THE HARD-LINE CATHOLIC religious campaigner Mina Bean Uí Chroibín has died.
The Santry postmistress rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s for her campaigns against sex education, abortion and contraception, claiming that she was fighting against the “deliberate destruction of the Irish Catholic Church”.
In 1994 she insisted that Scoil Paipin Naofa, a primary school housed on lands owned by her, only teach the traditional Catholicism of the Tridentine faith, which involves the mass being said in Latin. In 1998, she was one of a group of protesters who disrupted a meeting at a school in Trim, Co Meath, where parents were being informed of a new sex education programme being taught to schoolchildren.
She most recently rose to prominence for her role in the 2009 Roscommon ‘House of Horrors’ case, in which it was claimed she helped the parents at the centre of an incest case to secure a High Court order preventing the authorities from taking the children into care. She allegedly contacted health workers and argued that the family needed support not intrusion. The woman she intervened on behalf of was later jailed for seven years for 10 offences including incest, sexual assault and neglect of her six children.
During the case, a HSE childcare manager told the court that he had been contacted by Uí Chroibín, who argued that the family needed support not intrusion. He said he had no evidence that she was involved in the application, but he suspected it. Uí Chroibín said she had no involvement in the application, stating that she would not believe “a Hail Mary” that came out of the mouths’ of healthcare workers.
The HSE report into the Roscommon abuse case in 2010 did not include any names. However, it referred to a “Mrs B’ who contacted the Garda shortly after the High Court injunction was granted in October 2000. Mrs B also wrote to the minister for children asking that she get the Western Health Board to stop “persecuting” the family.
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