Campaign highlights abuse of mixed-race Irish in institutional care

Posted in Articles, Europe, Media Archive, Social Work on 2013-12-12 03:22Z by Steven

Campaign highlights abuse of mixed-race Irish in institutional care

The Irish Times
Dublin, Ireland
2013-11-18

Marie O’Halloran, Parliamentary Reporter

‘I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs’

A campaign has been launched for recognition of mixed-race survivors of institutional abuse who believe they suffered racism while in State care.

Rosemary Adaser and Evon Brennan of the campaign group Call to Action Mixed Race Irish, have 20 members, but believe there are about 200 Irish people of mixed race who were in institutional care here between the 1950s and 1980s.

Ms Brennan, a London-based singer-songwriter, said they were looking at the “colour-specific nature of abuse”. That abuse “has been under the radar all these years” and they want an acknowledgement that “Ireland in the ’50s and ’60s was a racist country”…

…Ms Adaser said: “The key point is that if you were mixed race back in the ’50s and ’60s you were 99 per cent sure of being put in an institution.”

Put into State care at the age of three months, she was in homes on the Navan Road, Dublin, and spent 11 years in St Joseph’s, Kilkenny, where her baby son was forcibly taken from her by the nuns when she was 17.

‘Performing monkey’

“I have absolutely nothing good to say about it. I was the only black girl there, seen as an oddity, treated as an alien, at best a performing monkey, at worst a savage, a savage to be civilised.

“I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs on the farm. That’s where I was told I belonged.”…

Read the entire article here.

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