The Running Book by John Connell

Author:John Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Ann

In January 1984, a fifteen-year-old girl called Ann Lovett died giving birth to a baby boy in a grotto to the Virgin Mary beside the motte of Granard.

Ann’s passing caused a public outrage; her pregnancy had been hidden from her family and friends for shame and her tragic death sparked a debate about the taboo subjects of teenage pregnancy and pregnancy outside of marriage.

Ireland of the late 80s was a very different place to the one I now run through. The Catholic Church exerted a tremendous pull and power over the people and government and many things we now see as injustices occurred then.

Ann attended Cnoc Mhuire Secondary School at the top of the town. It was the same school my own mother had studied in just years before. Falling pregnant (outside of marriage), as it was known then, was seen as a downfall and scandal and could ruin the reputation of a family. A teenage pregnancy, more often than not, resulted in the girl’s being sent to an institutional convent or laundry where the baby would be born, taken from the mother and adopted out. These places were run by various orders of nuns and paid for by the Irish state. They were not places of love or care and many pregnant girls became, in effect, modern slaves, working for the nuns in their laundries, in some instances for years on end. Their babies, too, were not simply adopted but in many cases sold to American families for large money, the profits going to the religious orders.

Recently, a local historian, Catherine Corless, helped to discover the remains of up to eight hundred babies and young children from one such home. They were buried in a septic tank in the town of Tuam, a little over an hour’s drive from Longford town. The babies and young children had died, Catherine said, in some cases at a rate of two a day, due in large part to malnutrition and lack of care. The death rate inside that home in the 50s and 60s was five times the national average.

There were many at the time who believed in these institutions, who believed that the Church was carrying out the will of God and that it was for the betterment of the girls that their children born of sin were taken from them.

The language, even the official language, denigrated the children themselves: they were known as illegitimates. It was a system of banal evils, a system like Eichmann’s, that was run not by sociopaths but average people who were motivated by personal gain.

It was, however, not devotion that made religious orders sell children, it was not ideology that kept young girls behind eight-foot-high walls. There existed, in this time, many truths in Catholic Ireland. The truth of the clergy who ran things, the truth of the victims who suffered, the truth of the government who oversaw and funded the practices and the truth of the public who knew. All that is concrete and

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