Ireland 2014: Tuam Babies

 

Ireland 2014

By Joe Armstrong

 

Tuam Babies. Human remains of babies and children

Found in a septic tank.

Hundreds more buried in a mass grave.

Our shame.

 

It’s safe to feel outrage at religious bigots in foreign lands

Where girls are raped and hanged from trees

Where small minds issue death sentences and

Shoot a girl in the head and

Kidnap hundreds more for going to school.

 

Even safe, if uncomfortable, to feel outrage at Ireland’s collusion

With our own religious zealots of yesteryear

Breeding the vile religious doctrine of

Legitimate and ‘illegitimate’ children

Stigmatizing innocent children from birth

As lower than the lowest.

 

It’s easy to feel outrage at foreign lands and the distant past

But tricky to admit equal cause for shame today.

Then, in Irish mother and child homes,

Medical experiments, forced adoptions, mass graves.

Today, de facto forced baptisms of infants by parents

Just so their children can get a place

In their local primary and secondary school,

Most of which remain Catholic-controlled

In an Ireland where it remains lawful in 2014

To discriminate in these State-funded schools

Against anyone who isn’t a baptized Catholic.

 

So let’s save some of our outrage for ourselves

And the abject failure of Irish politicians to make good the

Tattered guarantee of the 1916 Proclamation to

Cherish all of the children of the nation equally.