Download or read book Mothers of Ireland written by Julie Kane and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Violent historical and cultural forces shaped the lives of Julie Kane's Irish and Irish-American women ancestors: famine, genocide, warfare, poverty, emigration, repressive religion, ethnic prejudice, and alcoholism. In Mothers of Ireland, her new collection of poems, Kane explores how the legacy of personal trauma gets passed down to subsequent generations, with a focus on mothers and daughters and their histories of pain and endurance. Even at their very darkest, however, these haunting poems flash with resilient Irish wit"--

Download or read book Mother Ireland written by Edna O'Brien and published by Plume Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mother Ireland" includes seven essays seamlessly woven into an autobiographical tapestry. In her lyrical, sensuous voice, O'Brien describes growing up in rural County Clare, from her days in a convent school to her first kiss to her eventual migration to England. Weaving her own personal history with the history of Ireland, she effortlessly melds local customs and ancient lore with the fascinating people and events that shaped he young life. The result is a colorful and timeless narrative that perfectly captures the heart and soul of this harshly beautiful country.

Download or read book The Adoption Machine written by Paul Jude Redmond and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MAY 2014. The Irish public woke to the horrific discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of most 800 babies in the ‘Angels’ Plot’ of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home. What followed would rock the last vestiges of Catholic Ireland, enrage an increasingly secularised nation, and lead to a Commission of Inquiry. In The Adoption Machine, Paul Jude Redmond, Chairperson of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Homes Survivors, who himself was born in the Castlepollard Home, candidly reveals the shocking history of one of the worst abuses of Church power since the foundation of the Irish State. From Bessboro, Castlepollard, and Sean Ross Abbey to St. Patrick’s and Tuam, a dark shadow was cast by the collusion between Church and State in the systematic repression of women and the wilful neglect of illegitimate babies, resulting in the deaths of thousands. It was Paul’s exhaustive research that widened the global media’s attention to all the homes and revealed Tuam as just the tip of the iceberg of the horrors that lay beneath. He further reveals the vast profits generated by selling babies to wealthy adoptive parents, and details how infants were volunteered to a pharmaceutical company for drug trials without the consent of their natural mothers. Interwoven throughout is Paul’s poignant and deeply personal journey of discovery as he attempts to find his own natural mother. The Adoption Machine exposes this dark history of Ireland’s shameful and secret past, and the efforts to bring it into the light. It is a history from which there is no turning away.

Download or read book I Called Her Mary written by Thomas Gorman and published by . This book was released on 2021-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peg Holland became pregnant as a teenager in a conservative village in 1950s Ireland. She knew her life would never be the same again. She was sent away in shame only to find courage and wisdom deep within her soul that led her to the greatest life, husband, and family.Being poor and not having many options, Peg's parents sent her to Sean Ross Abbey to deliver the baby. After her baby, Mary, is born, Peg and Mary are heckled and ridiculed by townspeople for ninth months until Peg decides she must give Mary up for adoption so she can have a better life. This decision haunts her the rest of her life. Having nothing left to keep her in Ireland, Peg leaves home to work as an indentured servant for a family in America. Mick O'Hagan is swept away by Peg and wants to marry her. She refuses due to the secret of her baby that no one knows about. After seeking advice, Peg's mother tells her to not start her new life off with a lie and to tell Mick everything if she truly loves him.Fifty years after the birth of Mary, Peg receives a phone call from her daughter. They are reunited and the family only grows bigger and stronger because of their love. They share many stories of what each other missed out on but as the stories are told new details emerge. The story that Peg told of the adoption and giving Mary away don't match up to the letters documents that Mary possesses. After Mick's passing, Peg cleans out the closets and stumbles across these documents that Mary shared with her. Fighting past the trauma of giving Mary up at such a young age, memories come flooding back and a new truth of what actually happened comes to light - Mary lived with the nuns at the abbey for a year. On the back deck, Peg and Mary continue their beautiful relationship and reflect upon how wonderful, despite all the heartache, their lives turned out.

Download or read book Republic of Shame written by Caelainn Hogan and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'At least in The Handmaid's Tale they value babies, mostly. Not so in the true stories here' Margaret Atwood '[A] furious, necessary book' Sinéad Gleeson Until alarmingly recently, the Catholic Church, acting in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of 'fallen women'. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted - sometimes illegally. Mortality rates in these institutions were shockingly high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at the mother-and-baby home in Tuam made news all over the world. The Irish state has commissioned investigations. But the workings of the institutions and of the culture that underpinned it - a shame-industrial complex - have long been cloaked in secrecy and silence. For countless people, a search for answers continues. Caelainn Hogan - a brilliant young journalist, born in an Ireland that was only just starting to free itself from the worst excesses of Catholic morality - has been talking to the survivors of the institutions, to members of the religious orders that ran them, and to priests and bishops. She has visited the sites of the institutions, and studied Church and state documents that have much to reveal about how they operated. Reporting and writing with great curiosity, tenacity and insight, she has produced a startling and often moving account of how an entire society colluded in this repressive system, and of the damage done to survivors and their families. In the great tradition of Anna Funder's Stasiland and Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea - both winners of the Samuel Johnson Prize - Republic of Shame is an astounding portrait of a deeply bizarre culture of control. 'Achingly powerful ... There will be many people who don't want to read Republic of Shame, for fear it will be too much, too dark, too heavy. Please don't be afraid. Read it. Look it in the eye' Irish Times 'A must read for everyone' Lynn Ruane 'Republic of Shame is a careful, sensitive and extremely well-written book - but it is harrowing. It would break your heart in two' Ailbhe Smyth 'Hogan's captivatingly written stories of people who were consigned to what she calls the "shame-industrial complex" puts faces - many old now, and lined with pain - to the clinical data ... Brilliant' Sunday Times 'Utterly brilliant. Please read it' Marian Keyes 'Riveting, immensely insightful and horrifically recognisable' Emma Dabiri '[A] sensitive, can't-look-away book ... Through moving stories, Hogan shows how the past is still present' NPR

Download or read book With Our Blessing written by Jo Spain and published by Crooked Lane Books. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds searches for the missing links between a recent murder case and a series of decades-old crimes in this Irish closed-room mystery In 1975, a baby just minutes old is taken from its devastated mother. In 2010, the gruesome corpse of a nun is found in a Dublin public park. Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds and his team are on the scene and he’s convinced the murder is linked to historical events that took place in the infamous former Magdalene Laundries, institutions for “fallen women.” As Reynolds and his team follow the trail to an isolated convent, everything seems perfectly normal and it seems perhaps they’ve followed the wrong lead. But it soon becomes disturbingly clear that the killer is amongst them and determined to exact further vengeance for the sins of the past. The walls in this closed-room mystery narrow in on Reynolds and his team as they race to stop another murder in With Our Blessing, bestselling author Jo Spain’s U.S. debut.

Download or read book Motherhood in Ireland written by Patricia Kennedy and published by Mercier Press Ltd. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motherhood has been used as a political, social and cultural symbol in Ireland. In fact, the role of mother was institutionalised in the 1937 Irish Constitution. This book brings together creative and critical writings on motherhood in Ireland in an attempt to understand its complexity.

Download or read book Mothers and Sons written by Colm Toibin and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the internationally celebrated author of The Master, winner of the 2006 International Dublin Literary Award. Mothers and Sons is a deeply penetrating and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Each of the nine stories focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered. A son buries his mother and goes out to a drug-fuelled rave on a remote beach near Dublin. A mother sings about treacherous love to a rapt crowd of musicians in a local pub. And in “A Long Winter,” Colm Tóibín’s finest piece of fiction to date, a man goes searching for his mother in the snow-covered Pyrenees. Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an acute, masterful, and moving collection that confirms Tóibín as a great prose stylist of our time.

Download or read book Banished Babies written by Mike Milotte and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dublin, summer 1980; Kate Bush is on the radio, Nadia Comaneci is cleaning up at the Olympics and in one house by the Liffey, a spiky but sensitive ten-year-old girl is minding her troubled ma and her two brothers. But when a tragedy splits the family apart, the girl realizes that the only person she can depend on is herself.

Download or read book What Else Could I Do written by Clíona Rattigan and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerful book - now available in paperback - explores the history of single mothers and infanticide in Ireland over a 50 year period. Based primarily on underused archival material from the Central Criminal Court in the National Archives of Ireland, 'What Else Could I Do?' provides a detailed analysis of the diverse experiences of unmarried mothers who faced criminal charges because they were suspected of having committed infanticide. Although statistics relating to female perpetrators of serious forms of crime are examined, the history of single women who killed their illegitimate infants cannot be understood through official numbers alone. The book undertakes a detailed ~case-by-case analysis of the records of over 300 infanticide cases tried in Ireland - both North and South - during the first half of the 20th century. This timely study makes an important contribution to historical scholarship and adds considerably to existing knowledge of female criminal behavior in Ireland. It is also a major contribution to the historical understanding of gender relations, class, sexuality, and family life.

Download or read book The Irish Pregnancy Book written by Peter Boylan and published by O'Brien Press. This book was released on 2020-04-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, comprehensive, up-to-date guide to all stages of pregnancy from one of Ireland's leading obstetricians. Fully revised and updated, The Irish Pregnancy Book is an essential guide to having a baby in Ireland, a user-friendly reference for expectant mothers to turn to time and time again.

Download or read book Lone Mothers in Ireland written by A. McCashin and published by Combat Poverty Agency. This book was released on 1996 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on interviews of lone mothers with young dependent children. Looks at the economic and social circumstances of a group of lone mothers in north Dublin.

Download or read book Mothers of Ireland written by Julie Kane and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-19 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrated poet Julie Kane returns to her Boston Irish Catholic roots in this collection about mothers and daughters shaped by the forces of Irish history and Irish-­American culture. Mothers of Ireland confronts how the legacy of personal trauma gets passed down to subsequent generations, with a focus on women from her family history and their paths of both pain and endurance. Kane’s verse reverberates with the lives of her ancestors and the lasting impacts of famine, poverty, repressive religion, ethnic prejudice, and alcoholism. The poems are formal—villanelles, ghazals, sonnets, sestinas, and the like—but their language is fresh and rich with the sound of contemporary spoken English. Coming from a culture that values music, storytelling, and the oral poetic tradition, Kane uses rhyme and rhythm to move the body as well as the mind. Even at their darkest, these haunting poems flash with resilient Irish wit.

Download or read book Reconceiving Women written by Mardy S. Ireland and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1993-06-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to recent surveys, approximately 40% of American women between the ages of 18 and 44 do not have children. Yet these women are virtually missing from accounts of women's lives. In this important new work, Mardy Ireland defines a place for women outside the parameters of motherhood and gives voice to the significant number of women who are not mothers. She draws extensively from interviews with over 100 childless women from various ethnic and educational backgrounds, demonstrating the myriad ways they came to view themselves as complete adults without recourse to the traditional defining criteria of motherhood. Her work offers all women--mothers and nonmothers alike--a vision of self-defined adulthood and a recognition that every woman is the subject of her own life. Challenging the assumption of deprivation or deviance that is traditionally applied to childless women in psychological theory and popular culture, Dr. Ireland reframes childlessness as a concept and lays a groundwork for an expanded view of women's identity and psychic development. Using contemporary psychoanalytic theory, she reexamines female identity development and presents a positive interpretation of women who--for whatever reason--are not mothers. To contrast and compare the experiences of her interview subjects, she places them within the changing psychosocial context of the last few decades and categorizes them according to their reasons for childlessness. Included are: 'traditional' women, who are childless by reasons of infertility or health complications; 'transitional' women, who are not mothers because of delaying circumstances; and 'transformative' women, who have actively chosen not to bear children in order to develop lives beyond the field of motherhood. The legend of Lilith, a creation story of the first woman, described in the last chapter, places both female desire and female power in a longstanding historical and mythic context. Animated by excerpts, quotes, and stories from the many interviews, RECONCEIVING WOMEN: SEPARATING MOTHERHOOD FROM FEMALE IDENTITY is illuminating for general readers and professionals alike. It provides valuable insights for anyone interested in women's studies and the psychology of women, and serves as an excellent textbook for courses in these fields.

Download or read book Suffer the Little Children written by Mary Raftery and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 2002-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up until the late sixties in Ireland, thousands of young children were sent to what were called industrial schools, financed by the Department of Education, and operated by various religious orders of the Catholic Church. Popular belief held that these schools were orphanages or detention centers, when in reality most of the children ended up at the schools because their parents were too poor to care for them. Mary Raftery's award-winning three-part TV series on the industrial schools, States of Fear, shocked Ireland when broadcast on RTE in 1999, prompting an unprecedented response in Ireland-hundreds of people phoned RTE, spoke on radio stations and wrote to newspapers to share their own memories of their local industrial schools. Pages of newsprint were devoted to the issues raised by the series, and on the 11th of May, the airdate of the final segment of the trilogy, the Taoiseach issued an historic apology on behalf of the state to the victims of child abuse within the system. Now, together with Dr. Eoin O'Sullivan, Raftery delves even further into this horrifying chapter of Irish life, revealing for the first time new information from official Department of Education files not accessible during the making of the documentaries. It contains much new material, including startling research showing a level of awareness of child sexual abuse going back over sixty years, particularly within the Christian Brothers. The dissection of these official records, detailing sexual abuse, starvation, physical abuse, and neglect, together with extensive testimony from those who grew up in industrial schools convey both the extraordinary levels of cruelty and suffering experienced by these children, and their tremendous courage and resilience in surviving the often savage

Download or read book My Father Left Me Ireland written by Michael Brendan Dougherty and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perfect gift for parents this Father’s Day: a beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir of Irish identity, fatherhood, and what we owe to the past. “A heartbreaking and redemptive book, written with courage and grace.” –J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy “…a lovely little book.” –Ross Douthat, The New York Times The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He was raised in New Jersey by his hard-working single mother, who gave him a passion for Ireland, the land of her roots and the home of Michael's father. She put him to bed using little phrases in the Irish language, sang traditional songs, and filled their home with a romantic vision of a homeland over the horizon. Every few years, his father returned from Dublin for a visit, but those encounters were never long enough. Devastated by his father's departures, Michael eventually consoled himself by believing that fatherhood was best understood as a check in the mail. Wearied by the Irish kitsch of the 1990s, he began to reject his mother's Irish nationalism as a romantic myth. Years later, when Michael found out that he would soon be a father himself, he could no longer afford to be jaded; he would need to tell his daughter who she is and where she comes from. He immediately re-immersed himself in the biographies of firebrands like Patrick Pearse and studied the Irish language. And he decided to reconnect with the man who had left him behind, and the nation just over the horizon. He began writing letters to his father about what he remembered, missed, and longed for. Those letters would become this book. Along the way, Michael realized that his longings were shared by many Americans of every ethnicity and background. So many of us these days lack a clear sense of our cultural origins or even a vocabulary for expressing this lack--so we avoid talking about our roots altogether. As a result, the traditional sense of pride has started to feel foreign and dangerous; we've become great consumers of cultural kitsch, but useless conservators of our true history. In these deeply felt and fascinating letters, Dougherty goes beyond his family's story to share a fascinating meditation on the meaning of identity in America.

Download or read book Ireland s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation s Architecture of Containment written by James M. Smith and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Magdalen laundries were workhouses in which many Irish women and girls were effectively imprisoned because they were perceived to be a threat to the moral fiber of society. Mandated by the Irish state beginning in the eighteenth century, they were operated by various orders of the Catholic Church until the last laundry closed in 1996. A few years earlier, in 1993, an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their Magdalen convent to a real estate developer. The remains of 155 inmates, buried in unmarked graves on the property, were exhumed, cremated, and buried elsewhere in a mass grave. This triggered a public scandal in Ireland and since then the Magdalen laundries have become an important issue in Irish culture, especially with the 2002 release of the film The Magdalene Sisters. Focusing on the ten Catholic Magdalen laundries operating between 1922 and 1996, Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment offers the first history of women entering these institutions in the twentieth century. Because the religious orders have not opened their archival records, Smith argues that Ireland's Magdalen institutions continue to exist in the public mind primarily at the level of story (cultural representation and survivor testimony) rather than history (archival history and documentation). Addressed to academic and general readers alike, James M. Smith's book accomplishes three primary objectives. First, it connects what history we have of the Magdalen laundries to Ireland's “architecture of containment” that made undesirable segments of the female population such as illegitimate children, single mothers, and sexually promiscuous women literally invisible. Second, it critically evaluates cultural representations in drama and visual art of the laundries that have, over the past fifteen years, brought them significant attention in Irish culture. Finally, Smith challenges the nation—church, state, and society—to acknowledge its complicity in Ireland's Magdalen scandal and to offer redress for victims and survivors alike.