Joanna Cherry: Events in America serve as a reminder of healing after division

But for myself I must confess I was both laughing with joy and crying with relief as the new president and vice-president took their oaths of office.

America, the so-called land of the free, has had a pretty rough time recently. The storming of the Capitol was shocking. But so too are the endless series of brutal homicides of black men at the hands of the state.

In a lecture marking the approach of Holocaust Memorial Day, David Miliband has argued that the fact that the most powerful democratic country in the world is under attack from within is symptomatic of the retreat of the rule of law across the world. He reminded us that those who are in thrall to government cannot hold them in check and that we all have a duty of vigilance to stand against the abuse of power. He criticised the tone of contemporary political discourse and argued we should aspire to passionate disagreement and avoid demonisation of those with whom we disagree.

The retreat of the rule of law can be seen closer to home as the United Kingdom Government thumbs its nose at the international rights-based order and this week refused to reconsider trade agreements with regimes found by the courts to be committing genocide.

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And indeed, even in Scotland, we should not be complacent as new allegations came to light this week about the death of Sheku Bayoh in police custody. The time it has taken to get to a public inquiry into this matter is unacceptable but now we must let it take its course. Meantime everyone in Scotland can surely acknowledge that Black Lives Matter and equality is something we must honour by our deeds not just by our words.

President Biden is of course of Irish descent and rightly proud of that. Yet this week the land of his forebearers was coming to terms with its own scandal.

Last Friday, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation reported on the abuses perpetrated on unmarried women and their children in Ireland in the period 1922 to 1998. The report described a “brutally misogynistic culture”, the enforced institutionalisation of thousands of unmarried women and the death of 9000 children and babies – a mortality rate much higher than the national mortality rate at the time. Many of the children didn’t even get a proper burial.

Anyone who has seen the film Philomena, based on a true story, will recognise the horror of the practice of sending young unmarried women to institutions where they gave birth, sometimes in brutal conditions, and then were separated from their children who were often offered up for adoption against their wishes.

The report was met with controversy. Some felt that the Church and State had got off rather lightly with too much focus on the families of the women and the men who abandoned them. Other commentators, to their shame, sought to take the structural oppression of women out of the equation altogether. The respected journalist Fintan O’Toole countered that the fear instilled in unmarried mothers was the very epitome of coercive control. He was right.

But it was left to the president of Ireland to centre the suffering of the women and children at the heart of the scandal and to lay responsibility firmly at the door of the Church and the State.

One paragraph of his compassionate and shrewd statement in particular caught my eye: “It is the State that is charged with safeguarding the welfare of its most vulnerable citizens, and it is the State that must bear primary responsibility for failing to provide appropriate supports for these tens of thousands of young women and their children. It is important, too, to recognise, and with what consequences, how a newly independent State was captured by a judgmental, authoritarian version of Church/State relations that sought to be the sole and ultimate arbiter of morality.”

How did it to come this? Irish independence was born with high ideals. The Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic began with the words “Irishmen and Irishwomen” and went on to guarantee “religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens” and promised to cherish the children of the nation.

MANY of the revolutionary generation who brought about Irish independence espoused socialism, sexual liberation and radical feminism. They aspired to tackle the inequality endemic in Irish society under British rule and to tackle poverty in what were some of the worst slums in Europe. The first Dail boasted the first female Cabinet minister anywhere in the world outside communist Russia and she was the minister for Labour at that.

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But within years censorship had taken hold together with a terrible heartless prudery in sexual matters and the worst sort of misogyny.

The story of these mothers and babies is a warning from recent history of the dangers of institutional capture and what can happen when a special interest group intolerant of any departure from their orthodoxy gets the ear of government to the exclusion of others. It should also sound a warning for those who wish to control the thoughts, speech and actions of others in order to conform with their belief system. And it is a warning that even those who start out with high ideals of equal rights and civil liberty don’t always live up to those ideals.

I think most people would agree that there could and should be no place for authoritarianism in an independent Scotland. And that there should be no place for those who do not respect and provide for the needs of women and children. Human rights and equality are for all and no-one has the monopoly on belief systems. As we look at events across the world from American to Ireland it is good to be reminded of this.