Republic of Shame was a spectacular read, I absolutely will be thinking about it for ages.

The mother-and-baby homes and Magdalen laundries of 20th century Ireland are disturbingly, perhaps even morbidly, fascinating. They're shrouded in layers of church-and-state secrecy to this day yet are the source of so much pain that healing may take many more generations to even begin.

Caelainn Hogan is, in some ways, the central character of Republic of Shame. She really shows how the 'shame-industrial complex' as she calls it has permeated every aspect of Irish society by traveling from place to place, interviewing men and women, from nuns and priests, to the former inmates, to the grown children who had been forced out of their unmarried mother's arms and adopted out. Many stories told in the pages of the book come from leads garnered from dog walkers passing by or even by Hogan's chance meetings with victims and survivors of the institutions.

Hogan also masterfully weaves historical facts and details throughout, creating a tapestry that doesn't scapegoat any one institution or person, while still holding the church and state responsible for what are undoubtedly some of the most brutal and callous actions that could be imposed upon innocent women and children. ( )

There are really no words that encapsulate my ire at how Irish people treated their young.
This is how Ireland punished "Fallen Women" and their Children, never the men, still not the men.
GAH! ( )

Caelainn Hogan has written a compelling, heart-wrenching, and often infuriating book about Ireland’s notorious mother-and-baby “homes” for unwed pregnant women and girls. In operation for most of the twentieth century, these institutions were run almost exclusively by Catholic nuns hand-in-glove with the Irish State. Their existence was fuelled by deep misogyny and a pervasive cultural perception of human sexuality as inherently shameful, dangerous, even evil. Even girls whose pregnancies were a result of rape or sexual abuse were not afforded compassion. Approximately 30,000 females were cast out of their homes and sent to these appalling places. Often the parish priest was called in to facilitate the transfer of a “sinful” young woman from the family home to an institution; in some cases, a priest might actually be the father.

An estimated 9,000 infants and children died in these mother-and-baby homes, many of them from malnutrition, measles, undiagnosed gastrointestinal illnesses, pneumonia, and convulsions. Epidemics weren’t uncommon. Large numbers of babies were buried secretly in unmarked, mass graves. At the most notorious home— operated by the Bon Secours Sisters between 1925 and 1961– in Tuam, County Galway, the remains of an estimated 800 babies and children were disposed of in a sewage tank.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the religious orders have claimed to have neither knowledge nor records of these burials. To this day, the culture of silence runs very deep. After 1952, when adoption became legal in Ireland, some of the homes discovered there were profits to be had in adopting out able children to American Catholic couples, who promised to raise them in the Church. The couples were obliged to make donations to the Sisters for their services. As for the young mothers: they were invariably pressured into consenting to the adoptions. In some cases, nuns forged the signatures of the women and falsified birth certificates, making it difficult for mothers and the children they bore to trace each other in the future. Disabled and mixed-race children—unsuitable for adoption—were often transferred to industrial schools. Women who became pregnant a second or third time were often sent along to the Magdalen Laundries where they did penance as slave labour.

Hogan explores multiple aspects of this stain upon the Irish nation. The work of Catherine Corless, a local historian in Galway, is rightly highlighted. In childhood, Corless had attended school with some of the unfortunates from the Tuam Home. She and her classmates understood they were not to interact with these pitiful children. Their existence haunted her for years and prompted her determined search to find out what had gone on in the home. When a piece by Alison O’Reilly about Corless and her discoveries appeared in The Irish Mail on Sunday in the spring of 2014, the nation finally took notice. A Commission of Investigation commenced the following year, and the Commission’s final report was published on January 12, 2021. Hogan has immersed herself in the material surrounding what she calls “the industrial shame complex” of her native country. Her powerful book brings multiple strands of this story to those of us across the Atlantic. It is well worth your time.

Rating: 4.5 rounded up ( )