Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

Mary Harney: At two and a half, my mother was given a half an hour’s notice that I was going. She had knitted me all my little clothes ready to, if I ever should go. She had put those on me, and she walked me up the corridor to the nun, who took me from there. And that was the last my mother was ever to see of me. That’s how it was arranged.

[INTRO TUNE]

Asymmetrical Haircuts Justice Update with Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg in partnership with justiceinfo.net.

Stephanie: Welcome to asymmetrical haircuts. I’m Stephanie van den Berg.

Janet: And I’m Janet Anderson. And today’s episode is supported by justiceinfo.net.

Stephanie: Today we are tackling a huge justice issue close to home. Not war crimes this time, but truth-seeking reparations and accountability.

Janet: Yeah, we’re looking at what happened in Ireland during especially the 1960s and 1970s and earlier, when thousands of unmarried women were forced into mother and baby homes run by the church or the state and where thousands of babies died.

Stephanie: A special commission was set up to look into what happened. And after six years of work, it has said a lot. It said, for instance, that Ireland was an, quote, especially cold and harsh place for women at the time, that they suffered serious discrimination. And that, quote, women who gave birth outside of marriage were subject to particularly harsh treatment, end quote.

Janet: And that’s all part of the background. But while fathers of the children concerned or families may be a bit to blame for the way that unmarried mothers were treated, the commission said that that was, quote, supported by, contributed to and condoned by the institutions of the state and the churches. Now, to discuss all of this, we’re joined by a couple of people.

We have Mary Harney, who was born herself in a mother and baby home, and she was illegally taken away from her mother, forcibly adopted. She’s also, though, a recent law graduate in Galway, and she is currently a tutor at the Human Rights Law Clinic at the National University in Galway.

So, Mary, hi. 

Mary Harney: Hello, how are you?

Janet: I’m well.

Janet: Mary, considering your backgrounds, I’m sorry to kind of summarise your, I’m sure, much more deep and much more important story than we’ve just put in that one line. Did you talk to the Commission and tell them that this was your story? What’s your role in this?

Mary Harney: I was born in Bessborough in 1949, so I’m 72 now. And I wasn’t adopted because adoption wasn’t legal at the time I left Bessborough. I was with my mother there for two and a half years. And when we say we were with our mothers, that’s something we use a loose kind of term because we weren’t in the same buildings as our mothers necessarily. Our mothers were not the women looking after us. It could be some of the other girls, some of the other mothers, but it wasn’t always your own mother that came to feed you or hold you or change you. And we were in cots, you know, we were in metal cots, rows of cots. We were swaddled down sometimes, you know, like where we couldn’t move our hands and our little feet. But at two and a half, my mother was given a half an hour’s notice that I was going. She had knitted me all my little clothes ready to, if I ever should go. She had put those on me and she walked me up the corridor to the nun who took me from there. And that was the last my mother was ever to see of me. That’s how it was arranged. I was handed over to two strangers, elderly strangers at that. And the nun came back and took my clothes back to my mother who had so lovingly knitted them for me and said she won’t be needing these. Her new mother has got her clothes.

This was the kind of parting that really was such an emotional tragedy for women and children. And I don’t think the Commission has taken into account the huge psychological effect of the separation and the breakup of families.

Janet: Mary, I really want to get into more of the detail of that. You’ve already come out with an incredibly important critique, I imagine, of the Commission. So let’s come back to that in a moment. But first, let’s also introduce our other guest.

Stephanie: We are also joined by Maeve O’Rourke. She’s a lecturer in human rights law. And Maeve, maybe you want to tell me where exactly.

Maeve O’Rourke: Thanks for having me. I’m a lecturer in human rights at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway.

Stephanie: Thank you. We’ve been wanting to do this podcast for a while now because there is a government report on these mother and baby homes that came out last January. But you needed a bit of time to absorb it when we first talked to you. So now you have had some more time. What do you think now? It’s a very voluminous report, I think 3000 pages. I just read the executive summary, but that was already almost 80 pages. How are you feeling about it now?

Maeve O’Rourke: Yeah. So when we spoke, it was very soon after the report had been published and it’s over 3000 pages long. An important point about this is that actually when it was published on the 12th of January, it had already been with the government for several months, meaning that actually the government had had a chance to understand what was in it, to decide how it wanted to summarize it. And in actual fact, the government leaked the report to the newspapers a few days in advance of the survivors and the general public receiving the report. And what they leaked was that the report finds Irish society is responsible for what happened in the mother and baby homes.

So, you know, as you can imagine, when a huge report comes out like this, the media has maybe a day or a week where there’s intense focus, which really puts survivors and researchers like myself and advocates, of which Mary and I are both, at a huge disadvantage. And then the civil servants go off and say they’re going to draft up a redress scheme. And meanwhile, this report, which contains absolutely shocking conclusions in my view, just sits on now the historical record, and it’s very difficult for those affected to actually counteract what it says.

And before I finish, it’s just really important to make the point, which I don’t think is well known, which is that it was essentially a secret inquiry, because when it was set up in 2015, none of those people affected were given legal representation. And as it proceeded, it refused entirely on a blanket basis to give any survivor access to any of the evidence it was gathering. And it refused even to give people like Mary a transcript of the evidence that they had given. And it wouldn’t give anybody their personal data. It operated a blanket restriction of GDPR. And so actually, none of those people directly concerned were empowered to participate in this investigation. They had to wait to just see what the Commission came out with. And unfortunately, what it came out with were highly troubling findings because it did not apply a human rights framework to its analysis.

Stephanie: So what I understand from your criticism is that you can’t even kind of fact check the government or fact check the report or because you don’t know and cannot have access to the documents their conclusions are based on.

Maeve O’Rourke: Exactly. For the whole time that the Commission was operating, nobody except the Commission had access to the documents it was gathering. And now the government is holding the entire archive gathered and it hasn’t made efforts to make the administrative files public in any way.

We had a huge fight in October where a number of us and survivors launched a public pressure campaign to quote unquote or hashtag unseal the archive because what the Minister was planning and he was stating this in public was once the Commission came to an end, he was going to gather that archive and he was going to seal it entirely for 30 years. And we are talking about all the personal data as well as the administrative files he was planning to seal. And so there was a huge campaign and it was only after that that the Government acknowledged that EU law is actually directly effective, that you cannot blanket restrict it and that it would make efforts to give people their personal data. But that still hasn’t actually happened. People now like Mary and others are receiving these responses from the Department of Children saying, we know we’re supposed to get back to your subject access request within a month, but sorry, we need more time. And as for when anyone will ever access the administrative files or files relating to their relatives that go beyond the GDPR, that is anyone’s guess.

Janet: Can I ask, Mary, can you join in with this at this point? What was your direct reaction to the publication?

Mary Harney: I was appalled. The contradictory statements that were made in that report. On the one hand, there was abuse, but on the other hand, it wasn’t really abuse. That kind of notion went through the whole thing. I gave my testimony to the Confidential Committee, which is different to (…) the other committee, which was the one where you made an affidavit. I gave mine to the Confidential Committee, and I never got a copy of that statement back, yet I appear and can be identified by people who know me in the final documents. But I was never given the opportunity under the Act itself, under the Commission of Investigation Act 2004. I should have been given a copy first, but it went straight into the documents. And I don’t mind being identified, but it breached its own Commission rules. So that was one thing.

But the report itself before, even before the Commission was formed, Ireland’s own Commission on Human Rights and Equality asked the government to said basically, and I’m going to have to read this because it is so important, before setting up the Commission, IHREC told the government that it was critically important that the investigation should take place in a human rights and equality framework, and that in particular, it should conform to Ireland’s human rights obligations under its own Constitution and under its international human rights obligations. The government chose not to do any of this, and therefore we have a mess on our hands now because nothing is based on human rights.

Stephanie: And just to circle back slightly with Maeve, why was the commission set up? What was the spark point for this actual commission being set up?

Maeve O’Rourke: Well, this commission of investigation into mother and baby homes and what was called representative sample of four county homes, there was actually a county home in every county, but this was the third in a series, if you will, of state inquiries into church-run, state-funded, residential, in carceral institutions. First, we had the industrial and reformatory schools inquiry from 2000 to 2009, the commission to inquire into child abuse. Then we had the Macalise committee, a non-statutory inquiry into the state’s involvement with the Magdalene Laundries, which concluded in 2013. And then this is, I think most people would see it as the third in a series.

The problem really being that the Irish government is always making efforts to compartmentalise, to put boundaries around its investigations. A lot of people are affected by multiple institutions, because as you can imagine, if you were born like Mary, in one state funded church run institution, you are very likely to have ended up in another one, if not another and another. And for there to be family connections with other institutions too. So, you know, those affected have always made the point that it’s wrong to investigate on an institution by institution basis, but that is what the government has done.

And so it wasn’t a revelation in 2014 that there were such things as mother and baby homes, which caused terrible abuse. But, you know, it was well known to all those affected and to the government that those institutions needed investigating for a very long time. But it was a function of the fact that there were other investigations going on, I suppose, that meant that these institutions were left out. And I also think, you know, it’s a gender based discrimination point that the forced separation of women and girls from their children simply wasn’t understood by those in power as requiring investigation urgently. And so what happened to force the government’s hand really, even though it wasn’t a revelation, was the evidence that was gathered by Catherine Corliss in relation to the two mass graves that became an international scandal.

Janet: Can you just explain what that was? Is this the material that we came across when we were researching this that came from Tuam, that there was an excavation of a mother and baby home there where they found hundreds of babies’ bodies there? Is that what you’re referring to?

Maeve O’Rourke: Yes, Catherine Corliss is a local historian in Galway who paid herself to gather every single death certificate that was in the general register office for a child who had died in the Tuam with her own baby home and then set about trying to find out where they were buried. There wasn’t a record in any known graveyard and ultimately concluded, she concluded that they were in fact buried altogether in a space near now, a housing estate and a children’s playground, that upon further investigation by archaeologists, turned out to be correct, albeit we don’t know how many of the babies are actually there, but certainly there are many. And it is this structure that was formerly a septic tank and the babies are buried not in coffins and very deep into this chamber in a way that is going to make it extremely difficult to exhume.

And I mean, almost unbelievably, those babies are still in that place and there has been an entire investigation which the government would claim was to respond to this problem as it became international news in 2014 and yet the whole thing has happened. Within the terms of reference, it was stated by the government in 2015 when this commission was set up, the commission is not to concern itself with any single individual. It is not to help any family trace their relative. And so we have had this whole inquiry into the generalities of the mother and baby homes, and yet there has been nothing done for the actual individual families who wish to know is my relative in the ground, either in Tuam or another institution? What is the cause of their death? There are actually people wondering, is that death certificate correct or could my relative actually be adopted somewhere else? Was it actually falsified or not? Because of course, well not of course for your listeners, but of course we know in Ireland, many people’s birth certificates were falsified. There was a whole process of illegal adoption where adopters wished to actually be down on the birth certificate as natural parents. And so people’s identities were completely obliterated. And so people are wondering, was that done with death certificates as well in furtherance of transnational adoptions, for example?

Stephanie: And if we look at that, you’re talking about a bit of the conclusions of the report. And I read through the executive summary, which already is going to give me trouble sleeping. So I’m kind of glad that I didn’t have to read through the 300 or 3000 pages of it. But it does say about 15% of the children born in mother and baby homes died in very early infancy. Over 60% of them, I think, in the first year. And to give our listeners an idea, there were about a little over 50,000 babies born in the time they looked at. So with that 15%, you’re looking at one in six babies who died, more or less, that percentage comes to. There is also, as Mary said, a kind of emotional abuse being forced, separated from your parents, from your mothers. What are some of the other really important things that that report found? If we look not at the kind of faults of the report and what they didn’t find in their omissions, what are the things that are important that they did find and confirm for you?

Maeve O’Rourke: I’ll let Mary come first.

Mary Harney: They clearly stated that in the case of Vespa in 1943, 75% of children born in one year died. That’s 75%. Three quarters of the number of children that were born in one year died in that institution. So, you know, when they talk about evidence of no gross abuses or no evidence of this or that, this is so difficult to accept.

One of the other things that, and this is still in a negative tone here, but they also state that the women admitted to the institutions ranged in age from 12 years old to women in their 40s. A 12-year-old is not a woman. It is a child.

Stephanie: I was horrified by that range of giving them from the age. Can you imagine a 12-year-old being, I don’t know, pregnant and having to deal with it? And I also read in the report that they were saying they got no explanation of childbirth and usually while during childbirth were treated very harshly by staff. And having gone through childbirth, I can only imagine what it would be like if A, you don’t know what’s going to happen and B, somebody is being extremely unkind to you while you’re doing that. It must be horrifying.

Mary Harney: It is. And again, there’s no evidence that the pregnancies of the children were reported to law enforcement at all. And they admit, the commission admits that they were due to either incest or rape. And we have no investigation. And my mother, who gave birth in 49, was denied medical attention during the process. Women were told they were paying for their sin, that they were now have to pay for what they did in a few minutes or that kind of demeaning, degrading treatment of women.

They also said things like there was no evidence that the women were forced into institutions. Well, let me tell you, my mother was from a rural town in Waterford. How did she get to Cork? She was taken from the place she was and put in there and not allowed to come out for two and a half years. Had she tried to leave, she would have been brought back by the law enforcement. So to say that women weren’t incarcerated, it beggars belief because arbitrary detention is the name of the game there. Arbitrary, these women had not committed any crimes. They were detained. And again, this goes to the heart of human rights. Enforced disappearance, trafficking of children by falsifying adoptions and falsifying information so that they were taken to America. They didn’t know they were adopted. They never knew they had Irish heritage. You know, this is all part of trafficking of human beings.

You know, the beef I have with all of this report is that until it is based in human rights, it’s a whitewash. It’s no use.

Janet: And does your critique of the report also extend to the recommendations that came out there? I mean, there are quite a number and they talk very generally about issues of compensation and memorialisation, which are the kind of things that we’ve come across when we talk about justice issues all over the world. How important that can be to give people compensation to some communities want memorialisation. Are those recommendations useful or not, Mary?

Mary Harney: They are guidelines. You know, they could be guidelines. But what is the paramount importance to us is that we have free and unfettered access to our identities. They stripped us of our identities. They changed our names. They changed our mother’s names. We can’t find our birth certificates. If you’re an ordinary citizen in Ireland, you can go and get your birth certificate. If you’re an ordinary citizen in Ireland, you probably go and access my birth certificate, but we can’t. So they stripped us of identity, dignity, human rights. And to say that they want us now to have access to our documents is a great recommendation.

However, there are barriers put up to stop us, and mostly it’s the misinterpretation of GDPR and freedom of information. So there are great obstacles in the way of accessing. So to recommend it without a solution is as bad as offering somebody a chocolate teapot to make tea in. You know, it’s just nonsense. A lot of it is. Now, to recommend compensation, many people just want an enhanced medical card and financial recompense. And that’s fine. That is what they want. But a majority of us want restorative justice. We want transitional justice, recognize the pillars of transitional justice. Instead, what we’re getting is a term made up by the government called restorative recognition. What does that mean? They came up with that Mickey Mouse term, you know, without explaining what it means. It means recognizing we were in the institution and maybe, you know, giving financial compensation. However, I was also incarcerated in an industrial school for over 11 years. And I went to that commission. And the compensation there was based on whether or not you could prove you were in the institution, which is going to be hugely difficult with the mother and baby institutions, because we can’t get our records to say that we were there. We had to sign that we were gagged, essentially, not to tell anybody how much we got on pain of imprisonment. This is not compensation. This is not redress. This is not adhering to the tenets of transitional justice or restorative justice. And until we get this kind of justice, we’re not going to be satisfied.

Stephanie: You’ve had, you know, they made up this restorative recognition. You had an apology from the Taoiseach and from the Catholic Archbishop. What else, you know, you call this the Mickey Mouse term, the restorative recognition. Are there any other kind of transitional justice avenues available to you and other survivors?

Mary Harney: Yes, I’ll hand this over to Maeve too, you know, but what I believe is that we have not received the truth. We have not received accountability. There’s no accountability. No one is being held accountable for what happened to the women and children. There’s no investigations on finding out anything. So, you know, this is missing. And when, and this happens, of course, when you discard human rights and when, you know, the Taoiseach gives us an apology saying harm was done. Yeah, what we want is an apology that says successive Irish governments trampled all over your human rights. And when we get that apology, and then the findings and the recommendations are based in international human rights, then that’s a part of justice. I’ll hand it over to Maeve for her thoughts on that.

Maeve O’Rourke: I’m really, it’s very upsetting really just to listen to Mary make so clear that the last six years of the Commission of Inquiry, in my view, were an abuse. Because like you asked Stephanie, but can we focus on the good things in the report or the good useful findings? But it’s not acceptable for one set of people to be given a monopoly on analysing and summarising all of the information that rightfully belongs to the survivors.

So yes, they found that 9,000 babies died, but how… why should they be the only ones to have been able to see that fact and to have taken six years to do it and for it to be a revelation and for us all to say, oh, well, we can’t say only bad things about this report because didn’t it give us loads of useful information? Well, actually, it’s not useful to the people if they can’t get the records to then take to the police or take to the civil courts or to seek a coroner’s inquest. 

So I don’t think there is any redeeming factor to this commission that has gone on. And that is not to say that the individuals involved didn’t mean well and work really hard and do their best, but the setup they were given and to an extent that they chose to operate was completely unacceptable because the very first thing, as Mary says, that survivors and victims of these gross and systematic human rights violations, which absolutely include torture and enforced disappearance, the very first thing that they need is information.

Because we actually live in a so-called democracy, Ireland, that has a criminal justice system, a civil justice system, a system of coroner’s inquest, supposedly freedom of information and GDPR, and survivors of these institutions have been systematically excluded from every single one of those systems and placed due to their vulnerability because we have to look after them and give them the special process into a completely unjust, undemocratic, supposed investigation that actually gathers up all their information, keeps it from them so that they cannot access the ordinary mechanisms of justice in our state. And now we have a narrative, and Mary gave some of the conclusions of the commission, and I can give you some more, but we have essentially a narrative that says human rights abuses did not happen. In mother and baby homes, people are upset, they’re sad, but they were not incarcerated, they were not forced to enter, they were not forcibly separated from their children, they claim they didn’t give consent, but there is no objective evidence that that is true. Their testimony is contaminated. There is a line at the beginning of the whole Confidential Committee report saying we repeat everything people said. Actually, many of the survivors say that their testimony has not been repeated faithfully, but they say we repeat what they said, but we can’t stand over it essentially because some of it is contaminated because the survivors seem to have met and spoken. But they don’t say which bits of the testimony are contaminated and then they essentially give a national historical record. And this goes to national education.

So not only are the survivors denied accountability in the ordinary justice sense, but even the type of education that they want to see in schools, in universities is going to be affected by this national record that had human rights nowhere within it and that did not allow the survivors to participate. So I just find it so upsetting that basically the survivors are actually in a worse position now than they were six years ago, in my view. And as you can hear from Mary, they just want access to what citizens of Ireland would think they’re entitled to if these kind of abuses happened to them.

Stephanie: If we loop back, because there’s a similar case in the Netherlands where there’s a government commission looking into women, unmarried mothers being forced to give up their children for adoption and the involvement of the Dutch government and Dutch Child Protective Services in that forcing. They have that commission, but parallel to that, there is one of those mothers who started a civil case. But what I understood from you is that the survivors here and the victims here were kind of kept away from being able to file a civil case because the commission was ongoing?

Maeve O’Rourke: Well, in practice during the commission, because it wasn’t giving anyone access to the information, it’s very difficult for someone to take a case. Because, of course, with the historical case, you need to show that the court should disapply the ordinary statute of limitations. And really the only way you can show some defending can get a fair trial, even if it’s the state, is that there’s a huge amount of documentary evidence that can form the basis, right, of the case. So being denied access to the archives de facto denies you access to court. 

But also we have heard evidence only two days ago, survivors were giving evidence to the parliament around the legislation that the government is planning. They’re planning legislation to ensure some exhumations, but they’re only doing that on condition that the coroner’s powers are disapplied. The government does not want to apply the coroner to any of these debts. And survivors were saying, I made a missing persons report to the police, and the police told me several times, oh, sorry, the Commission of Investigation is dealing with this. We can’t talk to you, essentially, because there’s a commission. But that’s not right, of course, because a commission of investigation cannot displace the ordinary criminal justice mechanisms of the state, which is my point, that people are being kept outside their citizenship rights, as was the case with the institutions in the first place.

And then Mary referred to previous redress schemes, and as I said, so many people were affected by numerous institutions like Mary. And the previous redress schemes for the industrial schools and the Magdalene Laundries have required waiver of rights. So people have had to sign to say we will never sue the state, or in the case of the industrial schools, we’ll never sue the state or the church.

Now, I have a case at the moment at the UN Committee Against Torture by Elizabeth Coppin. So Elizabeth Coppin versus Ireland, and there’s been an admissibility decision already, a very positive one for Elizabeth. She, like Mary, already received redress payments from the industrial school scheme. She also received a payment from the Magdalene scheme. She was forced to say she would never sue the state, but yet she wishes to see accountability, even in the sense of being able to access the archives of the state, at the very least, and for the state to stop saying, no human rights violations happened in Magdalene Laundries. So she went to the UN Committee Against Torture with an individual communication. The government said, hold on, she can’t come here. Committee has no jurisdiction because she… some strange argument about she hasn’t exhausted her domestic remedies because she’s not allowed. We told her she couldn’t. She signed a waiver. She can’t come here to complain to you. And she voluntarily signed this waiver. So she’s voluntarily not exhausted her domestic remedies. And the UN Committee Against Torture said, torture and freedom from torture and freedom from ill treatment is an absolute right, of course. And you cannot be forced to sign away your right to accountability. And so this waiver is unenforceable in respect of our jurisdiction. And we are going to hear this case. And the other hugely important point is that Ireland only ratified the UN Convention Against Torture in 2002, which is many years after Elizabeth Coppin was in the Magdalene Laundries. And the committee said, as we know, it’s continuing violations. Jurisprudence states that on the date that Ireland ratified in 2002, it then took on obligations to investigate, to ensure access to complaints mechanisms and actually also to ensure redress in respect of alleged or proven abuses that happened even before ratification.

Janet: Mary, you’re in your seventies now and you’re working really hard at this area. Do you imagine that you will see real justice in your lifetime?

Mary Harney: I was hopeful when the commission was set up. I thought when I realised the report was due to come out, I breathed a sigh of relief and thought, right, I can hang up my advocacy shoes now and take a rest. But after the report came out, I just couldn’t believe it and I thought not only am I going to need my advocacy shoes, I’m going to need bigger boots. I’m going to need hip waders to go through this. And so I cannot stop advocating now. I am not sure I will see justice, but I am hoping that the work that we have been doing in the ongoing advocacy that we continue will bear fruit for other people that are younger and are going through this right now. But as for myself, I’m hoping I will see justice, I always hope. But I know, for instance, my mother died before she got any justice. So, you know, every day we’re losing the older members that have survived the atrocities and they’re getting older and sicker and we’re losing them, unless people like me keep on keeping on.

Stephanie: And if you do get access to the archives and your personal information that you’re kind of fighting for or that’s one thing you’re very much advocating now, what do you still want to know? Because you seem to know really a lot about your life and you’ve managed to find your mother as well at a later age. So why is it important for you to see the personal files? Is there something there that you still want to know?

Mary Harney: Yes, I want to know about my mother’s life there. She was in that institution for two and a half years, yet I’m told I can’t find out anything about my mother, even though there could be mixed information, which is partly mine and partly hers. But no, I can’t find out. And my mother was not forthcoming, as many mothers aren’t, about what actually happened to them. You’ll often find this with survivors of other atrocities too, that they don’t want to talk about it. And so my mother didn’t tell me everything, and I want to find out the truth.

Janet: I wanted to thank both of you very much for taking part in this. I mean, for me, it’s a real revelation, all of the details that you’ve given, not only of what the Commission had to say, but what wasn’t there and how much more work there is still to be done. But maybe there are some elements that you’d like to add yourself. That’s our usual sort of first extra question at the end, is there anything that you think that we should have asked that we haven’t asked either Mary or Maeve?

Mary Harney: I would like to recommend that one of the parts of the memorialisation is to educate the young people to ensure these atrocities never happen again. And this is where the Irish Human Rights Centre at NUI Galway comes in. Maeve runs a clinic that is a hands-on process for young people to work with other advocates. And this year, one of the groups that I’m helping Maeve tutor has created a pilot scheme for educating teenagers and taking it into the schools the history of this dark chapter of Ireland, because it’s not included in any history books. And so we’re taking it in with the view to a human rights-based element, but it also contains history and it’s going to help young people to never forget what happened and to ensure it doesn’t happen when they’re adults.

Maeve O’Rourke: And I think I would just add that there’s actually a huge movement constantly building for truth in Ireland and many young people getting involved too, because thanks to Mary and other people like her, so many people are speaking out and are empowered by the advocacy that’s going on. Despite the ongoing abuses, they’re still feeling somewhat empowered by the advocacy. And so young people I think are noticing that Ireland still has massive problems of arbitrary detention, of outsourced, privately run, state-sponsored institutionalisation of people seeking asylum, overly institutionalising older people, people with intellectual disabilities, failing to have inquests when people die in state care sufficiently. You know, the Catholic Church was adamant from the foundation of the Irish state that it was going to provide social services and that it did not want state interference, but it wanted money. So we have major accountability problems in Ireland when it comes to the whole sphere of social care. I think people are seeing that and connecting the so-called past to the present. And we’re so grateful to Mary, to everybody who’s similarly affected for continuing to make the efforts they are to make sure that it is about transitional justice, as Mary says. It’s actually about institutional reform guarantees of non-recurrence. So I’m just so grateful every time I get to listen to Mary. And thank you very much for having us. And maybe one thing that is relevant to our European audience is that Mary and I are very involved with others in proposing the equivalent of the Stasi Records Agency as a model for creating that national archive. And we have worked closely so far with Dagmar Hovstad, the spokesperson for the Stasi Records Agency who visited the National University of Ireland in Galway for a session that I ran a couple of years ago. And we’ve really taken that on and proposed that to the government as the way forward on records.

Stephanie: Thanks for explaining that. I’m also suitably chastened about suggesting what the good parts of the report were, but that is also the journalist in me who finds the highlights. But I thought you explained very well how it’s just so problematic in its entirety that it’s hard to just focus on those things. So thank you also for explaining that and getting me out of my journalist brain.

Another question we always ask on Asymmetrical Haircuts, which is unprepared for both of you, is are you reading, watching, listening to something that you can recommend to our listeners? It doesn’t have to be legal. I assume you’re both doing lots of human rights things, but it can also be entirely unrelated if you do something to get your head out of human rights. Mary, do you have anything that you can recommend or share with us?

Mary Harney: I’m a mystery buff. I love to go into escapism, so I’m a big fan of people like Agatha Christie. You know, we’re not talking about Booker Prize stuff here, but it just helps me to transition my brain at night because there are some times when my PTSD will reoccur and I have to break away and engage with other things. You know, I go for long walks. I pet every dog I see, whether the owner realizes it or not. So, you know, if you want to know about the real situation of trafficking, then I recommend people would read Mike Malott’s book called Banished Babies. And that will give you a much clearer picture of how deep church and state were involved. There was no separation. But for lighthearted stuff, choose anything else.

Stephanie: Understood, we are all big mystery buffs and dog and cat petters ourselves, having to follow lots of war crimes and things. Maeve, what is your…

Maeve O’Rourke: I’m afraid that my recommendations are still human rights related, because I do this work mainly in my spare time. So actually, my evenings and weekends are, you know, very much spent a lot of the time on these issues. And so what I’d recommend to people, if they’re interested in the ongoing advocacy, because, you know, there’s so much interesting work and hopeful and creative work going on. And also, if people are personally affected, they may be interested in this too, but a couple of websites, so the Clann Project website, C-L-A-N-N project.org, Clann is Irish for family.

That is a project that I established with Claire McGettrick in 2015 to help people give witness statement evidence to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission, but it has a lot there besides on the website. Also, Justice for Magdalene’s research, jfmresearch.com, and also Adoption Rights Alliance, which is Adoption.ie if I’m not mistaken.

But, you know, if people want to kind of get more familiar with the ongoing fight. And Adoption Rights Alliance runs a private, closed, amazing peer support Facebook group for people who are personally affected.

Stephanie: Thank you so much. We’ll put up links to all of your recommendations in our show notes as usual. We want to thank you both for taking your time and for explaining it to us kindly but also talking about hugely traumatic things in such an open and honest way. And we’re really happy also that we got to talk a bit away from the institutional things of war crimes and stuff that we usually follow and talk to something very real.

Janet: But what struck me was how similar this is. We’re using the terms of atrocities and of justice, which has so many parallels in so many other parts of the world that we look at. And I found that very striking indeed. So again, thank you very much to both of you.

Mary Harney: Thank you.

Maeve O’Rourke:Thank you.

Stephanie: Thank you.

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