Exhibition Forsaken
Farcry productions
Gerard Mannix Flynn and Maeghbh Mc Mahon
Dollard House, Wellington Quay Dublin 2
16th July-December

The exhibition Forsaken reveals the identity of the ten thusands of Irish children abandoned in Mother and baby home from the mid 19th up to the 20th century. Through prints,requiem plates, baby vests, maps of the some of the institutions on broideries and books on the child report's abuses in some very bright white rooms, full of empty buskets and brooms for scrubbing the floor shows a dark past that the Irish Church still denies.

Women whose children were born with deformities or outisde the wedlock and lived often in poor conditions, gave or were persuaded by the Church to give their children to many institutions all over the country. Many suffered from psycological problems after the separation and were also internalised in mental hospitals.These children often were sexually and physically abused.Woman children were kept in the istitutions all their lives in a state of incarceration,while boys once they were sixteen went to work in the fields or other did other hard labour. Some of their children brought up by these parents who were themselves abusived or tried to numb their pains with alcohol or drugs committed suicide or have developped themselves drug or alcoholic problems. Some were sent to UK, the States, Canada or Australia and where adopted by rich families there.

The abused have longely being forced to shut up, labeled as disabled and when Marxim Flynn talked about it openely and wrote his autobiographical novel Nothing to Say in 1983 he was not believed.The exhbition was supposed to run only until August 20th but now it has been extended till December and the space will organised conferences and eventually also show Marxim Flynn's play  James X  following the life of a boy from the intenalisation up to the moment when he is going to face the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse.

A group of Americans that had been sent there and adopted came to see the exhibition, like also some old women nowin their seventies whose babies were taken from them, without even signing any permission papers, but the Church still doesn't want to acknowledge having committed these horrors.Yesterday a priest came to the exhibition and he said with arrogance that he had been in one of those istitutions and the women that worked there were happy- reveals Maedhbh, one of the organisers of the exhibition.

Forsaken makes you think about the role of the Catholic Church founded by the State  for what were supposed to be charitale acts of helping the poors and the forsaken, concerned in getting rid of any stains of sins in the Irish society and commiting themselves crimes far worst. It shades light into a dark past that still bears his witness in the many prisoners and addicted that are in the Irish prisons, in homeless institution and reabilitation centers  today and hopes that they raise from the pit of shame in which they have been made fallen and get their sense of dignity crucial to any man to move on.