I grew up opposite a mother and baby home in Belfast. We were mad Protestants who for some unfathomable reason lived in a house with a Catholic mother and baby home in front, a convert to one side and a retirement home for priests and nuns on the other.

I was about six when we moved and no idea what the mother and baby home was but almost immediately the walls around it started to give me nightmares they were so foreboding.

Then there was a really horrifying series of events I did not comprehend fully at the time but one day I came home from school and my favourite tree opposite my bedroom window had been cut down. It turned out a young woman had used it as a gallows while being held in the home.

Then there were two road deaths on the junction in a short space of time. Both originally passed off as drunk people crossing the main road carelessly. Both actually young pregnant women ending their lives by running out into traffic.

That was when I realised what the home was. And that it was run by the same order who ran my nursery school and owned the park we played sports on.

As I say, I was Protestant so my overlap with the nuns and the teachings was small. But it turned out the order had teamed up with a Protestant home run through the church I went to Girl Guides at. Girls disappeared all the time to ‘England’. Girls reappeared all the time in a state that made us think England must be more brutal in person than the soldiers on our streets.

I did not realise how much my deep phobia of pregnancy, staunch child free stance even now at 42 was linked to all this until the Repeal the 8th referendum. Then I started to realise why all the Northern Irish women I knew had such sexual trauma, such sexual abuse, such fertility trauma, such bad mental health around even wanted pregnancies and such poor maternal healthcare compared to the English ones I had met living in London since 2000.

My Italian therapist was dumbstruck when she asked me about the referendum and I casually started mentioning the mother and baby home outside or the friends who took the ferry in the 90s and that we frantically saved money and covered for to get an abortion after being raped, or the girl in my school too scared to say she was pregnant who gave birth in secret on her bedroom floor and the baby died. She was so traumatised and stigmatised she killed herself. My multiple friends who were sectioned with post partum pyschosis after unwanted pregnancies. The friend who left her baby on the hospital steps and left the country and is still missing 26 years later. We have no idea if she hit her identity or died.

I turned 18 in 1996. The mother and baby home closed in 1998. The children’s home just down the road the unwanted unplacable babies went to only closed in the mid 00s and is the subject of the largest child abuse inquiry in Northern Ireland covering a nearly 70 years.

And that is the impact Catholic homes run by nuns had a Protestant woman who has never been pregnant. I cannot comprehend the trauma they inflicted on the women who gave birth there or their children. And that’s without discussing the Magdalene Laundries or the missionary history of Irish nuns or the schools run by them.

I am sure not all nuns. But GTFO that Catholic nuns are totally selfless. They suffered their own terrible abuse at the hands of priests but they terrorised multiple nations particularly Ireland. And I for one am of the opinion if you gave your life to serve God and face his judgement in death, then you will damn well take your judgement on earth from fellow humans too. You do not get to pick and choose. You commit, you take the consequences.

Also you don’t do nunning a great justice if your reasoning is God doesn’t mind us throwing 800 dead children in a septic tank so what are you fussing for? How many selfless deeds and Hail Marys outweigh the fact the child mortality rate in nun run mother and baby homes was 10 times the rate of the highest child mortality rate in the poorest countries in the world and 20 times the rate of that in Ireland generally? Or that nuns subjected unmarried or ‘unrespectable’ mothers to birth trauma including sawing their pelvis bones apart for no medical reason?

Because I am all ears what selfless deeds counter this institutionalised policy and basis of your life’s calling as a nun. (We’ll cover the priests separately...)