Editorial: Mother and baby homes report reminds us of ideals betrayed

The Commission must not allow Church and state to shirk responsibility for the woman-hating ‘gulags’ of modern Ireland

As the report says, for at least the first half of that period, Ireland was a “cold, harsh environment” for most Irish people, but “it was especially cold and harsh for women”

“It is high time that the people of this country find some other way of loving God than by hating women.”

Those words were spoken in Seanad Éireann in 1928 by Oliver St John Gogarty, the writer and patriot, during a debate on citizenship in the Irish Free State. Gogarty was a wit and man-about-town, but he was sufficiently aware of the darker corners of the new Catholic-nationalist Ireland to pinpoint one of its emerging ...