Diarmaid Ferriter: There is a difference between history and memories

In 2011, a site-specific performance, Laundry, directed by Louise Lowe for Anu Productions, took place in the convent building attached to the former Magdalene laundry in Gloucester Street, Dublin, and gave voice to hundreds of names, with each audience member asked to remember four names. The performance confronted the “rule of silence” with the staging of testimonies and recovered histories. It was interactive to counteract the women’s historic invisibility, presented their daily routine and included the “extremely pungent smell of carbolic soap”. Audience members were also directly challenged: “People said they didn’t know what was going on. Would you have done anything?”

Ten years on, to mark the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, the Abbey Theatre began streaming Home: Part One, from a dark, empty stage, to amplify testimonies of women who experienced the homes. Reading the testimony of Philomena Lee, Liz Fitzgibbon describes the gut-wrenching pain of watching a child being driven away to a new adopted home and asks: “Can you imagine how I felt?”

This represents a continued focus by the arts community on what historian Roy Foster characterised as “coming to terms with cultural memory” in relation to abuse and institutionalisation underpinned by a strong sense of duty towards empathy. It is a significant challenge, and playwrights and actors using archival material and personal accounts have done much to keep afloat narratives that can be drowned in a sea of cautious and often cold legalese.

The response last week to the Oireachtas Committee on Children by former circuit court judge Yvonne Murphy, who headed the mother and baby homes commission, was cutting, and, for many of those deeply impacted by this saga, will have appeared self-aggrandising and condescending; was it necessary for the letter to tell us “confidential means ‘intended to be kept secret’”?

State to argue against judicial reviews taken by mother and baby home survivors

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Cabinet to consider mother and baby home redress proposals

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Purpose of mother and baby commission should have been made clear

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State to address High Court cases against mother and baby homes report

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Empathy deficit

The tone of the letter compounds the impression that the empathy deficit is born of a sense of necessary judicial detachment; the commission was engaged “in a formal legal process and carried it out having due regard to the Constitutional and statutory requirement to fair procedures. The report is necessarily written in sober, straightforward, non-emotional language.” But, as Murphy notes, it was also required to include “a social history report”, and social history, of all things, does not have to be dry.

The letter raises legitimate arguments about limitations placed on the commission due to its terms of reference, the requirements of confidentiality, “a rush to judgement” and the need to preserve the independence of the commissioners. It does not explain why it is okay for a commissioner to speak frankly to an Oxford seminar on the report but not to an Oireachtas committee or directly to the survivors. It does not acknowledge the distress of many of the women or address those who have highlighted misrepresentations of their testimonies or express concern about their ongoing trauma. The assertion that the report “speaks for itself” is dismissive, as part of the problem is that many survivors feel it does not speak adequately for them. The issue of how many women’s experiences constitute a reliable body of evidence is also elided.

Wider question

The letter also raises the “potential shortcomings” in evidence given so long after the events experienced, which prompts a wider question of how we, collectively, mediate these aspects of our past and distinguish between history and memory. It is a universal challenge; consider, for example, the opening of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Booker prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending: “I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events anymore, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.”

Or consider the words of American historian Richard White, writing of his maternal Irish ancestry: “There are regions of the past that only memory knows... there is nothing my mother has told me that is without some basis in the past. But neither, at least in those cases where I can recover the historical scraps, is there a story that to a historian sifting through the evidence clearly happened as she remembered.”

Archival documentation does not provide a complete picture and as Murphy insists, the commission’s report “cannot be taken as a definitive history of mother and baby homes”. But the balance to be struck between the documented history and the personal testimony remains unresolved and the commissioners, for all their hard work, are compounding that problem by being selective in what they choose to respond to and how, while simultaneously maintaining their work is done, and their report cannot be revised. Whether they like it or not, however, the issue of “coming to terms with cultural memory” will continue to cast a shadow over their report.