ABSTRACT
From 1922 to 1998 there is copious evidence of the systematic arbitrary detention of girls and women and neglect of their children in state-funded Mother and Baby Homes and County Homes and the widespread coerced or otherwise unlawful adoption of children born to unmarried mothers. However, despite this copious evidence, the Final Report of the Republic of Ireland’s Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters (hereafter MBHCoI Final Report) may best be construed as a particularly horrific state-sponsored wilful ignorance. My chapter contends that the MBHCoI wilfully maintain, what I am calling, ‘a belligerent ignorance’ of (i) the experiences of the mothers who spent time in Mother and Baby Homes, of (ii) the people who were born there, and of (iii) the evidence of forced family separation. I use evidence of testimony gathered by the Clann Project and submitted to the MBHCoI to highlight the distinct strategies of epistemic injustice deployed in the MBHCoI Final Report. I elaborate my claims here by drawing on Axel Honneth’s discussion of the failures of recognition. For, his framework provides a lens to discuss the dynamic confluence of privilege and oppression. Those who do not have their human rights recognised by those in power are invariably those who already labour under a stigmatised social identity. The privileged in a society are reluctant to recognise the rights of those who are socially oppressed as they are reluctant to reform the status quo by which they accrue what Peggy McInstosh terms ‘unearned advantages’ and a ‘conferred dominance’. My chapter concludes with a discussion of the epistemic strategies of those with established privilege to highlight the investments of at least some of the Irish establishment in seeking to ensure that testimonial and hermeneutical injustice prevails in relation to unwed mothers and those who were born outside marriage in 20th-century Ireland.
