haq

I finished the 110 page novella Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and it's brilliant, with not a word out of place. It's set in 1985 in the mind of one small town Irishman who, almost accidentally, lifts an accusatory finger against the abusive Magdalen laundries run by the Catholic Church (in reality they continued until 1996 - short rant under a cut in the next post). Keegan's only use of the word "legitimately", in the last sentence, is perfect.

Obligatory folk song note: The Croppy Boy sung within the story is the version (recorded by the Clancy Brothers) in which the young man is betrayed by his cousin and denied by his father: "My own first cousin did me betray / And for one bare guinea swore my life away" and "My aged father did me deny / And the name he gave me was the Croppy Boy." (A very different version of the song was used by James Joyce in Ulysses where Leopold Bloom attempts to avoid it.)

#reading #books #Ireland #CatholicChurch #MagdalenLaundry #MagdalenLaundries #FolkSong #FolkMusic #IrishMusic #IrishLiterature

May 14, 2023 at 3:43pmWeb
Show threadhaqMay 14, 2023

I don't know how to explain Ireland's Magdalen laundries (originally supposedly set up as training schools), or the Catholic Church's other "residential school" mass murders, beyond basic facts. There were many "Magdalen laundries". In Tuam they murdered at least 796 infants, about one baby every two weeks during the 36 years it existed, plus the women murdered through intentional neglect and malnutrition. Babies' bodies were disappeared into sewers. Another mass grave of 222 infants was found at another site in Dublin. This was outsourced mass murder by a government targeting particular demographics of people in exactly the same way as all other "residential school" genocides. I have no expertise in this subject but even I know that the Catholic Church was using "residential schools" to mass murder indigenous people in the Americas from the 1600s onwards, e.g. in what is now Paraguay (tellingly the Catholic Church "educated" thousands of indigenous Guarani people in concentration camps without producing one indigenous Catholic priest). The Jesuits are still trying to spin these mass murders as a positive contribution to society - there are Jesuits, amongst others, employed today by the Catholic Church to twist history and theology into forms in which murdering Catholic priests and nuns didn't commit crimes or sins and aren't, according to their own religion, being tortured in hell for all eternity (they were "following orders", which sounds familiar...). I condemn all these intentional evils: all the orders, and all the murders, and all the cover-ups.

#reading #books #Ireland #CatholicChurch #MagdalenLaundry #MagdalenLaundries #ResidentialSchool #ResidentialSchools #Paraguay #Guarani