I NOTICE - already! - a backlash against the revelations about the institutional care of children in this State. One of the tacks the instant revisionists are taking is to place the world they happened in far back in history. But those events are not history. They are about the somebodies and the nobodies in our society. They are about the spectrum of attitudes, stretching from indifference through disrespect to cruelty, that the powerful feel free to display towards the powerless. It was children then. It is the poor now.
People who listened on the radio to the lacerating eviction scene on The Gay Byrne Show last week will have noticed that the seven men sent from the sheriff's office to put the woman and her children on to the street walked into her home without speaking to her, without giving their names and without showing a warrant. She was nobody, you see.
It will do us no good to minimise the importance of what was done to children. But now that we're over the first shocks, perhaps we can develop a more rounded way of thinking and feeling than the simplicities of blame and hate. Evil certainly exists. When you think about those shining little faces in the school in Dunblane; and that the gunman lifted his arm time after time to level a gun at them - you have to acknowledge the mystery of evil. But there is a mystery of goodness, too. Goodness can blossom where it makes no sense.
To make that point, while also insisting that we go on facing unpalatable facts, I quote today from a letter from a woman I know. She lives in London. She is well known in "miscarriage of justice" circles, where there is no trouble she won't go to for people she believes to be wrongly imprisoned. This is part of her reaction to a childhood spent in an Irish "orphanage" - her mother wasn't married - a reaction which as a whole seems to me to lend meaning to the word "good".
"I spent 16 years in three of those delightful institutions," she wrote. .. . we were always being threatened with banishment to Goldenbridge. The nuns used to describe it as if they were describing hell. It was a threat you took seriously. We met Goldenbridge girls at all the charity Christmas dos. They always and ever looked haunted. They spoke in very low voices. They acted strangely too - they walked with their heads bowed, like nuns, when they walked around the grounds praying.
"I remember them so clearly we never wanted to sit beside them. We knew their lives were sad, everyone in the world knew it. I often used to mimic the nuns when they threatened me with Goldenbridge. It was seen as a punishment of some gravity to be sent to Goldenbridge. The other alternative was Limerick Laundry - most who were expelled went there and were never heard of again...
HOW does she, as opposed to hurlers on the ditch, such as myself, approach questions of blame and forgiveness? Listen to this. "About 16 of us in London, from the institutions we were in, meet up regularly. One of the girls owns a pub and we all adjourn there and get drunk and have a great afternoon talking. We are really close - it is kind of special for us. No formality about it. Lots of things have happened to us since we started. We have found long lost mothers, brothers, and two dads, including mine. Mostly we talk and share things about our lives, our kids, our partners, all kinds of things. We have a good laugh, and cry sometimes.
"We are having a Dublin London reunion on May 5th. We planned it before all this publicity broke out. I hope the Dublin girls don't get cold feet. We've been arranging it for ages. We invited the nuns but all this publicity will upset them terribly. Some of the nuns were OK too. It is hard not to have feelings for them - we were with them for so many years. I still write regularly to one or two and I left in 1965."
I, too, hope the nuns go to the reunion (I won't be trying to find out where it is, if that worries them). The nuns surely need to talk too. The woman in London writes: "One thing I have never heard the girls say, that I am in touch with, is that they want retribution or revenge. Many of us have very mixed feelings about these nuns - we love them and we hate them at the same time. I think the girls would find it difficult to testify against them, though some of the nuns really badly assaulted us. I know I couldn't and wouldn't testify. It would be too painful recalling all that stuff again. Another part of me would be sorry for the nuns . . ."
It is not the nuns this woman blames. "The State," she says, "really did abandon us. Nothing ever seemed to be recorded - a few of us got the primary school certificate but we never received the certs. Hospital ops and things were not recorded or available to us. As soon as we left, everything about us was wiped out. I knew loads' of girls looking for medical stuff when they were pregnant and there was nothing available. Family connections were not recorded.
"When we asked, the nuns had the information in their heads. When they died it died with them: When I was tracing one girl's mum she knew this really old nun who had met her ma a few times, but by the time we got to her she was dying and we couldn't ask her anything. It was sad really. We finally traced the ma and she had died within that year - calling for her daughter. It broke my heart to tell Patsy the news. If there had been records it could have bee possible for Patsy to see her just once even . . .
Yes. They were such nobodies they didn't even have records. This humiliating fact is what these gallant survivors have come to terms with. But we shouldn't come to terms with it.
Some children were destroyed. "I meet girls that I was really close to in the orphanages and they are equipped for nothing but to be someone else's slave. . ." But some magnificently transcended the valuation put on them by society. A mystery.
PERHAPS even one light in the darkness counts. This woman in London adds: "I was saved by a lady called Mrs Le Brocquy. Her son is some kind of famous artist. My mother worked for them before I was born. Then she had to let my ma go because she couldn't keep us both. But she was so kind to my ma - took her to the hospital and then to the home. Down through the years when things got really bad for me - I was always in trouble - my mother would write to Mrs Le Brocquy from England. Mrs Le Brocquy saved my skin so many times.
Mrs Le Brocquy lent the beautiful family christening robe for the baby - now the woman in London - to be baptised in. That's respect. The woman has never told her mother - who lives near her in London - what the orphanages were like: the mother thinks she had a happy childhood. That's surely love. And the women who spend an afternoon drinking and reminiscing and supporting each other - that's a reaching for life and health. Dunblane happened. But so does this. So does this.