Looking the other way

Why do so many of us look the other way when horrendous abuses and injustices are being committed under our very noses? Maybe it's an unsavoury part of human nature that we find it easier to ignore or pretend we don't see things that we know are wrong and causing great suffering to our fellow human beings.
I'm not referring to passing by collectors on the street who shower you with smiles and hellos and beam at you as if you were a long lost friend to get your attention. There are only so many charities one can support, and sometimes you wonder where the money is really going.

The kind of looking the other way I have in mind is the sort that allows an injustice to continue by default.

For example, the Nazis couldn't have rounded up millions of innocent Jews and Gypsies without the advantage of so many millions of other “decent” people who knew about this crime “minding their own business” and pretending it didn't concern them.

After the Second World War, Germans in their tens of millions said: We didn't know, and yet if you look at the old newsreels, you can see them in breathtaking serried ranks, stretching as far as the eye can see, loudly cheering a regime advocating genocide.

“Decent” people continued to pretend they didn't know even when they caught the whiff of burning flesh from the chimneys of nearby death camps.

A similar if less deadly form of self-delusion or denial was at work during the industrial school era in Ireland, and when thousands of young women were confined in “Magdalene Laundries”.

We ask today how so many innocent children and single mothers could have been subjected to horrific abuses in a civilised democratic State. A State where most people went to mass and more or less behaved in a civilised manner.

The majority of Irish people who lived through the decades of that so-called “Hidden Ireland” deny they knew anything of the abuses. Yet many people MUST have known or at least suspected what was going on.

When boys were sent out to work on farms, they spoke sometimes of what was happening to them back in the schools. Girls also hinted, occasionally, at maltreatment or cruelty.

And parents nationwide would threaten misbehaving kids with a stint in one of the feared institutions. Feared precisely because people did know or suspect that something shameful and inhuman was happening behind those high brick walls.

At the edge of a little wood near the former Letterfrack industrial school in County Galway, a thoughtful Kilkenny woman has created an apt memorial to the inmates of that terrible place…dozens of heart shaped stones bearing inscriptions that honour the forgotten names that were once real human beings…condemned to live their short innocent lives in a constant daily terror of beatings or worse.

Similar memorials should be provided at other sites that recall victims of politico-religious fascism in Ireland. While recognising that many priests, brothers and nuns were compassionate and humane, we need to face up to the fact that the system they found themselves propping up and serving was oppressive and riddled with abuse.

And how on earth could anyone who lived through that era claim to have been ignorant of the plight of the “Magdalenes”?

Apart from the widespread abuse that was part and parcel of the grim centres to which those innocent women were condemned, for giving birth out of wedlock, surely the entire system, or network, of religious concentration camps was an abuse in itself.

Some enterprising documentary maker ought to arrange interviews with the families of women who were banished to those horrible places. Especially, where possible, with the family members who signed them in for “punishment”.

What is the difference between making Jews wear yellow stars, socialists wear red triangles, gipsies wear some other colour patch…and what Catholic Ireland did to the inmates of the “Laundries”? They were punished for not conforming to the then accepted ideal of what constituted “The perfect Irish Catholic Mother”.

In decades to come, lots of decent people will, I'm sure, claim they knew nothing about how elderly people were suffering in poor quality nursing homes, or at the hands of cruel “carers” back in the first decade of the 21st century.

But right now, we are aware that all is not as it should be in these places where any of us could end up one day.

So let's not pretend that we don't know.