Les silences de l’Irlande
▻http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Les-silences-de-l-Irlande.html
Grâce au succès du film Les Magdalene Sisters, les Magdalene laundries, ces institutions chargées de punir les #femmes « déchues » d’Irlande, font désormais partie de la mémoire collective du pays. Malgré des avancées sociales importantes, les victimes attendent encore excuses officielles et réparation.
/ femmes, #Eglise, #oppression
Près de 800 squelettes de bébés découverts dans un ancien couvent en Irlande
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2014/06/04/pres-de-800-squelettes-de-bebe-decouverts-dans-un-ancien-couvent-en-irlande_
Près de 800 squelettes de nouveau-né ont été découverts dans une cuve en béton, à côté d’un ancien couvent catholique de la ville de Tuam en #Irlande. Entre 1925 et 1961, ce lieu a accueilli des jeunes mères célibataires tombées enceintes hors mariage.
« Quelqu’un m’avait mentionné l’existence d’un cimetière pour nouveau-nés, mais ce que j’ai découvert était bien plus que cela », a déclaré l’historienne Catherine Corless, à l’origine de cette découverte. C’est en réalisant des recherches sur les archives d’un ancien couvent de Tuam – aujourd’hui reconverti en lotissement – que l’historienne a découvert que 796 enfants avaient été enterrés sans cercueil ni pierre tombale. Ces nouveau-nés auraient été enterrés secrètement par les sœurs du couvent de Bon-Secours.
Quelle horreur
▻http://www.directmatin.fr/monde/2014-06-04/un-memorial-pour-les-796-enfants-morts-au-foyer-de-tuam-680356
L’historienne a rapidement constaté un écart criant entre le nombre de décès consignés dans les registres et la présence d’un seul enfant du foyer dans le cimetière de la ville. Or, dans une ancienne fosse septique découverte par des enfants en 1975 sur le site du couvent, de nombreux ossements épars avaient été retrouvés. Catherine Corless en a déduit qu’il s’agissait des restes des petites victimes.
« Il y a juste un enfant qui a été enterré dans le cimetière de Tuam. C’est ainsi que j’en ai déduit qu’il y avait au moins 796 bébés dans la fosse », a-t-elle expliqué au Daily Mail, considérant qu’aucun bébé n’avait été confié à des familles d’acueil.
Un monument commémoratif érigé
Des documents historiques ont confirmé que les enfants ont été mal nourris et négligés. La plupart sont morts de pneumonie, de rougeole et de gastro-entérite. Une femme qui a vécu au sein de l’établissement a confirmé ces faits au Daily Mail. Elle se rappelle que les enfants de l’époque étaient « rarement lavés » et portaient souvent les mêmes vêtements pendant des semaines.
De son côté, l’Eglise catholique irlandaise a annoncé qu’un monument commémoratif sera érigé portant le nom des 800 enfants sur le site de l’ancien couvent, a indiqué The Independent.
« et Jésus leur dit : laissez venir à moi les petits enfants » (Mathieu 19:14)
Les 796 enregistrements des décès à l’état-civil.
Death records of children who died in Tuam / Sunday World
▻http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/news/tuam-death-records-full-list-revealed-mass-grave-septic-tank
The Sunday World has obtained the records of the 796 innocents who died and were buried in an unmarked mass grave.
This is the roll of the dead that campaigners now want erected as a permanent memorial to generations of babies that were shamefully treated by the church and state.
And it uncovers the full horrors of what went on behind the walls of Tuam and other Mother and baby homes where premature infant deaths were rampant.
Official records obtained today by the Sunday World list each name alongside the many causes of death that stalked the rooms of the home.
Each individual name hides a harrowing history of broken lives, and campaigners now want them all remembered properly at the site of their mass burial.
Crammed into communal nurseries, contagious diseases ran unchecked. The youngest to die was recorded as just “10 minutes old”. One boy wasn’t even given a first name. The oldest was eight, having lived all her life in the home until measles took her.
In less than one month, between November 27 and December 24, 1936, TWENTY TWO died from measles.
Quelques graphiques
Décès par année
Décès par âge
répartition par sexe (d’après les prénoms) :
• 393 garçons
• 400 filles
L’analyse des causes de décès demande pas mal de recodage : plusieurs éléments sont fréquemment indiqués, fautes d’orthographe, etc.
Après un traitement sommaire (je n’ai pas exploité les mentions mises en deuxième rang), on peut noter
• rougeole 81
• débilité congénitale 77,
auxquels s’ajoutent débilité à la naissance 68
et délicats à la naissance 10
(plus divers autres indications de faiblesse)
• idiot congénital 15
• prématuré 49
• rhume 78
• bronchite ou bronchopneumonie 40
• syphilis congénitale 12
…
Oui, il faudrait disposer du nombre de naissances.
Sinon, sur le « Home »
Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
▻http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Secours_Mother_and_Baby_Home
Unwed single women who became pregnant were sent to give birth there, rather than at a hospital or at home. The nuns were trained nurses and midwives. In 1927, the Board of Health directed that a maternity ward be added to the Home so that the mothers could be segregated from the public wards. This was built in 1929. The mothers were required to stay inside the Home for one year, doing unpaid work for the nuns. It has been claimed that this work was in penance for their pregnancies. Some women who had had two confinements were sent directly to nearby Magdalene laundries after giving birth as punishment for recidivism. For each mother and child in the home, the County Council paid the nuns £1 a week. At the end of the year, the mothers were sent away while their babies were typically kept at the Home. The children stayed there until they could be adopted, fostered, or until they were old enough to be sent to industrial boarding schools.
Survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby scandal deserve justice | Tanya Gold
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/09/survivors-ireland-mother-baby-scandal-justice-tuam
‘There is nothing for some victims – no possibility of apology, financial settlement, memorial, medical history or opportunity for healing.’
Thursday 9 March 2017
It is true, as survivors said it was. Under a small patch of grass by a playground in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland, the bodies of the children who died in the local Mother and Baby home lie in unmarked graves. The Mother and Baby homes of Ireland – the last of which closed in 1996 – were run like punishment hostels for unmarried pregnant women. Their children were taken for adoption, fostering or the horror of the industrial schools, or they died in their thousands, of malnutrition and neglect. In some cases the bodies were used for dissection in medical schools.
#témoignage d’un rescapé
The ‘mother and baby home’ at Tuam, Ireland, where friends just ‘disappeared, one after the other’ - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/13/a-survivor-recalls-the-mother-and-baby-home-at-tuam-in-ireland-where
Of the first, he has no independent recollection as he was only a year and a half old. His mother told him 48 years later about it. One day at Tuam, she explained, she found out that she was about to be separated from her son by the nuns who ran the home, perhaps forever. So she came in and “cut off a lock of my hair as a memento.”
The nuns then sent her to an institution then called “ the Magdalene Asylum* ” in Galway, he said. She was 17-years-old. “The key was turned in the door and she remained there 15 years until she got the courage to escape.”
…
“And during this reunification, the most moving moment was when my mother Bridey went through her suitcase and presented this lock of hair to my wife,” Rodgers said, choking with emotion as he recounted his mother’s words to his wife:
“‘Julie, darling. I regret I wasn’t here to give my son away when you got married. I’m releasing him now. He’s yours.’” Six years later, she died. And Rodgers, who had promised her to keep her secrets until her death, began to tell her story.
▻https://www.letemps.ch/monde/2017/03/04/restes-denfants-decouverts-un-ancien-foyer-catholique
35 000 femmes ont résidé dans le foyer
Au total, ce sont dix-huit foyers gérés par les institutions catholiques qui sont visés par l’enquête de la commission pour des faits couvrant une période allant de 1922 à 1998. On estime à environ 35 000 le nombre de femmes tombées enceintes hors mariage qui y ont résidé.
Témoignage de Catherine Corless
▻http://www.irishcentral.com/news/how-she-did-it-the-heroic-irish-historian-who-broke-the-tuam-baby-home
She has built a scale model of the Tuam home in her living room. It allows the survivors to reconnect with traumatic childhoods, which many of them had blanked out, and gives them the strength to talk about their experiences as “illegitimate” children in the home.
La plupart des articles font un lien avec les blanchisseuses des Magdalene asylums
Ireland apologises for ’slave labour’ at Magdalene Laundries | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/19/ireland-apologises-slave-labour-magdalene-laundries
Ireland apologises for ’slave labour’ at Magdalene Laundries
Taoiseach Enda Kenny forced into finally saying sorry for ’the hurt and trauma’ caused to up to 10,000 Magdalene women
Magdalene Laundries
Voir également les photos des orphelinats Magdaléniens (pas pu m’empêcher)
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4352372/Haunting-images-everyday-life-Magdalene-Laundries.html
Images from Magdalene Laundries from around the world show what everyday life looked like in the homes across the world.