The Catholic Cure for Poverty | Jacobin
While stories of young boys finding skeletons on the school’s grounds
were deeply disturbing, behind them lay an even more tragic story —
Ireland’s long history of imprisoning
women and children in industrial schools, reformatories, mother and baby
homes, Magdalene laundries, and psychiatric facilities. How did Ireland
become a country where institutionalization was the preferred response
to poverty, “immorality,” and other social ills?
The Catholic Church is often held up as the primary culprit, but it is
not the only guilty party in this story. It acted in partnership with
the state and elites, creating an institutional nexus that rejected
social-democratic solutions to poverty and pushed back against women’s
liberation.
Adoption Rights Alliance/Brian Lockier
