‘Small Things Like These’ is set in a small town in early 1980s Ireland and stars Oscar winner Cillian Murphy as coal man Bill Furlong. His 5 daughters attend the local Catholic school. Managed, typically enough for the time, by an order of nuns. One, however, engaged in a repugnant government subsidised financial side hustle: the economic exploitation of young women, who in the absence of any semblance of an objective sex education, and through sexual violence which communities turned a blind eye to, found themselves in inescapable lifelong unpaid hard labour, their babies sold unbeknownst to them while they scrubbed floors, hospital bed linen and military uniforms. One ex-soldier active in the Irish military at the time recalled to me how he and his fellow soldiers intermittently found handwritten notes reading “Please save me” slid into their freshly laundered military issued shirts.
The film’s styling and portrayal in general of life in this epoch of 1980s small town Ireland is panic inducingly sharp; I write as someone who was a teenaged girl in 1980s Ireland. The all-seeing, all-knowing religious with a finger in every pie in town. Who knew the comings and goings of every one of its self-preservingly deferential penitents. With the only social outlet in town, outside of mass on Sunday, being the small local pub catering for young and old to play out their weekend down time. The one Catholic girls’ school training girls to be the compliant reproducers of the next generation of ungrateful penitents, the cloying sense of there being nothing to do if one eschewed the enticement of the local pub for entertainment.
Mother and Baby Homes: Epitome of the Cruelty of Catholic Church Independent Ireland
Although existing in some shape or form in the mid to late 19th century, these “Mother and Baby Homes” really came into their own at the inception of the new Irish state in the early 1920s. The freshly minted Irish government wholeheartedly handed over the management of education and the ‘problem’ of unmarried pregnant women and their ‘illegitimate’ babies to religious orders, only too happy to have unfettered influence over the next generation of Christian soldiers. The government no doubt relieved at this taming of the possibility of a revolutionary conscience marinating in the experience of the recent bloody civil war.
From that point the Catholic Church had the new political establishment in its pocket and so flooded the laws and constitution with strict catholic social teaching, the ‘Mother and Baby’ homes being the most draconian and macabre examples. In ‘Small things Like These’ we experience the agony of women’s suffering in these ‘homes’ through Murphy’s character – coal man Bill Furlong – who, stumbling across one of his local homes’ badly mistreated young pregnant women in the course of his work, agonises with the undealt with trauma of his own childhood as the son of an “unmarried mother” who escaped a similar life of forced unpaid labour by the skin of her teeth by being taken in by a wealthy local woman.
While Murphy’s portrayal is excellent at drawing out the internal trauma of feeling powerless to help, one can’t escape the reality that Ireland was not, at least on the surface, where action would have counted, awash with people agonising about the religious order’s encapture and exploitation of young women in this predicament. If men like Bill Furlong commonly existed, they kept their opinions very much to themselves. It’s a pity that the film needs the trope of this tortured family man to portray this despicable fate suffered by women and girls – all 56,000 of whom (that were recorded) had the misfortune of languishing in interminable penitence as communities collectively turned a self-preserving blind eye.
Remove the Church from Health and Education
Almost 30 years after the closure of the last such home in the Irish state, mechanisms to pay reparations to former inmates and their children are finally in place, albeit wrung through with the necessity of bureaucratic hoop jumping – many survivors, some now in their 90s, have reported the process of claiming reparations exhausting and some have sadly passed away before ever getting the chance to apply.
By 2022 a staggering 88.5% of Irish schools remain under Catholic patronage, with the demand for non-denominational schools by working class people far ahead of the speed at which the Catholic church is willing to divest their hold, and, as if nothing has been learned from the past. Many Catholic secondary schools still employ Catholic agencies to carry out sex education programmes.
It is time to demand a complete separation of Catholic church and education, to secularise care and education under the complete nationalisation of services, and to demand objective sex education to arm children against the risk of Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence, coercive control and to ensure inclusive and respectful sex and relationship education inclusive and respectful to LGBTQ+ young people so that we break with the damaging Catholic agencies and religious control of the past, from which countless still suffer untold trauma.