- TheJournal.ie - Mary Lou McDonald warns that Tuam mass grave could be one of ‘dozens’
*A cross-department initiative has begun to examine how best to address details emerging about "mother and baby homes" and the burial of deceased children.
*The Government has bowed to national and international pressure over the scandal of the death of 4,000 babies who were buried in unmarked, unconsecrated and mass graves at homes for unmarried mothers.
The horrifying record of so-called mother and baby homes over several decades in the last century is being reviewed after campaigners forced renewed focus on the need to formally commemorate how 800 infants died and were buried in at one institute in Co Galway.
The remains of the youngsters were interred in a concrete, septic tank in the grounds of a since-abandoned home in Tuam, run by Catholic nuns from the Sisters of the Bon Secours between 1925 and 1961.
The names of the 796 children buried in the mass grave without a headstone have been confirmed by a local historian after she made repeated requests from the state for records. Records of hundreds more at other homes are still being held confidentially.
The revelations sparked renewed calls for the Government to hold a short, focused public inquiry into the practices at the homes, particularly mass burials.
Children’s Minister Charlie Flanagan said officials were giving active consideration to the best means of addressing the harrowing details.
“Many of the revelations are deeply disturbing and a shocking reminder of a darker past in Ireland when our children were not cherished as they should have been,” he said.
“I am particularly mindful of the relatives of those involved and of local communities.”
About 35,000 single women are believed to have spent time in one of 10 homes - one of which, the Sean Ross Abbey in Tipperary, was where the story of Philomena Lee began when she was forced to give her son up for adoption. He died without her ever seeing him again.
Four homes had little angel’s plots for infants who died in their care – Tuam, and the three run by the Sacred Heart Sisters at Sean Ross, Bessborough, Co Cork, and Castlepollard, Co Westmeath.
The records of the deaths – even if the birth had not been registered – were kept in ledgers under the 1934 Maternity Act and are now held by the state in private record offices in Galway, Waterford, Cork and Donegal.
Several Government departments, including the children’s ministry, health, education and justice, are involved in examining calls for an inquiry, which if granted is likely to dwarf the examination of the Magdalene laundries.
Campaigners have been asking ministers to take action on the mother and baby homes for several years, with little success.
A renewed focus on calls for Bon Secours nuns to fund a memorial headstone at the Tuam burial site has sparked massive interest nationally and internationally and led to calls for Taoiseach Enda Kenny to announce an inquiry and issue a formal apology to relatives of the dead.
Paul Redmond, a campaigner with Adoption Rights Now, said the Government has been running scared.
“The Government is terrified of this. It’s massive. The Government just don’t want to know,” he said.
Another home where the scandal of unmarked graves was uncovered is the Protestant Bethany Home in Dublin, which was found to have had 222 infants die before being secretly buried.
They have since been re-interred and a memorial placed on the new plot in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross.
In a joint campaign, Adoption Rights Now, the Bethany Home Survivors, Beyond Adoption Ireland, Adopted Illegal Ireland and Catherine Corless, the historian who identified the 796 unknown babies in Tuam, have asked for three simple responses to the controversy.
Along with the public inquiry, they have asked for a dignified memorial stone to be placed on the site in Tuam – a grassy area on the edge of a housing estate - along with similar monuments on the other sites.
Campaigners say the names of every infant secretly buried should be engraved on the stones.
The Sisters of Bon Secours have been in talks to pay for an official commemorative site. The congregation has not commented publicly but it is understood to be prepared to issue a statement in the coming days.
Discussions have also taken place between the Tuam campaigners and Catholic diocesan leaders.
“In a positive way, we want to assist the local community in their efforts to erect a plaque and to have a suitable religious service,” a spokesman for the archdiocese said.
It is understood the Archbishop would support an inquiry into deaths at the Tuam home but he has not formally or publicly made his thoughts known.
Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said yesterday a state inquiry or academic research was needed to record what happened. He also said he would support excavation for exhumation on reasonable grounds.
The Tuam burial site was discovered in 1975 by 12-year-old friends Barry Sweeney and Francis Hopkins.
Locally it was referred to for years as a famine burial site where youngsters who had died in the 1840s disaster were buried in a mass grave, often on unconsecrated ground.
Health board inspection records dating as far back as 1944 reveal the conditions some of the children and their mothers lived in.
Some 271 children, mostly aged from three weeks to 13 months, were listed as living there at the time with 61 single mothers, way over capacity
A 13-month-old boy was described as a “miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over bodily functions and probably mentally defective”.
There was a “delicate” 10-month-old baby who was a “child of itinerants” and a five-year-old child who was described as having “hands growing near shoulders”.
Others were referred to as “poor babies, emaciated and not thriving” or “fragile, pot-bellied and emaciated”.
"Relevant Government departments have been tasked with working together in preparation for the Government's early consideration and determination of the best course of action," he said.
There have been calls for the Government to investigate the details surrounding the death and burial of nearly 800 babies and toddlers in a mass grave in Galway.
Fianna Fáil TD Colm Keaveney said the Taoiseach should offer a formal apology on behalf of the State for what he described as "appalling treatment of mothers and babies".
Mr Keaveney told RTÉ's News at One that there is "no excuse for silence" on the issue.
The infants were buried without coffins in the grounds of a former Bons Secours home for unmarried mothers in Tuam between 1925 and 1961. The grave was discovered in 1975.
He said: "We need to hear from the Taoiseach today about the Government's plans to investigate the circumstances surrounding the deaths of these children.
"I believe it must begin with a wholesome apology from the Taoiseach on behalf of the State.
"These infants were Irish citizens and the treatment of their mothers was grossly unacceptable.
"We cannot pursue or progress social or economic policy in this country by slamming the door on the past by refusing to have a transparent or open debate on this issue."
Minister of State at the Department of Education Ciaran Cannon has also called for an inquiry, including a garda investigation, into the deaths of the babies.
Meanwhile, Adoption Rights Alliance Director Susan Lohan said the State knew about mass graves for babies for a long time.
Ms Lohan called on the Government and the Department of Justice to speak out about the issue.
She said Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald knows "all too well about the issue" because the Adoption Rights Alliance and other groups have been sending her material since she took office as Minister for Children in 2011.
The alliance is calling on the Government to carry out an inquiry into around 25,000 Sacred Heart adoption files that were "dumped" with the Health Service Executive in 2011.
Ms Fitzgerald received a report on the issue on 24 July last year, Ms Lohan said.
Mass graves located at former mother and children homes in Bessborough, Castlepollard and Roscrea have also been highlighted.
These homes were run under the partial English order, The Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Figures have indicated highly erratic mortality rates, namely in 1943.
The Bessborough order had a 57% mortality rate in that period, while a national average of 15% has been estimated.
Findings on birth certificates have also suggested that malnutrition was a major cause of the deaths.
Ms Lohan explained that one issue was that nursing children were not adequately breast-fed.
*Sinn fein has called for a full public inquiry into mother and baby homes after a mass grave allegedly containing the bodies of almost 800 infants was discovered on the grounds of a former children’s home in Tuam.
The party’s deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald said that any inquiry launched by the government must not focus exclusively on the home in Galway.
She said that similar graves could exist at “dozens” of mother and baby homes across the country.
“As shocking as Tuam has been – and it is very, very harrowing – it’s not an isolated incident at all.
“Successive governments very deliberately excluded mother and baby homes from any form of redress or recognition. That now needs to change. These were state-funded institutions.
There are mass graves dotted around the country. We don’t have the option of looking the other way. We need to confront this legacy issue for the sake of the children, but also for the sake of the mothers that have suffered, and for the sake of many, many children who were adopted, some of them illegally, from these institutions.
McDonald added that the government has “very deliberately refused to deal with Bethany [Home]“, a residential home in Dublin for Church of Ireland mothers and children.
It was not included in the 2002 Residential Institutions Redress scheme as the women were said to be there voluntarily.
If they dealt with Bethany Home it meant that they had to deal with other mother and baby homes. That game is now up for the government.
Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams said that an inquiry was necessary to gather the full facts surrounding this ”dreadful piece of history”.
“The nation needs to know, but more particularly mothers who have survived need to know what happened to their babies.
Adams noted that the “vast majority of people didn’t know” what went on these homes, adding that “the church hierarchy wasn’t about liberation of souls – it was about control, about power”.
Children’s Minister Charlie Flanagan has said the revelations in Tuam are “deeply disturbing”.
“Relevant government departments have been tasked with working together in preparation for the government’s early consideration and determination of the best course of action,” Flanagan stated.
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UPDATE: The Catholic Church in Ireland is facing fresh accusations of child abuse after a researcher found records for 796 young children allegedly buried in a mass grave beside a former orphanage for the children of unwed mothers.
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UPDATE: The Catholic Church in Ireland is facing fresh accusations of child abuse after a researcher found records for 796 young children allegedly buried in a mass grave beside a former orphanage for the children of unwed mothers.
The researcher, Catherine Corless, says her discovery of child death records at the Catholic nun-run home in Tuam, County Galway, suggests that the former septic tank filled with bones is the final resting place for most, if not all, of the children.
Church leaders in Galway, western Ireland, said they had no idea so many children who died at the orphanage had been buried there, and said they would support local efforts to mark the spot with a plaque listing all 796 children.
Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said that “if a public or state inquiry is not established into outstanding issues of concern surrounding the mother-and-baby homes, then it is important that a social history project be undertaken to get an accurate picture of these homes in our country’s history," the Irish Times reported.
Irish leaders lamented the horrendous discovery and called for an urgent inquiry into the case. Ministers of three departments — education, justice and children — promised to take steps to investigate the matter.
County Galway death records showed that the children, mostly babies and toddlers, died often of sickness or disease in the orphanage during the 35 years it operated from 1926 to 1961. The building, which had previously been a workhouse for homeless adults, was torn down decades ago to make way for new houses.
A 1944 government inspection recorded evidence of malnutrition among some of the 271 children then living in the Tuam orphanage alongside 61 unwed mothers. The death records cite sicknesses, diseases, deformities and premature births as causes of death.
Elderly locals recalled that the children attended a local school — but were segregated from other pupils and routinely bullied — until they were adopted or placed, around age 7 or 8, into church-run industrial schools that featured unpaid labor and abuse. In keeping with Catholic teaching, such out-of-wedlock children were denied baptism and, if they died at such facilities, Christian burial.
It is well documented that throughout Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, church-run orphanages and workhouses often buried their dead in unmarked graves and unconsecrated ground, reflecting how unmarried mothers — derided as "fallen women" in the culture of the day — typically were ostracized by society and their own families.
Records indicate that the former Tuam workhouse's septic tank was converted specifically to serve as the body disposal site for the orphanage.
Tuam locals discovered the bone repository in 1975 as cement covering the buried tank was broken away. Before Corless' research this year, they believed the remains were mostly victims of the mid-19th century famine that decimated the population of western Ireland.
Respectful of the unmarked grave in their midst, residents long have kept the grass trimmed and built a small grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Archbishop of Tuam Michael Neary said he would meet leaders of the religious order that ran the orphanage, the Bon Secours Sisters, to organize fundraising for a plaque listing the 796 names and to hold a memorial service there.
Corless and other Tuam activists have organized a Children's Home Graveyard Committee that wants not just a lasting monument to the dead, but a state-funded investigation and excavation of the site.
The government has declined to comment. Ireland already has published four major investigations into child abuse and its cover-up in Catholic parishes and a network of children's industrial schools, the last of which closed in the 1990s.
Al Jazeera and The Associated Press:
UPDATE:
There have been increasing calls for an inquiry into the discovery of an unmarked mass grave at a former Catholic Church-run home in Tuam, Co Galway, where almost 800 children died between 1925 and 1961.
The grave was discovered in the former grounds of one of Ireland's mother-and-baby homes run by the Bon Secours order of nuns.
Researcher Catherine Corless said the bodies were buried in a sewage tank on the grounds.
Ms Corless said public records show that 796 children died at the home before its closure just over 50 years ago.
She told RTÉ that some of the dead were as young as three months old.
The Adoption Rights Alliance, which campaigns for greater access to adoption records in Ireland, particularly for those born in Catholic-run institutions, said there could be mass graves in other homes.
"This has got to be a national inquiry, it's got to take in all of the mother and baby homes, all of which have mapped children's graveyards on site," the group's co-founder Susan Lohan told RTÉ.
"We're looking at the very big mother-and-baby homes we know about but there are also smaller ones."
In a synopsis of the research published on her Facebook page, Ms Corless said some mothers who gave birth in the home told her of long unattended labours, mostly without help from a sister or midwife, and that they were examined only once by a doctor when first admitted.
The Bon Secours order which ran the home has not commented.
Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin was quoted by the Irish Examiner newspaper as saying that work was needed to get an accurate picture of what happened at the homes.
Opposition parties and Government TDs have said an immediate inquiry is required.
Minister of State for Education Ciaran Cannon said: "How can we show in Ireland that we have matured as a society if we cannot call out these horrific acts of the past for what they were?
"They were willful and deliberate neglect of children, who were the most vulnerable of all."
Minister for Children Charlie Flanagan has said the Government is working to determine the best course of action.
Further reports
Story draws international attention
International media organisations have picked up on the story.
The Mail on Sunday wrote that "Newly unearthed reports show that they suffered malnutrition and neglect, which caused the deaths of many, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia."
The Washington Post wrote a story headlined "Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers".
The Guardian said: "The Catholic church in Ireland is facing fresh accusations of child neglect after a researcher found records for hundreds of children said to be buried in unmarked graves at the site of a former home for unwed mothers."
In a blog for the same paper, Emer O'Toole wrote: "For those of you unfamiliar with how, until the 1990s, Ireland dealt with unmarried mothers and their children, here it is: the women were incarcerated in state-funded, church-run institutions called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, where they worked to atone for their sins. Their children were taken from them."
Germany's Der Spiegel wrote about "Kinder-Massengrab in Irland: Das dunkle Geheimnis der Schwestern von Bon Secours" (Mass children's grave in Ireland: The dark secret of the Bon Secours Sisters).
The story was also picked up by The New York Times, which notes that suspicions first arose as long ago as 1975.
The Sydney Morning Herald also wrote about it, as did the Toronto Star.
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