In a speech backing repeal of the Eighth Amendment and supporting an unrestricted right to abortion, FG TD Kate O’Connell launched a blistering attack on Irish society and the influence of the Catholic Church. “It is when we have been at our most Catholic in Ireland that we have been at our least Christian,” she told the Dail on Thursday. She said the ban on contraceptives, enacted in 1935, meant that women would spend most of their adult lives pregnant, breastfeeding, and raising their children. “All the while, the Church and State were colluding to subjugate and inter fallen women in Catholic-run and State-subsidised prisons, punishing them for the sin of sex and the flaw of being female. Irish women were quite literally enslaved, in an act of church and State collusion that could be honestly characterised as nothing other than sexual apartheid. Their babies were sold like puppies to foreign homes or enslaved in industrial schools to be preyed upon by those in power-wielding authority,” she said.
Citing various events from history, Ms O’Connell said that “Catholic Ireland was a monstrous hoax”.
“When it came to children out of wedlock, the sin of having sex outside marriage was all-encompassing. The products of such sex were seen as the devil’s spawn. As it was women who bore the children, who laboured their births and nursed them at their breasts, it was the women who were unavoidably and visibly the most sinful”, she said. Speaking of the mother and baby homes, and the children who died in their care, she said: “We murdered them in their hundreds through neglect and hate, brutalised them in the name of salvation and enslaved them in the name of redemption”.
