Abuse in Protestant institutions and James Joyce's work

What is it about?

In the chaos of the Night of the Big Wind on January 6-7 of 1839, a conflagration at Bethesda (f. 1794), a Protestant-run “asylum” for “fallen women,” lit up the night sky in Dublin’s north inner city, and was possibly ignited by inmates. The troubled sky that greets the Conroys in “The Dead” as they leave Usher’s Island in the early hours and look northeast suggests the ghost of the long-ago fire at that exact time. The merely bad weather of January 6-7, 1904 in “The Dead” is a ghostly echo of the storm of 1839, just as the repeated stress on the vulnerability of children and women throughout Dubliners and Maria’s silence in “Clay” regarding the true nature of her Protestant asylum workplace summon the ghost fire of Bethesda and its silenced inmates on the anniversary of their mutiny. Bethesda’s haunting of Dubliners suggests that occult knowledge of shady Protestant institutions had quietly circulated in the capital for generations. In this century, activists, academics and journalists such as Niall Meehan, Derek Leinster, Victoria White and Carol Coulter have repeatedly drawn attention to the issue of abuse in Protestant institutions such Bethany Home and Westbank Orphanage, but the issue remains equally absent from public discourse. The silence that Joyce audited in the Dublins of 1839 and 1904 persists, in part because of positive stereotypes of Protestants, which efface ethnic, class and denominational differences. Such are crucial to understanding why abuse in Protestant Homes remains unassimilable into standard narratives regarding Ireland’s institutionalization regime, which assumes an intrinsic connection between Catholicism and child abuse. Furthermore, the silence at state level is also a legacy of colonialism: the perception in the post-1922 state that Protestants really belonged in Britain or in Protestant Northern Ireland aligns suggestively with the fact that children from Protestant homes were repeatedly trafficked to Britain and to Protestant families across the border. The old suspicion that Protestants cannot fully be Irish citizens feeds the state’s apparent contemporary stance that Protestants cannot be fully recognized as victims of institutions that were, ultimately, the state’s responsibility. This paper further argues that not only sectarianism but racism and a view of illegitimacy as conferring chattel status on non-marital or “mixed” (Protestant-Catholic) births structured the experience of institutionalized children. Australia’s recent recognition of “orphanage trafficking” as a form of modern-day slavery organized for economic gain illuminates the profit motive of mid-twentieth-century Irish institutions that passed off “illegitimate” children as orphans for export to a lucrative American adoption marketplace. In the post-World War II Irish case, the most “valuable” children for the American adoption marketplace were fair-haired, blue-eyed, and Catholic— the combined result of the racism of the target market (the United States) and the ongoing sectarianism of the country of production (Ireland).

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Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

Why is it important?

It is included in a landmark issue of the journal Éire-Ireland that emerged from Towards Transitional Justice, an International conference on Irish institutional abuse co-sponsored by Ireland’s Consulate General, the Department of Children of Ireland, and Boston College on November 2, 2018.

Perspectives