Stolen

The official report into the deaths in Ireland’s mother and baby homes, published in January 2021, found that 9,000 children died in them. To put it another way, that’s 15% of all those who lived there. 200 mothers also lost their lives whilst trapped in the system. The scandal of baby deaths at Tuam unfolded slowly after the discovery of human remains in a playground built on the site of a former home in 1975, and became big news around the world in 2014, but there’s a much bigger story behind it, and that’s what Margo Harkin set out to explore in her new documentary. Screening at Docs Ireland 2023, it’s a difficult watch but compelling nonetheless, and an important contribution to the record.

Navigating a subject on this scale would be difficult enough in itself, even without the added complication of dealing with traumatised subjects and allowing for the fact that some viewers will be traumatised in the same way. It’s Harkin’s success in overcoming these difficulties which makes Stolen stand out as a piece of filmmaking. Centred on interviews with survivors of the homes, it also addresses the political and cultural climate within which the abuses happened, and uses poetry and art to tackle the emotional impact of the experiences described. Some of these are truly shocking, and unless you have done scholarly work on the subject yourself then you’re bound to be confronted by something which you would struggle to prepare for.

Aware that the more shocking the story, the more hesitant people are to believe it, Harkin is diligent about providing evidence, showing us some of the relevant documentation onscreen and identifying other material such that it would not be difficult to find. One can only look at so many 20th Century infant deaths ascribed to marasmus – severe protein deficiency – before realising that something is very wrong. Harkin also cites publicly available statistics - in 20th Century Ireland one in every hundred people was institutionalised – which speak for themselves.

The testimony given is powerful, and includes the voices of children who were adopted out, some of them successfully and some of them into families where they were brutalised. We follow one man’s journey to locate and reconnect with his birth mother, whilst another mother, identifying her son after decades, faces the additional heartbreak of learning that he wants nothing to do with her. There is also a terrifying account from a woman who fled to London, wound up in hospital there, and says that she was forcibly taken back to Ireland by a priest and two nuns: “As far as I’m concerned I was abducted from one jurisdiction and taken to another against my will.”

Key figures are interviewed here, including Catherine Corless, the amateur historian whose painstaking research first blew the story open. Harkin’s camera drifts around Tuam, making plain the ordinariness of the place in which the horror came to light. Kitchens and living rooms are as much a part of the landscape of the film as old photographs of the homes themselves or tours of their now deserted, crumbling interiors. There is no suggestion that the suffering ended as women left the homes or saw them closed. Even the official inquiry has led to more dissatisfaction and frustration, something which Harkin makes room for at the end of the film.

Stolen stands alongside that inquiry as a space for oral testimonies which it left out. It also highlights abuses which have barely been touched on elsewhere, such as the use of infants in the homes as medical test subjects, without consent. We see archive footage of the men – and they are all men – involved in developing Ireland’s constitution, choosing to send out the message not only that women shouldn’t be sexual but that they shouldn’t work, leaving many dependent on the state and helpless against it. Viewers outside Ireland may not realise that the mother and baby home system remained in operation until 1998. We meet a member of the last generation of those sent there, with her daughter, whose very different outlook provides a note of hope.

Forthright as it should be, but also thorough and full of compassion where it’s due, Stolen is a vital piece of work. It forms part of a long overdue reckoning, and as for the women and children betrayed by their country, it gives them back their voices.