Have you ever seen a photo that’s actually two photos? It doesn’t happen much in the digital age, but in the past you’d often send a roll of film to be developed and later find that two photographs had been superimposed into one. It’s disorientating to look at. You can’t really tell which parts belong where. You think you’re seeing one thing, then the ghost of something else rises up from beneath.

Republic of Shame, the achingly powerful first book by Caelainn Hogan, gives us the queasy sense of standing in a picture that is really two pictures, superimposed.

In the opening chapter, the author finds herself standing outside a blush-pink building. It is a place she has passed many times – she grew up across the road from Rockfield Park where it is situated. But it feels like the building has been retrospectively photoshopped into her memory.

“I knew only vaguely that ‘the nuns’ lived there,” she says, “but I couldn’t have said what order they belonged to or what they did . . . I had never noticed the name on the pillars of the main gate, facing the busy road on the other side of the park: ‘Daughters of Charity’.”

Now, she finds herself waiting outside to meet Sister Goretti Butler, provincial head of an order that for decades ran St Patrick’s, the largest mother and baby home in Ireland. Standing there, Hogan is armed with knowledge. She knows about the thousands of women and girls who passed through the doors of St Patrick’s; about the reported 662 children who died there; about the remains of more than 400 dead children that were donated without the mothers’ knowledge for medical research; about the hundreds of babies that were sent to adoptive American parents often in exchange for donations. However, as she waits outside the stately building, “surrounded by manicured slopes and gardens”, she notes that “I was worried about what I was wearing, whether I would look respectable to Sister Goretti Butler in jeans and boots”.

It’s an unsettling and effective juxtaposition: a bright young journalist waiting to talk about the most shameful aspects of our history, yet holding the shame in herself; wearing it. It also feels true. It feels like something women have done forever. It is nowhere near in scale, yet strikingly similar in logic, to many of the stories we will encounter throughout this book. It’s like, for example, the woman who arrived at St Patrick’s wearing “two corsets […]to conceal her bump”. She “was inconsolable at having to leave her child and at the same time terrified of being found out”.

Nervous tension

Inside, Sister Goretti serves tea and biscuits to Hogan. Later, we will encounter a photograph of a nurse in the kitchen of a mother and baby home, demonstrating how to jump over the steel island to reach the biscuit press. They’re everywhere, these biscuits – a strange symbol.

Later again, survivor Karl O’Kelly will go to Henrietta Street seeking answers about his past, and tell Hogan: “They give you coffee and biscuits, the nuns”. I can’t imagine he would have been given biscuits as a child, mind. And Hogan, a woman born to parents who were not yet married, would likely not have been a candidate for biscuits either.

Another thing O’Kelly says to Hogan is: “They must have made a mistake.” He has a disability, yet was adopted from St Patrick’s – an outcome that would be unheard of. The picture of him and Hogan in the plush surrounds of Henrietta Street is incongruous. They’re like secret agents – visitors from the future – in the good room, being served biscuits as they wait to confront the nuns about their dark past. A mistake indeed.

One of the places Hogan visits for her research is the estate that backs on to the burial site at Tuam. There, a young man expresses regret about the children’s remains, then asks her: “Are you single? Are you on Snapchat?”

She also visits the archives of the Diocese of Killaloe. On her way, she sees a laundry van and a “pillar with Daniel O’Connell”. Her observations are subtle, untampered with. Inside the archive, she becomes so engrossed in the material that when a priest ducks in to say goodbye, she is startled. There is a nervous tension between the things we learn about the past and the place we occupy now, and it is almost as if she is acting it out. Any time we become too sleepily engrossed in history, we are startled out of it, forced to feel the earth beneath our feet.

Calm approach

The institutions have closed (the last one as recently as 2006), but the pain remains. Each of the people profiled in this book lives with the effects of what happened. There are records that can’t be accessed, apologies that haven’t been issued, stories that haven’t been told. There are bodies. Our land is, to steal Anne Enright’s menacing phrase: “boiling with corpses”, yet we are letting it boil over.

Months after her visit to Ennis, Hogan learns that the archivist was a convicted child sex abuser.

“[H]idden in plain sight” is a phrase she uses to describe the institutions. There is plenty that continues to hide.

I had to keep taking deep breaths, in and out, as I read this book, such was the seething energy of it. It knocked me sideways. Of course it did. These are stories that bolt out of their stall. There’s no way to tell them quietly. Still, there must be a calmness, a steeliness to the way they are handled, and Hogan has this in spades. “No one can give anyone a voice,” she asserts. “Space must be made for voices to be heard.” So, she stands aside and listens.

There will be many people who don’t want to read Republic of Shame, for fear it will too much, too dark, too heavy. Please don’t be afraid. Read it. Look it in the eye. There is a power in that: a diluting force. The shame becomes dispersed when we do. It starts to fizzle.