A redress scheme for survivors of the mother and baby homes has been soundly criticized because of everyone it leaves out. Domestic abuse reports against women (and some men) skyrocketed because of pandemic lockdown measures. There was more news of ingrained misogyny over the past year. (It was later determined that the recordings could be retrieved from backup storage.) Official indifference to the voices of victims could not have been more blatant - or infuriating. A commission charged with issuing a major government report on the crime faced a public backlash when it was discovered (after it was unceremoniously leaked before publication) that the recorded testimony of around 550 survivors had somehow been deleted.
Many of these children had been “adopted” - trafficked really - without their mothers’ consent. But the unfortunate truth is that there is only one way to approach this book: with the realization that ordinary life in Ireland is so appalling that justice demands that books like Keegan’s be written.ĭuring 2021 we learned that upwards of nine-thousand Irish children died in the so-called “mother and baby homes.” These were institutions used by both church and state to hide, abuse, and extract labor from more than fifty-thousand single, pregnant women between 19, when the last of these “homes” closed. (The book was published at the end of November.) That’s because I was searching for different ways to review Claire Keegan’s latest novella. There has been an unforgivably long delay between when my editor asked for my evaluation of Small Things Like These and its delivery. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Claire Keegan’s novella expertly shows how the culture of idle talk in certain Irish communities is like a secret code - an intricate language that both obscures and reveals.
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