O’Shea returns to the nightmare of the dead infants buried in secret in the mother-and-baby house grounds she shows that it was the result of callousness and incompetence but also something even more sinister not all the babies could be adopted, the authorities had no great enthusiasm for maintaining embarrassing hordes of growing infants and they were frankly content for the horror and grief of infant mortality to be part of the young women’s punishment.īut in Navan, some stood up against it all.

(England has nothing to be smug about: we had teachers routinely assaulting children in front of other children for reasons they perhaps couldn’t explain to themselves.)

Schools were the same, with their incessant beatings, carried out by unmarried men who had of course been beaten and humiliated themselves in their formative years: a theatre of cruelty where the punishment was the point. These were the workhouses of shame, or perhaps the refineries in which guilt and fear were extracted as fuel for the theocracy. There can hardly be anyone left now who doesn’t know something about Ireland’s coming to terms with the historical abuse sanctioned by the church and its treatment of young pregnant women in the brutal mother-and-baby houses and Magdalene Laundries, the subject of movies such as Stephen Frears’s Philomena and Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters. O’Shea is speaking to the people who stood up to church abuse in the 60s and 70s, at a time when challenging the Catholic authorities seemed unthinkable. I rish film-maker and journalist Sinéad O’Shea has a gripping and inspirational story to tell about her home town of Navan in Co Meath, and she tells it terrifically well, talking to the people involved, engaging with the history, delivering the drama and teasing out the poignancies and complexities.

Punish the Sinners by John Saul