Mary KennyWhere there was cruelty, there was also pity
It has been reiterated, repeatedly, over the past week in connection with the Tuam babies’ reports, that to be an unwed mother in Ireland was a state of shame. Historically, that was indeed so. Sometimes it was also a state of pity.
My uncle told me of a woman in his home town, near Ballinasloe, who had a child out of wedlock in the 1920s. “Musha, the crathur,” he said.
Was she treated cruelly, I asked him (in the early 1990s). He said she was more pitied than punished. Herself and her daughter lived in a cottage, and she had a caretaker’s job, but “it didn’t amount to much”.
Unwed mothers had a hard time of it in most societies – and in societies like Japan, unwed motherhood is still stigmatised.
Some communities in the past made a better effort at catching up with the father of the child, and making him face his responsibilities.
In the Gorbals in Glasgow the community usually managed to collar the young man.
One of the most memorable examples, in my experience, of unkindness to a single pregnant woman involved the famous agony aunt Marje Proops of The Daily Mirror who launched a vicious attack on Bernadette Devlin in 1970 when it was announced that she, Bernadette, was expecting a baby.
The late Proops, a celebrity columnist of the Labour-supporting Mirror, and regarded as an outspoken liberal, castigated Bernadette in splash headlines for giving appalling example to young girls by “getting herself pregnant”, as the phrase had it.
I remember being astonished by the mean-spirited tone of the censure. When Proops died in 1996 I wrote something critical about her, and Piers Morgan, who had edited The Mirror fired me off a letter saying I was “unworthy to tie the shoelaces of the great Marje Proops”.
I don’t mind being told I should practise humility, but I could never admire the way La Proops attacked Bernadette Devlin in the way she did.
And guess who spoke up for Bernadette? Her House of Commons colleague, the Rev. Ian Kyle Paisley, MP. He said at the time that it was unchivalrous and unChristian to calumnise any young mother-to-be.
Sometimes compassionate support arises from the most surprising quarters.
French approach to First Communion
It is just 20 years since the opening of the Eurotunnel between Britain and France, in 1994. It really is an astonishing feat of engineering ñ a corridor under the sea, which, in half an hour, transports a motor car from the island of Great Britain to the Continent of Europe. The vehicle is driven into an enclosed train, you sit in it for 30 minutes, and thatís it: youíre there.
As we live about 20 minutes away from Folkestone in Kent, a day trip to this part of France is roughly the equivalent of travelling from Dublin to Arklow. And so I found myself in France for the day, last Sunday.
Last weekend was Pentecost in France ñ a national holiday mentioned on all media (Pentecost, or Whitsun, now has to be explained in Britain and Ireland). So the stunning cathedral at St Omer was packed to the gills for morning Mass. Perhaps especially so, since there were First Communions being carried out.
French children are not dressed up to the nines for First Communion, as is the practice chez nous. French boys and girls are dressed similarly ñ in long white robes, like mini-monks. True, the young girlsí hair is more adorned, and sometimes in pretty coils and chignons garlanded with flowers, as in a Mediaeval pageant. But otherwise, there are none of the elaborate accessories associated with the fashion-conscious element in Irish First Communions.
I have sometimes thought it overly puritanical to criticise the expense and elaborateness of First Communion dresses and accessories for girls in Ireland. People need to mark significant ritual in the way they feel expresses the beauty of an event, even if that is costly. Yet seeing the simplicity of the French approach was impressive.
That the boys and girls wore the same robes brought a tone of shared community to the sacrament ñ and event.
Parents’ values influence children
Kevin Butler of Fairview in Dublin, wrote to The Irish Times during the week saying that parents should not be allowed to “foist” their religion on their “innocent children”. Faith schools should be outlawed, just as corporal punishment has been.
As a parent and grandparent, I can assure Mr Butler that parents “foist” their values on their children, in every choice they make daily, from meals to entertainment to friendships to money.
For sure, no child grows up in a moral and cultural vacuum.
Where parents and schools fail, the jungle enters the vacuum – be it the jungle of the internet, the streets or the Wolf of Wall Street’s values.