Sinn Féin: Urgent action needed to protect mother and baby home records – Kathleen Funchion MEP. “Sinn Fein MEP for Ireland South, Kathleen Funchion, has called on the government to fund a modern digital archive system to preserve Mother and Baby Home records. This comes following Tusla’s acknowledgement that the current database is built on unsupported legacy software, which is not fit […]
In 2012, an Irish amateur historian, Catherine Corless, discovered that there were no burial records for the 796 children who died at the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in the west-of-Ireland town of Tuam, which was run by the Bon Secours order of nuns. Tests confirmed that they were buried in a mass grave at the site of St. Mary's, which was demolished in the 1970s. This led to an investigation into the Mother and Baby Home network, which estimated around 9,000 children and babies died across 18 institutions over a 75-year period. The mortality rate for children in these homes was around 15 percent. Now, excavation has begun at the site of St. Mary's. The Dial's Jade Wilson took a look at what happened there, and spoke to people who lived at the institution, and family members of those who may have died there.
#History @histodons #Ireland #IrelandNews #IrishHistory #Tuam #MagdaleneLaundries
Der Irland-Krimi: Die Toten von Glenmore Abbey • Fernsehfilm Deutschland 2019
https://www.ardmediathek.de/tv-programm/68d078ddce991f54ab49966e
Niet echt wat bij de ARD om 20:15, maar later op ee avond bij de MDR een herhaling van de pilot van Der Irland-Krimi*. Centraal in de serie staan de #MagdaleneAsylums (#MagdaleneLaundries)**. Een donkere periode in Ierland
Aanrader, ondanks dat het Duits is en in Engeland speelt. Het onderwerp is er eigenlijk te belangrijk voor.
*
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Irland-Krimi:_Die_Toten_von_Glenmore_Abbey
** https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalenenheim
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MDR am 20.10.2025: Spielfilm Deutschland 2019 Désirée Nosbusch spielt eine ehemalige Polizeipsychologin, die nach Jahren der Ungewissheit endlich Klarheit über das mysteriöse Verschwinden ihres Mannes bekommt, als in einem Klostergarten mehrere verscharrte Skelette gefunden werden. Mit Désirée Nosbusch, Declan Conlon, Mercedes Müller, Rafael Gareisen, Vincent Walsh u. a. | Regie: Züli Aladag I Buch: Christian Schiller, Marianne Wendt
Small Things Like These, by Clare Keegan
Now on a bit of a roll, I’ve finished reading the third of the six novels I bought earlier this year. The first of these I read was Foster, by Clare Keegan who also wrote the latest, Small Things Like These. There’s much in common between these two works, not only in the beautifully spare writing style with which the stories are told, but also in the message hope of they find in grim circumstances.
The current book is revolves around a character called Tom Furlong, a hard-working and moderately successful timber and coal merchant who makes deliveries around his neighbourhood. It is set in the 1980s, in a time of economic recession, shortly before Christmas. Tom is happily married with five daughters. Tom doesn’t know who his father was; he was raised by a kindly Protestant lady. One day making his delivery round takes him to the local convent, where he sees the harsh treatment of young unmarried mothers in the Magdalene laundry run by the nuns; later visiting the same place to deliver coal he finds a young girl locked in the coalhouse, in the freezing cold. These and other episodes unsettle Tom, by making him think about how lucky he has been, largely thanks to the kindness of others, and how small things can make a huge difference to how one’s life turns out. What he does at the end of the story is not a small thing at all, and we aren’t told how it works out, but it is an act of kindness and he does it for all the right reasons, so we feel it will somehow all work out for the best.
The last novel I wrote about was a work of historical fiction, and so is this. Although it is set in the 1980s, that was a time in which social attitudes in Ireland were much more dominated by the Roman Catholic Church than they are now, the cruelty of the mother-and-baby homes being just one example. Keegan is at pains to point out that the convent is right next door to the local school, two aspects of the same system of social control.
Small Things Like These was published in 2021 and has already been made into a film featuring Cillian Murphy. I haven’t seen the film, unlike Foster in which case I saw the film based on it, An Cailín Ciúin, before reading the book. I must see the film.
P.S. At the end I found myself thinking of these lines from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey
As have no slight or trivial influence
Yesterday's Panel 2 at #BritCult2024 - Merle Tönnies & Dennis Henneböhl gave a great talk on the emotional rhetoric of the 2024 GB election, Andrew Wells on Liberty & Carolin Steinke on shame & the female body in Irish Nation-Building (#MagdaleneLaundries)
BritCult #AffectTheory
“Free Labour”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-13/magdalene-laundries-and-the-free-labour-of-fallen-women/103235648
Art by Rachael Romero shows the harsh life faced by women and girls in #MagdaleneLaundries.(#RachaelRomero)
A commemorative plaque honouring Magdalen women on a bench at St Stephen's Green Park in #Dublin.(Image: Wikimedia/Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasc) under CC licence 4.0)
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🇪🇺 Paul Schoonhoven 🍋🍉
In the Dark
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