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.