Sara McCarroll Images

Sara McCarroll Images Sara McCarroll is a visual artist living and working in Dublin, Ireland.

Her work employs the use of several mediums such as collage, moving image and sculptural objects.

Sunrise with no sun
06/09/2021

Sunrise with no sun

Good soup
06/09/2021

Good soup

Vagisil Adams
06/09/2021

Vagisil Adams

Intermingled - The Wait Survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby home institutions have now been told there will be furthe...
22/08/2021

Intermingled - The Wait

Survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby home institutions have now been told there will be further delays in the roll of out of the government’s planned redress scheme. The redress scheme would see victims of these institutions receive financial aid and a form of assistance with their future medical costs. The number of survivors including women and children is estimated at over 130,000. The costs of this scheme which is long-overdue for victims is rising. This has pushed the Irish Government to demand financial involvement from the Catholic church. The amount of money available to church leaders in Ireland is unclear however, property data shows the completion of a 2021 deal involving the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin where they received €95.5 million by selling the former Clonliffe College seminary and adjoining lands to the GAA. Of the 18 homes mentioned in the controversial Mother and Baby Home report, only three of the orders who ran these institutions have said they will, or will consider being financially involved in the redress scheme. Direct payment to victims is now said to not be available until late 2022, and so they wait.
The catalyst for this elusive redress scheme came from the public reaction to the government’s official mother and baby home report. Contradictory witness reports from victims state the common practice of children being removed from their mothers and forced into illegal adoption. This information was excluded from the official report. A second report has been offered to the Irish Government by 25 experts in the field of Irish history, in this alternative report which is corroborated by victim testimony, it now states how mother and baby home residents were subjected to involuntary detention, forced labour, and illegal adoption. Victims have urged children's Minister Roderic O'Gorman to accept this report which will allow for a more balanced conclusion however, he claims he is under no legal requirement to do so.
As the true scope of these issues unfolds, its global presence is evident. In May 2021 the remains of 215 children on the grounds on one of Canada's largest indigenous schools were found. This is one of Canada's many residential schools operated by the state and The Catholic church. These substandard boarding schools existed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children by destroying their culture and language. The discovery of this mass grave was the first of many and in stark comparison to the calls of Irish survivors. The Indigenous community leaders have called on police to lay criminal charges against the Canadian government, the Catholic Church and individual perpetrators of crimes committed in the institutions, and so they wait.

Image 1 - Tuam.
Image 2,3- News footage of churches during the public outcry in Canada.

Intermingled - The families These are some family photographs Anna Corrigan gave to me. The trauma that has been endured...
25/03/2021

Intermingled - The families

These are some family photographs Anna Corrigan gave to me. The trauma that has been endured by her family and all families affected by church and state abuse is made worse by the fact that many of them have not lived to see justice for themselves and their family members. This is a delay tactic that is believed to have been purposefully utilised by the church and state in order to lesson the number of survivors they may have to pay respirations to or as Anna has put it "deny, deny until we all go away and die."

First photo - This is a photograph of Mary Corrigan, Anna's great aunt. Records show that she died at a young age while in St. Bridgets industrial school in county Galway. Her place of burial is unknown.

Second photo - This is a photograph of Anna’s parents getting married. Her mother Bridget who was put into the Tuam home were she gave birth to two boys died on the 19th of May 2001 and her father William Corrigan died on May 25th which is the same day the story of Tuam was first released in the Mail on Sunday.

Third photo - This is a photograph of Anna’s father William Corrigan as a child before he was placed in an industrial school for ten years after his mother died of tuberculosis.

Fourth photo - This is one of very few photos Anna was able to find of her mother as a young woman.

Fifth photo - This is a photograph of Anna and her mother Bridget.

Anna has yet to recover any photographs or burial records for her two brothers who are assumed to have died in the Tuam mother and baby home.
IADT

Intermingled — The Violence The violence inflicted on the women and children of Ireland during the time of forced religi...
04/03/2021

Intermingled — The Violence

The violence inflicted on the women and children of Ireland during the time of forced religious and state institutional imprisonment is irrefutable. Many victims have testified to the physical and psychological torture they endured in these institutions. Violence which was inflicted on victims to keep them broken and pliable. The violence continues to be inflicted by the state through their denial of the blatant criminal activity that occurred, and also through their unwillingness to seek swift justice for the victims. The violence is also continued through constant neglect of issues surrounding women's health such as the practice of forced symphysiotomy , denial of contraception and divorce, issues which were only ratified in the mid 1990s. As well as access to abortion services which were denied up until January 1st 2019 following the ratification of the eighth amendment. The latest example of gender based state neglect is the 2018 and ongoing cervical check cancer scandal which saw over 1000 women given false negative cancer results. The mishandling of this controversy by the Irish government and the delay in informing women of their false results as led to the needles preventable deaths of many women. The State has issued official apologies for most of these heinous acts but as Anna, a family member of a victim of the Tuam home has said "I could wallpaper my living room with them".
IADT

Intermingled- The People The official apology from the Irish government to the survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby in...
16/02/2021

Intermingled- The People

The official apology from the Irish government to the survivors of Ireland’s mother and baby institutions has fallen short for many reasons. Many survivors have yet to even view the official report in full as a hard copy has not been made available to all. Survivors have also stated that the apology is hard to accept without access to their personal records. Among many issues, the apology, in my opinion, seeks to pass the blame from the oppressive religious controlled and state funded regime, the Irish people were forced to live under during these times to the Irish people themselves. This is not about vilifying the areas these institutions operated in or the people who lived there. The blame lies solely with the perpetrators, the church, state and county councils. The time I spent in Tuam was lovely and I don't believe the sins of past generations should be used to scapegoat the criminal enterprises that facilitated and funded these institutions while they themselves set the moral and ethical parameters for which society was expected to live by.
IADT

Intermingled - The memorial A loose gravel walkway leads up to a small black gate adorned with a cross. Outside the gate...
14/02/2021

Intermingled - The memorial

A loose gravel walkway leads up to a small black gate adorned with a cross. Outside the gate on the ground there is a headstone like, marble, plaque which reads “In loving memory of those buried here. Rest in peace”. At the base of the stone there were flowers and some small children's toys. Through the gate there is a small triangle shaped patch of grass. The centre piece of the memorial space is a large religious statue encased in a protective green locked cage. There were a collection of children’s shoes and toys placed at the base of the statue. Two circles were created in the grass which had a ritualistic appearance . One was made up of white stones and the other with planted pieces of evergreen. Religious candles and flowers were placed inside each circle . A group of children were playing football in the concrete playground beside me as I took the photographs. Overall it felt like a very unnatural place.
IADT

Intermingled - The List The now demolished Tuam mother and baby home exists only in photographs of which there are very ...
11/02/2021

Intermingled - The List

The now demolished Tuam mother and baby home exists only in photographs of which there are very few but thanks to the work of historian Catherine Corless, the names of the 796 children who died there between the years of 1925 and 1960 are now known. This wooden notice board which had fallen into disrepair stood on the site of the mass grave when I was there last year. The board listed the names of all the children who died in the home many of which lay buried beneath it.
IADT

Intermingled – The Erasure Campaigners have called for an immediate halt to any development plans on the former sites of...
03/02/2021

Intermingled – The Erasure

Campaigners have called for an immediate halt to any development plans on the former sites of Ireland’s mother and baby institutions. As of Feb 2nd, 2021 Cork City Council has refused planning permission for a housing development on the grounds of the former Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork where 923 children died over an 80 year period. According to survivors the illegal burial practices excersised by the nuns in Tuam is not an isolated case and Tuam may just be the tip of the iceberg. The Tuam home has been erased and replaced with a housing development, the urgency in removing these relics of abuse allows the victim’s story to be forgotten. The erasure of these spaces by hegemonic structures redacts the visuality of the horrific events survivors went through from both historical and current memory. An act of social forgetting that is only beneficial to the perpetrators and not the victims.
IADT

Intermingled - The Dig The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and certain related matters was set up...
02/02/2021

Intermingled - The Dig

The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and certain related matters was set up by the Irish government in 2015 with a deadline of three years originally put in place for its findings. In 2020 the delay in the release of the report’s conclusion was stated by Anna Corrigan who is a relative of 3 victims of the Tuam home as an ongoing attempt of “prevarication obstruction and obfuscation” by the Irish government. Upon the release of the final report in 2021 survivors have said its finding effectively “absolved both the Church and State of any systemic responsibility for what it admits is the effective incarceration of pregnant mothers." A stream of apologies from state and religious bodies have since followed while calls for a full investigation into both the assets of the institutions involved and the criminal acts perpetrated by the Irish government and the Catholic church remains ignored and so survivors continue to dig for justice.
IADT

Intermingled - The Search Anna Corrigan was raised as an only child. In 2012 she found out she had two older brothers he...
29/01/2021

Intermingled - The Search

Anna Corrigan was raised as an only child. In 2012 she found out she had two older brothers her mother Bridget had never told her about. She also discovered both boys were born while her mother was a resident of the Tuam mother and baby home. Since then Anna has been trying to confirm their fate. Like many survivors of the Tuam institution and others like it Anna still does not know for sure what became of them, nor if they are among the children buried in the mass grave in Tuam or if they have been illegally adopted. As of Jan 2021 the Irish government has told survivors that these records will finally be made available to them under certain stipulations. This comes after massive backlash from the Irish public as the government attempted to partially seal these records for 30 years in October 2020. The names of the TDs that voted in favour of sealing these records can be found on the next few pages.
IADT

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