'It's a fury informed by the deepest sort of sorrow' - Sebastian Barry on mother and baby homes, and the inequalities that remain
In the wake of the Mother and Baby Homes Report, Laureate for Irish Fiction Sebastian Barry addresses our collective responsibility for the horrors of the past - and the injustices of today. Truth and kindness are, he believes, the only vaccine
The names and ages of some of the infants who died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home hang at the shrine, which stands on a mass burian site in Tuam, Co Galway. Photo: Charles McQuill
His Costa award-winning 2008 novel The Secret Scripture told the story of Roseanne McNulty, pregnant, sectioned, abandoned by her family and society. She might have stepped from one of the 3,000 pages of last month's Mother and Baby Homes Commission report, a chilling litany of crimes against Irish women and their babies between 1922 and 1998.
"What you feel is some sort of fury," says Laureate for Irish Fiction, Sebastian Barry (65). "But at the same time having to accept that a lot was happening in my lifetime. My children are now in their late 20s and when they criticise Irish society, they often say, 'Oh, well, that happened on your watch, Dad'.
"The first thing in your mind is to remove yourself from that sense of responsibility, but you can't. We are all responsible."
Barry's family tree took root in his writing, with an aunt, uncle and grandfather inspiring the books Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way and The Temporary Gentleman, respectively. His work aims to "resurrect or recover people who were extinguished or written out, buried in silence". Roseanne was based on one such skeleton in the family closet.
The names and ages of some of the infants who died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home hang at the shrine, which stands on a mass burian site in Tuam, Co Galway. Photo: Charles McQuill
The names and ages of some of the infants who died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home hang at the shrine, which stands on a mass burian site in Tuam, Co Galway. Photo: Charles McQuill
"She was a great-aunt and to this day I don't know the details of what happened to her. But I know that my mother, in a deeply disapproving voice, once referred to her as 'your woman', which is always an ominous thing in Ireland."
His mother was actress Joan O'Hara, who played the popular character Eunice in Fair City. She was not "a cold person but there was a societal frigidaire feeling" towards women like this great-aunt, who had been a beauty and in his great-uncle's band before she was sectioned and he remarried.
"The whole question of this woman had been placed in ice. I wanted to thaw her out like a magnificent survivor in the French Alps."
The Secret Scripture opened conversations about this dark chapter in Ireland's recent past, years before the discovery of mass baby graves on the grounds of a former care home in Tuam.
"It was a surprise to me that, having written the book, it was causing echoes in the souls of people from all points of view. It wasn't for no reason that it was that curious thing, a bestseller."
From his point of view, "any father who marched their daughter up to a home like that or a mother who turned a cold shoulder are deeply complicit. That doesn't mean that you can lessen their sense of anger and blame on a Church that has been sort of in cahoots with the whole thing".
The "other part of the fury" is the age profile of many of the girls. "You are talking about » » between 12 and 18, so many [in the homes] as a result of fathers and brothers. It's a fury that's informed by the deepest sort of sorrow. Almost a sorrow for the nature of Homo sapiens. And I'm old enough to feel that nothing resolves. It simply goes around in great circles and has to be endured again and again."
In the run-up to the marriage equality referendum in 2015, Barry wrote an impassioned letter to The Irish Times advocating for a 'yes' vote. His son Toby had come out, aged 16, the previous year. That the referendum passed surely suggests we have graduated, finally, from shame.
"I don't think so," he disagrees. "It's just shifting. It shifts around. For instance, we are in dire need of that hate crime law [legislation is due to be brought to Cabinet by Easter]. If somebody says something to my son in the street, it's not a crime. If somebody makes a homophobic remark, even at that level of words, which is always a precursor to something much more dreadful, you can't ring the Gardaí."
Toby, a musician in the band Babylamb - recently named as 'one to watch in 2021' by Hot Press magazine - has endured such abuse many times.
"That makes me almost want to buy a gun and go and find those people. The sort of summary justice; but it's so enraging. If you allow yourself to say something cruel in the street to a magnificent human being like my son, let me say in my book you have committed a crime. I think there has to be strong law. People have to be afraid. Something has to stop the words in their mouth: fear of the consequences. Because when you feel it as a father or just as a fellow human being, the consuming level of anger is almost as dangerous."
The "most obvious example" of another modern-day injustice - about which his future grandchildren might very well chastise his children for witnessing - is Direct Provision.
"With my Laureate Book Club, I went down to one of the centres. This is [with] the Arts Council of Ireland and we weren't even allowed in the building [by] the people who ran the place. So the book club had to be held in a little gazebo-type thing out in the grounds. And these amazing people," he sighs, of asylum seekers. "When will I ever do a reading again with all their kids and babies crawling around on the ground, showing me their toys as I read, I think from The Secret Scripture, ironically enough. Ironic, because the mothers couldn't come without bringing their kids."
He recalls a woman there who was "so impressive. I think she'd been a lawyer in her home country. And so diminished by this experience and so curtailed that I felt it was an atrocity. We are talking about a national atrocity."
He is equally concerned about how Travellers are treated and praises Oein DeBhairduin's book of Mincéir stories, Why The Moon Travels.
"I think it's a vaccine book. Every schoolchild should be reading it. Because when you're presented with the very soul of a group of people you cannot fail to respond with love."
Barry is not convinced that Ireland is necessarily a safer place now than in the past.
"Maybe it's even more dangerous for children if it's assumed that everything has changed and everything's good now. But that cannot be. And if you talk to social workers, you don't get that impression whatsoever. They're at the coalface. It's the four walls of a house and the fact that you only find out certain things 20 years later. The virus of these things is always there. You have to keep applying the vaccines of truth and of kindness. But surely one of the most dangerous sites for children must be familial."
The bosom of the family home can also be a sanctuary. Barry and his screenwriter wife, Alison Deegan, have welcomed home their four adult children since the pandemic.
"With all these hundreds of thousands - millions - of people dead, it still behoves us to try and see the tiny gifts in this thing. And one for me is having the children back. It is a massive sense of privilege just to have these striving souls around the house."
Even if they hold you to account for societal wrongs committed in your lifetime?
"The fury one feels about the Mother and Baby Homes Report is also fury against oneself," he muses. "It's not just about looking for the perpetrators and let's pile in on top of that. It's the greater sorrow of realising that all the worst tendencies of society somehow arise out of you as well. Out of everybody. That's our sorrow as a creature. And that's the thing we're always trying to fold, keep folding the pudding to let the air in and improve it."
