symbol of the Laundries’ colossal business before the invention and arrival of washing machines in Ireland, is a stark reminder of the exploitation. Selling the laundry workers’ babies, of course, provided additional streams of revenue.

Preserving the stories of those who suffered in Irish institutions is a vital part of our history, and the artistry of these former institutionalised ‘babies’ representing dark legacies has importance far beyond their brilliance. Pen, brush, and voices design a path to reparation; remembering and denouncing, brick by brick, the horrors lived within Ralph Byrne’s “ecclesiastical cathedrals of incarceration."

The Sean McDermott Street remembrance project has also aggrieved urban conservationists as it will see the removal of the institution’s high prison-like walls, which are "part of Dublin's history."

Bulldozers will demolish the institution's walls, formerly run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity. However, alleviating walls of pain and hurt through the responsible institutions acknowledging, compensating, and respecting survivors is overdue.

The denial-fed lack of redress and Irish religious institutions' macabre, “waiting them out game” bears a troubling resemblance to post-WWII West Germany’s delays in compensating camp survivors. Of course, the crimes differ, but the dehumanisation and tactical patience feel eerily familiar.

Perhaps redress receipts, framed and hung alongside pictures of the Sacred Heart in survivors' homes, would be admissions for posterity that guilt-ridden religious orders are still unready to assume, preferring to shroud the past in silence.

Sheila Nunan’s April 2025 report revealed that only one out of seven Catholic Church bodies has made a serious cash offer towards the redress scheme for survivors, while the Church of Ireland has refused to contribute. ‘Not to Scale’ points out that religious institutions did not work alone in the past. However, today, it’s hard to understand why the Irish government is reluctant to compel refuseniks to contribute to the Mother and Baby home redress scheme financially.

The late Pope Francis, during his 2018 visit to Ireland, acknowledged that church officials often failed to respond with compassion to the many abuses suffered by Irish children and women over the years, and vowed to work for justice. Hopefully, justice for Irish abuse survivors will feature on the new Pontiff’s agenda.

Only when redress is made and the last barred window acknowledged will the stain of original ‘Magdalene Laundry sin’ and institutional abuse be lessened for those named and shamed Irish Catholic bodies. If not for empathy, healing, or the Christian imperative, then for the sake of their own congregations, they should pay up. Today's Irish nuns, some too young to have known the Mother and Baby homes, carry forward banners soiled with unresolved legacy.

They, too, could use a cleaner sheet.

A small number of signed and numbered copies of Anne Fitzgerald's ‘Not to Scale’ are still available. To order a copy: fortyfootpresseditor@gmail.com

This article was submitted to the IrishCentral contributors network by a member of the global Irish community. To become an IrishCentral contributor click here.