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Lots of people blaming the culture of Magdalene Laundries-era Ireland for the horrors inflicted on mothers as opposed to the church or the state, as if culture is independent of these two highly influential inputs.
Culture also doesn't have institutional power. Those facilities didn't just emerge from the bottom-up like a new dialect - they required funding, staffing, legal protection and so on, which required institutional actors.
I've heard enough stories from older relatives to know that the culture mattered, of course it did. But a culture of extreme intolerance and shunning of 'illegitimacy' is very obviously not independent of a powerful church that taught punitive purity over mercy and compassion.
And the state was clearly part of this too - taking one example, illegitimacy wasn't abolished as a legal category until 1987: https://onefamily.ie/about-us/our-history/
I do disagree with the takes that frame what happened as some kind of imposition from a dictatorial/'Catholic-monarchical' state - Ireland was a robust democracy the entire time, and the right to self-government also means the responsibility can't be displaced from voters either.
But to try and cut the role of institutions out of the picture and put the blame solely on culture/society is cope of the highest order. All of these things interacted. Religion in particular has a clear and enormous influence on culture.
And the state, well. Not to go all libertarian but the state isn't a pure expression of what voters want at the best of times. And *to* go all republican - leaders are meant to lead. Claiming they were just faithfully enacting the will of the people misunderstands governance.
Which isn't to say that Ireland wasn't a place with a culture of strong social conservatism and deep intolerance of 'illegitimacy', because it was, and that shaped how the state acted. But it is to say that state actors had agency, and bear responsibility for how they used it.
