We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

Father Simon O’Byrne. He explained to me: ‘Some people have this idea that a little child has a child’s soul. The soul does not occupy space; the soul is spiritual whether the person is ninety years of age or ninety seconds, the soul, when it leaves the body, is a full mature soul knowing all the mysteries and all the things that we don’t know. The soul is created at the instant of conception. That is the teaching of the Church.’ But the church didn’t really believe that a foetus was a person with a soul in the same sense that a ninety-year-old woman might be. If it did, how could Father Marx carry around and display the ‘little bodies’ in glass bottles? Should they not be buried in a churchyard with a headstone and prayers and solemn ceremony? The truth was that babies were disposable, not just before they were born, but afterwards as well. Temple Hill was part of the system that included the Mother and Baby Homes. Many of those homes did not even bother to record the burials of the huge numbers of babies who died in their care. This was, according to the church’s own canon law, perfectly fine. Of the Bessborough home in Cork, the commission of investigation into Mother and Baby Homes noted in 2019 that ‘More than 900 children died in Bessborough or in hospital after being transferred from Bessborough. Despite very extensive inquiries and searches, the Commission has been able to establish the burial place of only 64 children. The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesu...