Even if these operations are shocking revelations to those who have a romantic notion of the past then the risk of their disillusionment is worth the price of finally exposing the hypocrisy of those in the establishment who rest self-righteously on the rewards of those who in yesteryear’s freedom struggle made the supreme sacrifice. Sinn … Read more
The Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has unleased another wave of soul-searching in Ireland. How could a society claiming to be ‘Christian’ have failed to protect, and even to have harmed, its most vulnerable – unmarried mothers and their ‘illegitimate’ children? The harrowing accounts fit within a wider … Read more
The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1862). The quote above is from a work of fiction, but the author was drawing on a memory of four years imprisonment, following conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle – a Russian literary … Read more