A Betrayal of the children who built the state, Ireland's Survivors & a call to respect the Dail hunger strikers in their wishes not to be a political football.
Today marks 40 days since the Daíl hunger strikers started their hunger strike. Enfeebled elderly people brought up with abuse, deprivation & malnourishment at the hands of the state outside the Daíl, once again suffering hunger in order to try to get what little they are entitled to. You’d imagine for what they suffered they should be getting redress into the millions, they’d surely be owed hundreds of thousands in stolen wages from their lives as child forced labour, adjusted for inflation. No, all they are asking for is €15,000 of an annual pension, access to the Health Amendment Act medical card & housing supports. Things that they should already be entitled to. Yet for 40 days they have been left & largely ignored outside the Daíl. This is the back end of October & by no means fit weather to have human beings out on the street, let alone starving on the street in pursuit of their basic rights. They were there through storm Amy & they were there through the intense storm we had last night & will be when the remnants of hurricane melissa hit us on Monday. You or I have more regard for livestock or pets than the government has for us. Don’t forget that.
The story of Ireland’s industrial schools, Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes, and the myriad other institutions that blighted our society is not confined to history. It is a living, breathing wound carried to the core of thousands of our citizens. It’s a story of trauma. It is a story of a childhood stolen, of dignity systematically stripped away, and of a profound, fundamental trust broken not just by religious orders, but by the State itself. For decades, the political establishment, in all its guises, has compounded this original sin with a litany of failures of omission, of commission, of cowardice, and of calculated indifference. The bitter truth is that all sides of politics have failed those who survived, and the time for empty rhetoric is over. What is needed now is not political point-scoring, but a final, unequivocal, and just resolution.
This is not a sin carried by the church alone. This was state sanctioned child abuse contracted out in most but not all cases to the church. The church did not have the all encompassing power over the population that it did for most of the 20th century before Eamonn DeValera gave it to them. The first vice laws were written by Eamonn DeValera himself & would rival the virtue laws of the Arab peninsula.
The state is to be highlighted as the sole responsible party for the industrial schools whereas the other institutions were church & state. The survivors hunger striking themselves are very adamant that the state take all the responsibility for industrial schools, I submitted this before publishing to a person working with the hunger strikers & they told me to add this in & to be very clear on that. This is not out of any loyalty to the church, it's just they don't want people to mix them up with mother and baby homes or the laundries because the industrial schools were directly run by the state & under the remit of the department of education.
De Valera had a vision & he had an ideology of conservatism taken to the ninth degree. Ireland in the revolutionary period was quite progressive, many of our leaders going all the way back to Daniel O’Connell & through the leaders of the 1916 rising were progressive or even socialist in some cases. However a certain faction & a certain ideology via DeValera took hold & the rest is history. I will go into how it happened in another partnering article but for now I will get back to the direct topic at hand. Dev wasn’t by any means alone, but the church didn’t have the keys to the republic until they were given to them. In complement & to fulfil a certain vision.
The unsavoury reality Ireland has to grapple with is the fact that everyone was in one way or another complicit. There was no “we didn’t know” or “what could we have done” your forebears did know, there was plenty they could have done but they were too cowardly to do so then. Do not be the same order of coward now.
The truth is that the exploitation of women & children to an industrial scale was “necessary” to fulfill the vision. The forced labour was required by a state that wanted to undertake massive scale economic reforms & agricultural intensification but didn’t want to pay for it. It was necessary for a state allergic to the concept of proper provision for the people if the people in question weren’t voting for them. It was necessary as a cautionary tale to those not willing to go along with the lie, who either had their children taken or were committed to asylums.
The truth is the whole nation turned a blind eye & those that didn’t met the full force of the church and the state. What the church did wasn’t possible without the state & what the state did wasn’t possible without the church. Neither was possible without our silent obedient consent. Many people did try at small local levels to speak up or speak out. To hide or help people that the state was in pursuit of, the multitude of single mothers, children, teenagers & others who hit the pavement of London on money borrowed from people back home is testament to that.
It was never liked though & the few that stood up became pariahs in their communities if the state & church couldn’t get them.
This also applies to people who tried to help the travellers but that’s another (albeit related) story. “The cruelty man” was often seen in poor communities & traveller camps rounding up children to feed this state & church machine that constantly demanded fresh forced labour.
Still we need, you dear reader yourself need, to grapple with the truth that no one’s hands are clean of this including your own.
The scale of the abuse, once a dark secret whispered about in families and communities, is now a matter of public record, detailed in harrowing testimonies from the Ryan Report, the McAleese Report, and the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. These documents outline a system where children and vulnerable women were incarcerated, subjected to forced labour, physically and sexually abused, and had their identities and family bonds deliberately severed. The State was not a passive bystander; it was an active enabler. It funded these institutions, it sent children into them through the courts, and it turned a blind eye for decades, granting a de facto licence to religious orders to operate with impunity.
This foundational failure, the collusion between a deferential State and a powerful, unaccountable Church, created the original debt. subsequent political failures in addressing the aftermath have been a fresh betrayal in their own right.
The Failure of the Establishment: Delay, Deny, and hope they Die
For the survivors, the long battle for recognition and redress has been a second ordeal. The political establishment, particularly governments led by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, have often seemed to operate on a strategy of "delay, deny, and hope they die." The initial resistance to establishing inquiries was immense. When inquiries were finally established, their terms of reference were often criticised as too narrow, designed to limit the State’s exposure rather than to uncover the full, unvarnished truth.
The redress process itself, particularly the Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB), became a source of further hurt for many. While providing crucial financial compensation for some (not all), the process was often experienced as adversarial, retraumatising, and clinical. Survivors were forced to relive their most painful memories in a legalistic setting, with the burden of proof placed squarely on their shoulders. The infamous 2002 indemnity deal, where the State effectively capped the religious orders' financial contribution at €128 million, was a staggering political failure. It was a move that prioritised the financial interests of the State and the orders over the rightful & just claims of survivors, a deal that future generations will look back on with shame.
Even after the publication of the damning reports, the response has been characterised by a profound inertia. Recommendations for memorialisation, counselling, and medical care have been implemented slowly, inconsistently, and without the necessary urgency. The handling of the Mother and Baby Homes report, particularly the initial sealing of testimony for 30 years, was a catastrophic misstep that communicated to survivors that their truths were, once again, something to be locked away. The political language used has often been one of regret or apology, but it has rarely been matched by the swift, compassionate, and comprehensive action required. It is a failure of political will, a failure to treat this not as a historical issue, but as a present-day emergency of human suffering.
A very good friend of mine, Derek, a decent, kind & conscientious man, has been trying to highlight the plight of the hunger strikers since early on giving daily updates on tiktok, you can follow him @irish..farmer https://www.tiktok.com/@irish..farmer
The hunger strikers have explicitly stated that they do not want this to be turned into a political football. They don't want any specific party or end of politics to use their plight, they want honest support. Knowing the truth & the history, no end of politics has the right because we have all failed them. In line with the hunger strikers request not to be made into a political prop, Derek requested help from the group (Roots, a libertarian socialist & agrarian socialist group) but asked that we just repost stuff, share & raise awareness not to overshadow the hunger strikers or go against their very reasonable request. He was in direct contact with them & asked beyond general support that we stay out of it, which we did, up until now. Now we need to speak out because not everyone else has been so respectful. Particularly certain actors on the far right. The likes of Steenson, Dee Wall & the Irish Freedom Party were trying to take over & exploit the action against the wishes of the hunger strikers & trying to directly bully them into consenting to it. As usual from these scumbags.
The failure of the right wing political establishment:
We have gotten into a lot of the failure of the political establishment & much of it does not need re-stating. The thing that does need to be stated however is, even if what would go on to become Fianna Fail were the architect of this system, at times when they were in power Fine Gael was the maintenance man, & a loyal employee he was. Even up to the sealing of the records, FG voted for it. I will be an old woman when the records are released & the very youngest of the children born in the laundries are slightly older than me. The women who suffered & the children who suffered in the industrial schools after being transferred from the laundries will all be long dead by the time that happens. Both stole from them the last hope of truth, or ever meeting the families that were stolen from them.
Today they both, along with the independents in government with them, leave the hunger strikers to freeze & starve in front of the Dail & a few weeks ago had the gall to try threatening them & tell them that if they die or their health fails the hunger strikers will only be liable for it themselves. For all this they have done a lot of the faithful of both parties along with those who are still alive from amongst the ranks of the church should have been in front of the Hague. However the Irish ability to sweep pure evil under the rug, seemingly knows no bounds. The demands of the survivors couldn't be more modest, all of these TDs have gotten more for their local favored voters when asked in ordinary constituency work. They know how to pay a debt when they want to.
The Failure of the Left: Instrumentalising Pain
If the political centre and right have failed either through direct facilitation & apologia or indifference and bureaucracy, sections of the left have failed in a different, more subtle way. There has, rightly, been a strong voice from left-wing and socially progressive parties and independents championing the cause of survivors. However, there is a danger, at times, of this support becoming instrumentalised.
The plight of survivors can be folded into a broader, pre-existing narrative of an inherently oppressive Catholic Church. While this critique is undeniably true, there is not nearly enough scrutiny on what the state itself has done to facilitate & cover up every square inch of it they could, nor is there nearly enough of a critique of the communities & families, of the broader society that rubber stamped this in their castigation of survivors & those who did stand up. There is also a risk that the specific, unique, and deeply personal trauma of survivors becomes a political prop. A potent example to be deployed in a wider ideological battle. The focus can shift from the immediate, practical needs of ageing survivors for redress, healthcare, and truth. The problem is also, that at times in the past, what remained of the left after the decisive economic & social purges of the DeValera era, didn't speak up or fight nearly as much as they could have because of our culture. It is difficult to work in a community or within a union while uncovering quite a lot of dirty laundry that many families & their broader communities would rather hide under the bed.
The survivor is not an abstract concept; they are an individual who endured unimaginable suffering & whose labour was exploited to aid the rebuilding of the state. Their struggle is for justice, they didn't sign up to be martyrs for the collective. When support becomes conditional on aligning with a broader agenda, it ceases to be pure advocacy and becomes a form of political capitalisation. What many on the left have trouble coming to terms with is the imperfect nature of survivors who are real people & sometimes as a result of religious trauma become extremely religious themselves because it was literally not merely figuratively beaten into them. One now passed on survivor in my own life, walked up & down the passageway to her house saying the rosary every day for decades praying that the child that was stolen from her would one day find her. A few years before she died he did, he found his original records cleaning out the house after his adoptive parents died all the way over in America & searched for her. Regardless of your own belief, the religion that worked her as a slave, stole her son, sold him for export like a calf & abused her brought her hope, a coping mechanism & if you were to ask her, her prayers brought her son home. Regardless of what you believe, or even what is or is not factual reality, that's what she believed. The survivor's voice must be centred, even if they don't perfectly fit a certain world view. The true test of support from the left is whether it can relentlessly pressure for tangible outcomes: like the release of all records, proper funding for services, and a survivor-centred redress scheme, or the modest demands of the DaIl hunger strikers without conditions & for all survivors. Scrutinising your own side is always difficult & this doesn’t go to say that the left hasn’t done good work, there would be no accountability at all & no investigations at all was it not for the left, but we need to be self critical & ensure that we are & continue to do the right thing by survivors & listen to the criticism they have, and take it on board.
The Most Dangerous Failure: The Cynical Embrace of the Far-Right
But of all the political failures, the most grotesque and dangerous in the contemporary moment is the attempted co-option of survivor trauma by far-right and populist elements. This is a phenomenon that deserves the most vigorous and unequivocal condemnation.
For years, many of these same elements were silent on the issue, or their ideological forebears promoted the very kind of conservative, Catholic-nationalist ideology that provided the breeding ground for these abuses. Not only that but some of the people & organisations concerned took money directly from ultra conservative catholic organisations trying to get back to the “good old days” when we locked up impoverished children & unmarried mothers, even rape victims, for life. Some such as the Irish Freedom Party, Founded & led by Hermann Kelly who wrote articles trying to absolve the church & state, have long pushed the narrative that survivors of institutional abuse were “after money” Now, however, they have discovered the power of the survivor narrative. They have seen the raw, justified anger and have sought to harness it for their own divisive ends.
The far-right does not genuinely care about the survivors of industrial schools or Mother and Baby Homes. Theirs is a politics of weaponised grievance. They seek to use the legitimate pain of survivors as a blunt instrument with which to attack their preferred targets of the day: immigration, multiculturalism, and the "globalist" elite. The narrative they construct is a facile and dishonest one: "The State that abused you then is the same State that helps refugees now." It is a false equivalence of the most vile kind. Especially being uttered by the fetid lips of the vanguard of the same ideology that created the institutions the hunger strikers survived.
This argument is not only morally bankrupt but logically incoherent. It seeks to pit one group of vulnerable people against another. It ignores the fact that the abuse was perpetrated by a specific, historical nexus of Church and State power, a power structure that survivors have been fighting against for decades. A power structure that the Irish far right wants to resurrect from the dead to an even further extreme than it even was back when we had it. To now use their pain to argue for the creation of a new, ethno-nationalist state married to a version of the church so extreme many are considered heretical, that would likely be just as hostile to the vulnerable and the "different" if not more so is the ultimate betrayal. It is to take the survivor's demand for justice and twist it into a cry for the same form of exclusion and hatred dressed up in new clothes with an updated & expanded list of targets. .
These actors show up at the Daíl not with empathy, but with cameras, livestreaming the pain of others to grow their online followings. They offer no concrete policy proposals for redress, no detailed plans for counselling services, no compassionate understanding of intergenerational trauma. They offer only rage, division, and the empty promise that if you direct your anger at their chosen scapegoats, things will be better. They are parasites on the body of Ireland's national trauma, and their attempts to capitalise on this suffering must be called out and rejected by every decent person, regardless of political affiliation. Survivors are not pawns in a culture war; they are human beings owed a debt that cannot be weaponised for cheap political gain.
The Irish far right are pioneers for the Irish centre to right wing political establishment, in spite of pretending to be anti establishment. This is yet another example of the same pattern. They clear the way, cause disruption or discredit an important movement like the pioneers in the american west clearing land & murdering the native americans for “civilised society” to move in behind them & develop it, freshly relieved of obstacles or enemies, they mean to take over & kill the movement & to hold up the bodies of the survivors as martyrs to legitimise themselves. They see only their usefulness, alive or dead.
The Path to Putting It Right: Survivor-Centred Justice
So, where do we go from here? After so many failures, how can politics finally serve those it has so profoundly wronged?
The solution begins with a fundamental shift in approach. This must become the paramount, cross-generational priority of the Irish State. It is not one issue among many; it is the foundational moral challenge of our contemporary nation. The following actions are not merely recommendations; they are urgent necessities:
The number 1 item has to be the immediate granting of the modest, rightful demands of the hunger strikers.
Full Transparency and Access to Information: Every single record pertaining to every institution must be preserved, digitised, and made unconditionally accessible to survivors and their families. The idea that testimonies or documents could be sealed for decades is an abomination. Truth is the first and non-negotiable step towards healing.
A Radically Improved Redress Scheme: The current system is not fit for purpose. It must be replaced with a process that is non-adversarial, trauma-informed, and generous in its scope. The onus must be taken off the survivor to prove their suffering. The State must accept its liability and act as a facilitator of justice, not an adversary in a legal battle.
Adequate Funding for Lifelong Support: Financial compensation, while vital, is not enough. Survivors need guaranteed, lifelong access to the highest quality psychological counselling, medical care, and holistic support services. This must be funded by the State as a permanent entitlement, recognising that the trauma does not end with a payment.
Proper Securing of Restitution from Religious Orders: The 2002 indemnity deal must be revisited. While it may be legally binding, the moral pressure must be intensified to force the religious orders to make a proportionate financial contribution that truly reflects their culpability. All property & i mean all, along with assets belonging to the orders involved must be immediately confiscated. Whatever the church pays the state should also match as they were in it entirely together, the state should provide additional funds as well specifically for the industrial school survivors as they were entirely under their remit. This is a matter of justice, not charity.
A Formal and Unqualified State Apology, Backed by Action: Apologies have been given, but their power has been diluted by subsequent inaction. What is needed is a final, comprehensive state apology, delivered in the Dáil, that acknowledges the totality of the State's failure and is immediately followed by the swift implementation of all the above measures.
The survivors of Ireland's institutional horrors are not a problem to be managed. They are our mothers, our fathers, our grandparents, our neighbours. They are living witnesses to a catastrophic failure of our society. They have carried their burdens for a lifetime, while the political system, state, church, communities & Irish society itself have shuffled their feet and looked away.
The time for excuses is over. The time for half-measures is over. The time for allowing this profound human tragedy to be exploited by cynical political actors, particularly those on the far-right who offer nothing but hatred, is absolutely over.
This is Ireland's reckoning. It is a test of our character as a nation. We must finally, and without reservation, stand with the survivors. We are world famous for standing with the oppressed all over the world & should be proud of that, it is time now to fully stand up & be counted for our own as well. We must demand that our politicians, of all stripes, rise above their past failures and their present political calculations to deliver a justice that is swift, comprehensive, and dignified. The survivors have waited long enough. They need it put right, and they need it put right now. Their courage in speaking out has forced a nation to look in the mirror. The very least they deserve is to see a reflection of a country that is finally, and truly, sorry, and is unwaveringly committed to making amends.
A final word to families trying to hide their complicity: You cannot escape the truth, your family cannot escape the truth, the reckoning is coming & you can be on the side of truth & justice or it can be dragged out of you. We live in an era where mass political action is easier than ever & if this doesn't drag out the truth, all the Americans, British & others taking family DNA tests & finding relatives they never knew they had will. By not embracing the truth now all you are doing is making it the responsibility of your descendants who had never hand act or part in it, who never knew the stories & by then it will be too late, the survivors will have died knowing no peace & no restitution. It will be your fault every bit as much as it was the fault of the church & the state. What certain families & communities have done in this country is no better than the “Honour Killings” in other parts of the world which we all rightfully condemn. The unmarked graves lining the grounds of institutions are testament to that.