The high walls of the different institutions of Ireland after her independence hid away many of the inconveniences that society could find no other way of dealing with. Whether the industrial schools, the Magdalene Laundries, or the Mother and Baby Homes, everyone knew the existed. They knew who was sent there. But the walls allowed them to avoid having to face society’s shame. The high walls were ubiquitous across Ireland for much of the 20th century.
Being charitable to the general population of Ireland, perhaps the true extent of how life was behind the walls of the institutions was not known. In 2009, the Commission of Inquiry into Child Abuse, (known locally as the Ryan Report), and the Report by the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, (otherwise known as the Murphy Report), lifted the veil on some of what had been whispered about. No doubt they revealed a scale and depravity that very few could have expected and forced society to look upon what it had previously ignored.
The reports of the Committee and Commission into the Magdalene Laundries (2013) and the Mother and Baby Homes (2021) were much less shocking but they told a story that society at the time was aware of and did not—in the main—object to. All of these institutions were recognisable by the high walls and big gates that kept prying eyes out and residents (or inmates) in. They kept the lives considered ill-fitted to Irish society out of sight. And out of sight, was, essentially, out of mind. Not having to look upon and to face the women and children who were placed in these institutions meant consciences were seldom pricked.
The walls enabled society to turn a blind eye. The walls enabled the scale of abuse. Would anything different have happened if the full picture was known? It is hard to believe that it would. Enough was known and still very little was done. The reports of the various commissions demonstrate that when concerns were raised, they were easily ignored, brushed aside or buried. Leo Varadkar, as deputy prime minister in Ireland, upon the release of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Mother and Baby Homes in 2021 said “This report teaches us that when good people believe bad things about others, then terrible actions can be rationalised away.”
Terrible actions can be rationalised away by societies for all sorts of reasons. History is replete with examples. Hannah Arendt writes of the banality of evil. Social experiments—think of the Stanford experiment as one of the more famous—show that people take very little coercion to rationalise what they would otherwise consider unthinkable.
On October 17th, Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, put into action legislating for regulating ‘safe access zones.’ The new law will create exclusion zones within 100 metres of any premises that currently or may in the future provide abortion services, including GP clinics, hospitals, and family planning centres such as Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) clinics. These buffer zones are Ireland’s new walls. Ostensibly, the ‘safe access zones’ are in place to allow women and medical practitioners to access abortion services without being harassed. However, with no evidence of any harassment taking place, the unrelenting pressure from activists and politicians to put this measure in place indicates that there is more to these restrictions on civil rights. They are designed to salve the conscience of society to the reality of what is being carried behind the walls of Ireland’s health services.
Speaking in May after the legislation to introduce the zones was passed, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, dressed the zones up in euphemistic and sanitised language. “It is about dignity. It is about ensuring that people can access healthcare services and feel safe and not be intimidated. It aims to ensure that our friends, colleagues, and family members are treated with consideration and empathy at a time when they need care.” Irrelevant was the position of Garda (Irish Police) Commissioner Drew Harris that these new zones were unnecessary to deal with any intimidatory behaviour. “No incidence of criminality has been reported or observed” he stated in 2019.
Irrelevant also was information from the hospitals themselves that they were not being subjected to any intimidatory behaviour. The medical director of the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, the country’s busiest maternity hospital, admitted when asked about alleged pro-life protests that he couldn’t recall when the last protest of this type took place outside his hospital. I walk past the Rotunda two or three times every day and have never seen any protests. Cork and Limerick Hospitals confirmed the same.
According to Eilís Mulroy, a representative for the Pro-Life Campaign (PLC), speaking to the National Catholic Register earlier this year, “this series of public statements completely undermine the narrative being pushed by the government to justify its exclusion zone bill. “The bill singles out pro-life citizens and criminalizes them for engaging in peaceful non-confrontational gatherings, including even silent prayer, within 100 meters of every GP clinic, hospital or family planning centre in the country regardless of whether the facilities in question perform abortions or not.”
What appears to be most critical is the need to put the buffer zones in place so that no one need dwell upon the reality of what abortion is. That no one be reminded that life is at stake and that human life is being taken. Abortion is already sanitised in language and now in practice. In response to Minister Donnelly announcing the date for the implementation of the zones, the National Women’s Council of Ireland tweeted that ‘At long last, women and pregnant people will be able to access reproductive healthcare of all kinds, in privacy, safely and with dignity.
On its website, the NWCI claims to be Ireland’s leading national representative organisation for women and women’s groups in Ireland, yet at the same time it clarifies that: “By ‘woman’ we refer to any person who identifies as a woman”. The question as to whether the NWCI represents ‘pregnant people’ if they do not identify as women (and whether they feel that they are part of the patriarchy that needs to be smashed), is unclear. However, the choice of language is standard fayre nowadays in Ireland.
For many in Ireland, abortion is not healthcare; abortion is not dignified, abortion is not safe. Even many those who may feel it is necessary, do not endorse the notion that abortion is a neutral or banal act.
Longtime feminist campaigner, Nell McCafferty who died this year, caused shock when she questioned some of the centrally held theses of the pro-abortion movement. Speaking at a Women in the Media conference in 2018 in the lead-up to Ireland’s referendum which resulted in the removal of the prohibition on abortion and the dehumanisation of the life of the unborn child, she said: “I’ve been trying to make up my mind on abortion. Is it the killing of a human being? Is it the end of potential life?” She said she could not answer the question. “But it’s not that I’m unable—I am unwilling to face some of the facts about abortion.” She went on to say that “the pro-lifers are right” that allowing terminations at the 12-weeks stage of pregnancy means the dismembering of babies in the womb.
The safe access zones are just another extension of the banalisation of the ending of unborn human life. In 2013, when the tragic death of Savita Halappanaver was used to manufacture the clamour for the removal of the Irish constitutional protection of the unborn, Senator Jim Walsh was excoriated for spelling out the reality of abortion in the Irish Senate. Since then, hardly anyone speaks the truth.
The government in Ireland, as in the North, as in the UK, attempts to mask the inhumanity of the act by dehumanising the unborn child through the manipulation of language that is now all too familiar. Termination. Foetus. Reproductive health. Procedure. Pro-choice. Anti-choice. No one can speak the reality. With the manipulation of language firmly embedded in polite discourse, lived reality has to align with the words being used. The act itself has to be sanitised and protected from any divergent perspectives that may bring the sanitisation into question.
The UK Government announced that from 31st October 2024 “safe access zones” will take effect around all abortion clinics in England and Wales. Similar rules were implemented in Northern Ireland in September 2023, and in Scotland last month. This means that after the 31st of October there will be “safe access zones” in place across the whole of the two neighbouring islands of Ireland and the United Kingdom. The wording of the legislation in each of the jurisdictions is remarkably similar, with any conduct that will either intentionally or recklessly influence a person in relation to availing of, or providing, abortion services being verboten within the vicinity of abortion providers.
What this will mean in the practical application of the law remains to be seen but it is certain to have a chilling effect. In the UK, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested in November 2022 for silently praying in a censored “buffer zone” in Birmingham. She was subsequently released, re-arrested and then won a payout of £13,000 from West Midlands Police in acknowledgement of her unjust treatment, and the breach of her human rights, for unlawful arrest. Under such wording as is included in the buffer zone legislation, even blessing oneself for the Angelus when walking in the vicinity of a healthcare clinic could be construed as ‘recklessly influencing.’
It should not be considered far-fetched to imagine that malicious complaints will be manufactured by activists against anyone it considers to be in disagreement with them. The nature of thoughtcrime is that it is impossible to prove what is in someone’s mind but also impossible to disprove whether someone may have been recklessly influenced by something that may or may not have happened inside your head. With the buffer zones, no one will see the reality. No one will hear the reality. No one will speak the reality. It is likely anyone even silently praying to stop the reality will be prevented from doing so.
Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar at the time of the release of the Mother and Baby Homes report in 2021, said:
We should not be afraid or embarrassed to reflect on how much we have changed as a society and as a State, and how far we have come … nor should we think that today our standards are good enough for the future. Decades hence, people may look back on this time and point to our failings too and have to apologise for them. As we read this report, both hopeful and shameful, it should spur us on now to do better in the years to come, not just for the women and children who survived the mother and baby institutions but also for the women and children of today and of the future.
Those walls may no longer be in use but new barriers are being erected in law that serve the same purpose of hiding away unwanted children and making invisible society’s new ways of dealing with that inconvenience. And again, it is women, and the children of the future, who are being sacrificed for society’s peace of mind. We have not come far at all.
