Letter to the Irish World:
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was quoted in your issue of 9th June as describing the discovery of illegal adoptions between 1949 and 1969 as “another dark chapter in our (Irish) history”. Indeed it is, as is the Irish media contention that it was a uniquely Irish and uniquely Catholic scandal.
London’s Observer of 10th June revealed that over 500,00 infants in Britain were given over for adoption in the 1950s and the 1960s, at a time when “unmarried mothers” were often “rejected by their families and ostracised by (British) society.” Many of the mothers were coerced into giving up their children. Adoptions, reported the Observer, were generally handled “through agencies run by the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Salvation Army.”
In Ireland both Coalition and Fianna Fail Governments presided over that dark chapter. And in Britain Governments headed by Attlee, Churchill, Eden, MacMillan, Home and Wilson presided over it.
In Ireland, though it is seldom acknowledged, Protestant agencies were equally negligent, merciless as Catholic fellow-Christians and one of the Protestant agencies was intimately connected with The Irish Times.
It is right that these facts should see the light of day and that the surviving victims be compensated and cared for wherever possible. There were many other unconscionable actions by various regimes during the 1950s and 1960s. One power conducted ruthless military campaigns of aggression, suppression, and repression in Malaya, Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus, killing thousands and torturing many. In Kenya alone, and during the current Monarch’s Reign, her agents hanged nearly 1,100 black Africans after farcical trials. These adventures were not given their proper designation – wars – but were catalogued as Emergencies Ever a nation of shopkeepers, the truth could not be acknowledged by the English lest their tin and rubber merchants in Malaya have to pay high Insurance premiums.
Before the 1960s were over Britain was engaged in suppressing civil rights campaigners and organising a 30-year “Emergency” in Ireland.
It would be nice but deluded to believe that today’s Governments are one whit more humane than those of the 1950s and 1960s either side of the Irish Sea or the various oceans.
Donal Kennedy
LONDON
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