Tony Flannery

THE IRISH RELIGIOUS CONGREGATIONS

For two centuries, after the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, the Irish people were persecuted for their loyalty to Catholicism as the British State converted to various forms of Protestantism. Harsh penal laws were enacted following the Jacobite-Williamite wars in the 1690’s. The primary purpose of these laws was to ensure that Irish Catholics remained poor, socially backward, and uneducated. 

Then, after centuries of displacement, poverty and persecution, came the calamity of the Great Famine in the late 1840’s. Despite now being an intrinsic part of the United Kingdom, the British Government did little to alleviate the dire situation in Ireland due to the laissez-faire politics of the time. In

Tuam’s nuns have been unfairly demonised ​​Western People 17.2.2026 Brendan Hoban

In 2014 when news broke that 796 children had died in the Mother and Baby Home in Tuamand there were no burial records even though death certificates existed, it opened up an ongoing process that produced a government Commission of Investigation, a sustained and sometimes savage attack on the Bon Secour Sisters who had responsibility for the home and at present an ongoing excavation at the site to establish the facts.

The Children’s Home in Tuam is perhaps the most notorious example of the depravities of Catholic Ireland, and the nuns who ran it have become a byword for cruelty. But the reality of what happened could turn out to be more complicated

In 2023, the government of Ireland offered three new postgraduate scholarships for research into childhood disadvantage. The scholarships were established “in memory of the children who died in Mother and Baby Institutions” and the scheme was named after a remarkable woman called Alice Litster (1894-1980).