I have been talking a lot recently about public or collective memory. The series of commemorations that began two years ago illustrates that while we may have different interpretations of the events that gave rise to the birth of our nation, it is clear that the happenings of 1919-1923 are firmly embedded in the collective conscience. We will never agree on the finer detail of the roles played by the principal protagonists involved in the Treaty negotiations of 1921.
Still, the events that led to the Treaty are very much part of public memory. The penal laws, the Famine, and the long history of emigration are all part of the memory of our nation.
What is not preserved in public memory is an entirely different matter. On 6 September 1922, a vast corpus of law enacted by the Westminster Parliament was carried across and became the law of the nascent Irish Free State. The legislation included the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
The 1833 Act is a potent reminder of Ireland's connection to one of the darkest episodes in World history. That connection is not part of collective memory and restoring it is not without difficulties. The mindsets that ensured it was excluded from our history books still operate to obscure, deflect and recategorise the involvement.
The Colonial Slave Registers of the Caribbean tell the real story, the factual story. The registers evidence that many enslaved Africans and their descendants were named Ireland, Castlebar, Westport, Sligo, Cuffe, Bourke, Garvey, and Browne. Accounts of branding with hot irons provide us with the names of Irish planters whose initials adorned the backs and shoulders of enslaved people. This is uncomfortable history for some.
Further uncomfortable history is revealed in the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Report 2020. The publication coincided with the 1919-1923 commemoration period. This was coincidental, but it was also very appropriate.
For almost a century, the many classes of victims catalogued in the report were excluded from collective memory because someone decided they should be excluded from society, put aside, silenced, and denied the human right to have a life of their choosing. Over the past decade, survivors and descendants have had to fight a powerful, lawyered, and detached State for acknowledgement and the inclusion of their life experiences in the story of the nation birthed a century ago.
There was an opportunity in 1922 to take a different path. However, while the architects of the Free State disagreed on many things, they emphatically agreed to continue with the unconscionable exclusion of women and children they deemed undeserving of society.
The language of these early statesmen is indistinguishable from that used centuries earlier. In 1707, an 'Act to Prevent the Destroying & Murdering of Bastard Children.' imposed the death penalty on 'lewd women' who killed their infants. In 1921, Mayo County Council set about consigning the workhouses of Mayo to history. Suggestions in the scheme for dealing with unmarried and pregnant mothers were published in the Connaught Telegraph (3 September 1921 ):
'It need hardly be pointed out that the presence of this particular class would be a stigma on the status of the Central Home. The committee should consider how the following suggestions can be made practicable:
(a ) Transferring these undesirables to some provincial or national institutions where their maintenance will be paid for, as far as possible, by their own labour, eg, laundry work, basket making, sewing, knitting, etc.
(b ) Utilising the present Magdalene Asylums.
(c ) Allowing such cases, a small pension for maintenance in their own or friends home during period of incapacitation from work.'
What happened next is detailed in the 2020 report and the stories of survivors.
Reconstructing the public memory of these terrible chapters in our history has commenced. The dark history of Irish slaveholders and their legacies must be added to the national education curriculum. So too must the history and lives of those imprisoned in Magdalene Laundries and other victims of the Irish State. NUI Galway's Irish Centre for Human Rights has started the ball rolling with a pilot programme to teach secondary school pupils about human rights abuses in industrial schools, laundries, and mother and baby homes.
