Tea at Trianon: The Disgraceful Calumny of Tuam

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 17, 2025

The Disgraceful Calumny of Tuam

From Gript:

It paints a picture of a state that essentially gave the nuns a job but refused to offer even the most basic supports. It shows us that it was the state, not the church, that referred mothers and their children to the home. It shows us an order of nuns constantly imploring the state for more resources, and being denied. It shows us a state that was constantly investigating death rates in the home, but constantly refusing to take the basic measures required to reduce those death rates.
Somehow, in the Irish media and popular imagination, this has been twisted into an image of feral and malevolent nuns sweeping up vulnerable women and subjecting them to the most awful, and at times murderous, abuse. This is an image based entirely on cultural currents in modern Ireland, rather than any of the available facts about what actually went on.
Now, the state has commenced a two year excavation of bones at the site, formally for the purpose of identifying some of the remains of children who died (in the vast majority of circumstances from illness and infection before the age of one).
But the reality, as the state’s own commission of investigation shows, is that demand for the home was fuelled by the state and its civic administrators; that the nuns were completely under-resourced and over-whelmed, and that the nuns were the very people imploring the state for aid that never came.
What has been perpetrated here, on the Irish psyche, is a calumny of the most egregious kind. It is a form of fictional history designed to legitimise modern prejudices, in which the worst things that Irish society did were actually inflicted upon us by religious orders.
Irony of ironies, the belief in the Nun’s villainy has become a kind of religious conviction in and of itself, evidence be damned. All the while, Irish society has simply found new and more efficient ways to dispose of inconvenient and unwanted children, as the enormous surge in the abortion rate in Ireland would tend to confirm. (Read more.)