Workhouses and the enforced breaking up of families by the state, “reformatories” and Industrial Schools long pre-dated Britain’s partial withdrawal from Ireland.
Father Joe MacVeigh, whose blogs I admire, seems to have taken his cue from Fintan O’Toole and The Irish Times, from Eoghan Harris and the Sunday Independent, Colm Toibin and The Sunday Times, and Fergus Finlay. Fergus Finlay is a former Chief Executive of Barnardo’s , a charity founded by a bigoted Protestant (according to a sympathetic biographer) born in Clontarf, who with the best of intentions organised the despatch of young children to families
in Canada It’s said his organisation sent 30,000 between the 1870s and 1939. A great number worked as unpaid labourers on farms in the frozen wilds .
It seems Fergus Finlay may have inherited Barnardo’s hostility to Catholicism. Barnardo was a made-up surname. He was of mixed Irish Catholic and Jewish stock.
The mistreatment of women and children that has come to light is as near to a glimpse of Hell as I wish to see, The unnaccountability claimed, and the despotic conduct of Bishops, Catholic and Protestant was inhuman, not to mind a negation of Christianity. It is no consolation to know countries other than Ireland and communities other than Christian have fallen short of human expectations.
In John Redmond’s day his party at Westminster opposed the application to Catholic Institutions of State Inspection as required in Britain.
“Barnardo” or more properlya charity founded by a
Clontarf Protestant missionary.
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