I went to see this film last week about Ireland’s notorious Mother and Baby Homes with a friend who is a survivor of one of them, braced for impact and I was not disappointed. The film is intensely emotional and both of us were in tears but also filled with consuming anger. That is the predominant emotion which the film leaves the viewer with after seeing this powerful portrayal of one of the biggest scandals to hit the Catholic Church in Ireland, the latest in a long litany over the last twenty years. The story is very well known in Ireland, as is the figure at the centre of it, now regarded as a national heroine. This is Catherine Corless, a local historian, who stumbled across the scandal and despite all obstructions, from both church and state, insisted in bringing it to public attention.

The Mother and Baby Home at the centre of the film was situated in Tuam, a small market town outside Galway in the West of Ireland. It opened in the 1920s and closed at the end of the 1960s, when it was demolished and replaced by a housing estate. The home was run by an order of nuns, in this case the Bon Secours, now ironically at the centre of a huge private medical industry worth billions. Like all such homes in Ireland, it was where families handed over their unmarried daughters to the nuns, usually via the local priest, to avoid scandal. The woman effectively became the property of the nuns, to be used as slave labour until the birth of her baby, which was then removed from her care and became in turn the property of the nuns. This was the complete commodification of women and their children and the lucky children were sold by the nuns, while the unlucky ones suffered the fate of those portrayed in the film.

Corless is portrayed as a local woman who decides to do a history project on the home but quickly finds a contradiction in the records. Death certificates illustrate that hundreds of children died during the home’s existence but that there is no record of their burial place. She comes up against a stone wall with this until she creates a theory that they must be buried illegally under the remains of the home itself. In one powerful scene she confronts the head of the order of Bon Secours in Ireland, who initially refused to answer any of her questions but is forced by the growing scandal to meet with her and answer her questions. Catherine Corless is powered by growing indignation with the Church and the audience feels her searing righteous anger.

Essentially the film emphasises the situation in the Irish state from its foundation onwards where most power was handed to the Church and which had the highest number of children in institutions in Europe up until the 1980s. Women were its main victims and the dreadful tragedies shown in this film, many from the powerful accounts of survivors, were the result. This was portrayed by Ken Loach in one of his films on Ireland, Jimmy’s Hall, where the parish priest shows Jimmy a painting from the 1920s of a solider in uniform kneeling at the foot of a priest who holds up his hand in blessing. The state and all of its apparatus was subservient to the Church.

Monica Dolan is superb in the role of Catherine Corless and the film was partly financed and produced by Liam Neeson who was so angered when he read the story in a US paper that he decided to make the film.  Dolan deserves a major award for this film. It is once again a warning about the dangers of a theocratic state. The Irish countryside is littered with the ruins of the Catholic Church’s gulags. Its victims, like the lost children of Tuam remembered by plaques and memorials. The survivors, mostly in their 70s and 80s are the last witnesses to this dark chapter in Irish history. Those who fought the system to bring that history to light, like Catherine Corless, deserve their own memorials and this film is hers.