Ireland – a stifling and brutal church and state

‘Suffer little children to come unto me’ – for a religious organisation that flag-waves compassion as a guiding light, the Catholic Church in Ireland spectacularly failed to walk its talk. The brutal and inhumane treatment of unmarried mothers over decades has been exposed in a heart-rending report. Overall 60,000 women over 80 years were put into the ‘care’ of the Catholic Church, described by a local journalist as a ‘shadow state’. The infant mortality