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Ladybbird 06-10-16 11:27

TUAM Mother & Baby Home Survivors-Compensation STILL NOT Paid After Yrs
 
Search for 796 Buried Infants at Former Galway, N. Ireland, Mother and Baby home

Irish Central 6 October 2016.



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Women pay their respects at the grotto by the site of where 796 children from the Bon Secour Mother and Child home are believed to be buried. RollingNews.


The new tests were requested by the Irish Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, which is investigating the death and burial of up to 800 babies who died at the home, after their death certificates were discovered by local historian Catherine Corless.

Head of RTE’s investigative unit Philip Boucher-Hayes, who is on the ground at the dig, reported that there was no sense of drama surrounding it despite the international coverage the story has garnered.

Instead, tall plywood hoardings have been erected around the reputed burial site, discreetly obscuring the dig going on inside. Boucher-Hayes reports that he counted four or five men digging, with assistance from a mini digger onsite, and a forensic archaeologist.


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Chilling words of the plaque errected outside the burial ground at Tuam.


The question is, what will they find? Are there indeed human remains there? And if there are not, where are the estimated 796 babies whose deaths were recorded?

There are far too many credible local reports about the presence of bones for there not to have been bodies buried there at some point, Boucher-Hayes added.

One local man, Franny Hopkins, uncovered one reputed burial place with his friend Barry Sweeny when the pair were looking for apples in 1975.

They climbed a wall and arrived at the abandoned site, where they soon lifted a concrete lid that uncovered a hole they say was filled with human remains.


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Children at the Bon Secour Mother and Child Home.


Asked if the excavation group were digging in the right place to see what he had seen forty one years ago Hopkins replied that they were.
Asked how many bodies he saw he replied:

“I wouldn’t be able to put a number on it, but there was quite a few. They did not look like they had been buried with ceremony.” They looked like they had been dumped there, he claimed.

Also in the mid 1970’s local woman Mary Moriarity was walking on the grounds of the former home when she says she fell into a hole on a different part of the original site. When she opened her eyes she discovered she was in a crypt, she said.


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The Bon Secour Mother and Baby home, in Tuam, County Galway.


“I was just trying to get my bearings. I understood it was a crypt. There were quite a lot of babies wrapped up in swaddling cloth. I didn’t see the whole of the place. There was quite a lot of levels to it. There were three or four levels from the ground to the roof that was filled with those parcels. They were little parcels set on shelves.”

Asked if there was at least a hundred of these parcels, she said yes adding that she never realized there could be so many more.

The Commission of Investigation must now consider a range of possibilities, Boucher-Hayes says. The first one is that there are no bones there because there never were, or that over the years they may have decomposed to the point where they are no longer traceable, or that there are bones but they’re from the Great Hunger period and they’re from the workhouse that was there before the place became a mother and baby home.

Finally there is the possibility that the bones of all 796 babies are located on the site as their death certs make clear.


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Historan Catherine Corless standing before the grotto in Tuam, Galway.


“We know there are burials there,” the local historian, told Boucher-Hayes. “Bones don’t disappear over 50 years. It is a little bit scary, a little bit frightening, that it has come to this, to think they will unearth the infants, and it is emotional, but it's the right thing to do.”

Asked about her own attitude to the ongoing excavation, she replied: “I’m not worried. I came across all this evidence, I presented it to the Commission. I have no direct involvement, I just think it’s an awful injustice. I presented the evidence, hopefully the truth will find its own way out.”
“Most of the relatives want to acknowledge it and show some reverence for the little bodies,” she added, underlining the significance of the project to the community and surviving relatives.


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Sign held by protesters of the alck of investigation into the burial at Tuam.


Corless then revealed she had received a call from an anonymous woman in Dublin over the weekend who told her, “This is thanks to your work. I was in that home. Friday was my day.”
Friday was the day that news of the dig commencing was broadcast.



MORE, Click Here;

Read all the latest news on the Tuam mother and baby homes case

Read more:

Neglect and death of 800 kids in Galway happened in plain sight
.

Ladybbird 24-11-18 19:01

TUAM-Irelands' Scandal: Mass Illegitimate Babies Graves & Maltreatment of Mothers
 
796 Tuam Babies to be Exhumed From Mass Grave in Galway Ireland

Irish Central, 24 Nov 2018.


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Ireland's Minister for Children Katherine Zappone announced that the unidentified remains of an estimated 796 children buried in a mass grave by the Catholic Church at a Mother and Baby Home will be exhumed.


The unidentified remains of children buried in a mass grave in Tuam, Co Galway will be exhumed, Minister for Children Katherine Zappone announced on Tuesday.

The mass grave is part of the Catholic-run Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway, which is no longer operational having shuttered in 1961 after nearly 40 years.

On Tuesday, Minister Zappone said: "I understand that this is a hugely important decision for all connected to the site in Tuam, most especially those who believe they may have a loved one buried there and those now living close to the site."

"I am committed to ensuring that all the children interred at this site can have a dignified and respectful burial."


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Minister for Children Katherine Zappone making her announcement


Minister Zappone said the process will be delivered in phases, noting the situation’s "unprecedented technical and legal issues.”


The process will be broken out as such:


- A phased approach to the excavation and recovery of juvenile human remains as far as is possible

- The use of systemic on-site ground truthing and test excavations to effectively locate burials

- Forensic analysis of any recovered remains and where possible individualization and identification

- Arrangements for respectful reburial and memorialization and the appropriate conservation of the site

"It is only by taking the right actions now,” said Minister Zappone, “can we truly demonstrate our compassion and commitment to work towards justice, truth and healing for what happened in our past and, most especially, for those who were previously abandoned."


The exhumation and identification process will cost between €6m and €13m; the Bon Secours sisters have offered a “voluntary contribution” of €2.5m towards the overall cost.

Minister Zappone stressed the nuns’ donation was not a settlement and not an indemnity of any type.


The scandal of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home was revealed in 2014

The following year, the Irish government launched a public inquiry, The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation. In March 2017, testing at the Tuam site confirmed “significant quantities” of human remains were found in at least 17 underground chambers.

Following Tuesday’s announcement, The Tuam Babies family group said in a statement: "This is an exceptionally important decision and will pave the way for all the other mother and baby homes, and the lost children of Ireland.”

"We want all of the children found if they are not in the grave, where are they? All of the children must be found and we would like to see a full excavation of the entire site as we believe there are many graves in the area, not just at the site we have all come to know.”

"The lost children of Ireland deserve truth and recognition and dignity in their shameful deaths, which was no fault of their own."


Read More: Death records for 796 children at Tuam home published in full


Read More: PODCAST: Horror story of 796 babies found in Tuam mass grave unraveled
.

ThundaJoe 26-11-18 05:27

re: 796 TUAM Babies Graves-FULL HEARTBREAKING Story & VIDEOS
 
Thanks - interesting story. Kind of makes you wonder how many other places this kind of thing has happened ....

Ladybbird 26-11-18 06:47

re: 796 TUAM Babies Graves-FULL HEARTBREAKING Story & VIDEOS
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by ThundaJoe (Post 1417662)
Thanks - interesting story. Kind of makes you wonder how many other places this kind of thing has happened ....


Its sickening. Those Nuns & priests that did this worked with the devil..:arrrrrgh:

They also sold many babies from unwed mothers to many Americans and Canadians. They made a lot of money

Tarfoot 26-11-18 17:14

re: 796 TUAM Babies Graves-FULL HEARTBREAKING Story & VIDEOS
 
I'm sure God has a special place for these people....They'll stoke the fires of hell. The children are singing praises to God in Heaven and having a glorious time in eternity with our Lord and Savior.

Ladybbird 03-03-19 17:23

re: 796 TUAM Babies Graves-FULL HEARTBREAKING Story & VIDEOS
 
Ireland Wanted to Forget, But The Dead Don't Always Stay Buried.

How the Catholic Church Hid Away Hundreds of Irish Children

One Woman Made it Her Mission to Unearth The Truth.

The New York Times. Posted 3 Mar 2019



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The Lost Children of Tuam


TUAM, Ireland. Behold a child.

A slight girl all of 6, she leaves the modest family farm, where the father minds the livestock and the mother keeps a painful secret, and walks out to the main road. Off she goes to primary school, off to the Sisters of Mercy.


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Tuam,
IRELAND


WARNING > The Following TRUE Story is HEARTBREAKING

Her auburn hair in ringlets, this child named Catherine is bound for Tuam, the ancient County Galway town whose name derives from a Latin term for “burial mound.” It is the seat of a Roman Catholic archdiocese, a proud distinction announced by the skyscraping cathedral that for generations has loomed over factory and field.

Two miles into this long-ago Irish morning, the young girl passes through a gantlet of gray formed by high walls along the Dublin Road that seem to thwart sunshine. To her right runs the Parkmore racecourse, where hard-earned shillings are won or lost by a nose. And to her left, the mother and baby home, with glass shards embedded atop its stony enclosure.

Behind this forbidding divide, nuns keep watch over unmarried mothers and their children. Sinners and their illegitimate spawn, it is said. The fallen.

But young Catherine knows only that the children who live within seem to be a different species altogether: sallow, sickly — segregated. “Home babies,” they’re called.

The girl’s long walk ends at the Mercy school, where tardiness might earn you a smarting whack on the hand. The children from the home are always late to school — by design, it seems, to keep them from mingling with “legitimate” students.
Their oversize hobnail boots beat a frantic rhythm as they hustle to their likely slap at the schoolhouse door.


A sensitive child, familiar with the sting of playground taunts, Catherine nevertheless decides to repeat a prank she saw a classmate pull on one of these children. She balls up an empty candy wrapper and presents it to a home baby as if it still contains a sweet, then watches as the little girl’s anticipation melts to sad confusion.

Everyone laughs, nearly. This moment will stay with Catherine forever.
After classes end, the home babies hurry back down the Dublin Road in two straight lines, boots tap-tap-tapping, and disappear behind those Gothic walls. Sometimes the dark wooden front door is ajar, and on her way home Catherine thrills at the chance of a stolen peek.

Beyond those glass-fanged walls lay seven acres of Irish suffering. Buried here somewhere are famine victims who succumbed to starvation and fever a century earlier, when the home was a loathed workhouse for the homeless poor.

But they are not alone.

Deep in the distant future, Catherine will expose this property’s appalling truths. She will prompt a national reckoning that will leave the people of Ireland asking themselves: Who were we? Who are we?

At the moment, though, she is only a child. She is walking home to a father tending to the cattle and a mother guarding a secret, away from the Irish town whose very name conjures the buried dead.

In Ireland, the departed stay present.

You might still come across old-timers who recall how families in rural stretches would clean the house and set out a drink on the first night of November — the eve of All Souls’ Day — in the belief that the dead will return. How it was best to stay in the center of the road when walking at night, so as not to disturb the spirits resting along the wayside.

Even today, the Irish say they do death well. Local radio newscasts routinely end with a recitation of death notices. In a country where the culture of Catholicism, if not its practice, still holds sway, this alerts the community to a familiar ritual: the wake at the home, the funeral Mass, the long gathering at the pub, the memorial Mass a month later, and the anniversary Mass every year thereafter.

Wry acceptance of mortality lives in the country’s songs, literature, and wit. A standard joke is the Irish marriage proposal: “Would you like to be buried with my people?” A standard song describes a thrown bottle splattering whiskey – from the Irish for “water of life” — over a corpse. Thus the late Tim Finnegan is revived at his wake; see how he rises.

Respect for burial grounds runs deep, with crowds gathering in their local cemetery once a year to pray as a priest blesses the dead within. This reverence for the grave may derive from centuries of land dispossession, or passed-on memories of famine corpses in the fields and byways, or simply be linked to a basic desire expressed by the planting of a headstone:
To be remembered.

Some 60 years have passed since Catherine’s primary school days. It is a gloomy June afternoon, and she is walking the grounds once hidden behind those shard-studded walls. As rain falls from the crow-flecked sky, she drapes her black jacket over her head, almost like a shawl.

Her name now is Catherine Corless, née Farrell. At 63, she is a grandmother with a smile not easily given, and any fealty to Catholicism long since lost.


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Catherine Corless Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times


True, she occasionally volunteers to paint the weathered statues outside the local country churches: the blue of the Blessed Virgin’s eyes, the bronze in St. Patrick’s beard. But this is for the community, not the church. She finds deeper meaning in her garden, in the birds at the feeder outside her kitchen window, in the earth here at her feet.

Few photographs exist of the grim building that once loomed over this corner of Tuam (pronounced Chewm), perhaps because few desired the memory. In its place stand drab rows of subsidized housing and a modest playground. A silvery swing set, a yellow slide, a jungle gym.

One day, a few years back, Catherine began to inquire about the old home that had stoked her schoolgirl imagination. She set out on an amateur’s historical quest, but whenever she focused on the children who lived there, so many questions arose about the children who died there — the ones who never made it to the classroom, or even past infancy.

What, then, of Patrick Derrane, who died at five months in 1925, and Mary Carty, at five months in 1960, and all those in between, children said to have been “born on the other side of the blanket”? The Bridgets and Noras and Michaels and Johns, and so many Marys, so many Patricks, their surnames the common language of Ireland.

Would people pause at their graves? Would they be remembered?

In asking around, what Catherine heard was:
Ah, them poor children. Them poor children.

The more she dug, the more a distant time and place was revealed. Now, standing on the sodden grass, she can nearly see and hear all that was. The polished halls and bustling dormitories, the babies’ nappies and nuns’ habits, the shouts, the whimpers, the murmur of prayer.


‘Waiting for the Crucifixion’

The women and their newborns often arrived after the inquisitive streetlamps of Tuam had dimmed. They came from towns and crossroads with names like snatches of song. Portumna and Peterswell, Claremorris and Lettermore, Moylough and Loughrea.

And now they were here at the St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, a massive building the color of storm clouds, a way station for 50 single mothers and 125 children born out of wedlock.

The building opened in 1846 as a workhouse, but almost immediately it began receiving victims of the Great Hunger, a famine so horrific that the moans of the dying, The Tuam Herald reported, were “as familiar to our ears as the striking of the clock.”

It later became a military barracks, serving the new Irish government formed after a treaty between Irish rebels and Great Britain in 1921. One spring morning during the civil war that followed, six prisoners — republicans who disagreed with concessions in the treaty — were marched into the yard and executed against the ashen wall.

The government repurposed the building to be among the institutions intended as ports of salvation where disgraced women might be redeemed. These state-financed homes were invariably managed by a Catholic order, in keeping with the hand-in-glove relationship between the dominant church and the fledgling state.

Given the misogyny, morality, and economics that informed the public debate of the time — when a pregnancy out of wedlock could threaten a family’s plans for land inheritance, and even confer dishonor upon a local pastor —

Imagine that naïve young woman from the country: impregnated by a man, sometimes a relative, who would assume little of the shame and none of the responsibility. She might flee to England, or pretend that the newborn was a married sister’s — or be shipped to the dreaded Tuam home, run by a religious order with French roots called the Congregation of Sisters of Bon Secours.

Their motto: “Good Help to Those in Need.”

You rose early and went down to the nursery with your infant. Mass at 8, then porridge and tea for breakfast. Breast feeding next, after which you rinsed your child’s diapers before moving on to your daily drudgery. You might polish the dormitory floors with beeswax or clean bedsheets stained with urine.

“An awful lonely ould hole,” recalled Julia Carter Devaney.


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Julia Carter Devaney, right, with a friend at the Presentation Convent in Tuam. Tuam Herald


Born in a workhouse and left in the care of the Bon Secours, Julia became an employee who lived in the home for almost 40 years. Although she died in 1985, her rare insight into this insulated world — one she described as “unnatural” — lives on in taped interviews.

The gates remained unlocked to accommodate deliveries, but so powerful was the sense of cultural imprisonment that you dared not leave. Save for the chance gift of a cake from the bread man, you starved for love or consolation over the loss of your innocent courting days.
“Many a girl shed tears,” Julia said.

The Bon Secours sisters who watched your every move were doing the bidding of Irish society. They, too, existed in a repressive patriarchy with few options for women. They might have experienced a spiritual calling as a young girl, or simply desired not to be a farmer’s wife, having seen overworked mothers forever pregnant, forever fretting. A vocation offered education, safety and status, all reflected in clean, freshly pressed habits.

And Julia remembered them all.

Mother Hortense had a big heart, yet was quick to punish; Mother Martha was more enlightened, but a thump from her could “put you into the middle of next week.” This one hated the mere sight of children, while that one used kindness the way others used the rod. So it went.

The sisters frequently threatened banishment to the mental asylum in Ballinasloe, or to one of the Magdalen Laundries: institutions where women perceived to be susceptible or errant — including “second offenders” who had become pregnant again — were often sent to work, and sometimes die, in guilt-ridden servitude.

You preferred instead to suffer at the mother and baby home, bracing for that day when, after a year or so of penitent confinement, you were forced to leave — almost always without your child. Waiting for that moment of separation, Julia recalled, was “like Our Lady waiting for the Crucifixion.”

Typical is the story of one unmarried woman who had been sent to the home from a remote Galway farm. Determined to remain close to her child, she took a job as a cleaner at a nearby hospital and, for several years, she appeared at the home’s door on her day off every week to say the same thing:

That’s my son you have in there. I want my son. I want to rear him.

No, would come the answer. And the door would close.

For the children left behind, there were swings and seesaws and donated Christmas gifts from town, but no grandparents and cousins coming around to coo. They lived amid the absence of affection and the ever-present threat of infectious disease.

“Like chickens in a coop,” Julia said.


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The home in Tuam sometime after it closed in 1961. via Caroline Gormley


Many survivors have only the sketchiest memories of those days, a haze of bed-wetting and rocking oneself to sleep. One man, now in his 70s, remembers being taken for a walk with other home babies, and the excitement of seeing themselves in the side-view mirrors of parked cars.

“We didn’t even know it was a reflection of ourselves in the mirror,” he recalled. “And we were laughing at ourselves. Laughing.”

Until they were adopted, sent to a training school or boarded out to a family, the older children walked to one of the two primary schools along the Dublin Road, some of them calling out “daddy” and “mammy” to strangers in the street.

Shabby and betraying signs of neglect, they sat at the back of the classroom, apart.

“I never remember them really being taught,” Catherine said. “They were just there.”

Teachers threatened to place rowdy students beside the home babies. Parents warned children that if they were bad they’d go right to “the home.” And even though the babies were baptized as a matter of routine, there remained the hint of sulfur about them.

“They were the children of the Devil,” recalled Kevin O’Dwyer, 67, a retired principal who grew up just yards from the home. “We learned this in school.”

Still, when a bully targeted a young Kevin during one recess, the child who came to his rescue was a home baby.
You leave him alone
, the older girl warned. I see you doing that to him again, I’ll get ya.

The man has never forgotten his protector’s name: Mary Curran.

One September day in 1961, a rare and ferocious hurricane howled across Ireland, downing power lines, destroying barley fields, battering cottages. As gales flicked away slates from the roof above, Julia helped lock the doors of the mother and baby home for good. Its conditions were poor, some of its staff untrained, and County Galway officials decided not to proceed with a planned renovation.

Abandoned, the massive H-block building devolved into an echoing, eerie playscape, where games of hide-and-seek unfolded in dull halls once polished with beeswax.
Even the old chapel became a place where children became the priests and confessors. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I shot Brother Whatever,” Kevin recalled. “That kind of thing.”

The years passed. Galway County moved forward with plans to demolish the home and build subsidized housing. And the memories of hobnailed pitter-patter faded, replaced by the faint sounds of children outracing the home baby ghosts that inhabited the property at night.

In Pain, Finding Purpose

Catherine still wonders what led her to the story of the mother and baby home. Chance, perhaps, or distant memories of the little girl she once teased. Despite her bone-deep modesty, there are even times when she feels chosen.

She thinks back to her solitary childhood, her best friend a dog she called “Puppy,” her time spent navigating the sadness that enveloped her mother. She admired the woman’s deep empathy for others, but was puzzled by her refusal to say much about her own people back in County Armagh, a good 140 miles northeast of Tuam. Sure they’re all dead and gone, is all she’d say, and God help you if you pried much further.

“A troubled soul,” her daughter said.

Catherine graduated from secondary school, left a Galway art college for fear of lacking the necessary talent, and found satisfaction as a receptionist. In 1978, she married Aidan Corless, a man as gregarious as she was shy, a fine singer, nimble on the accordion, comfortable on the community theater stage.

Four children quickly followed. Before long, Catherine was minding the children of neighbors as well, immersing herself in the homework, play and exuberance of the young.

Her mother, Kathleen, died at 80 in 1992, leaving behind so much unsaid.

Catherine eventually headed up to Armagh to examine public records that might explain why her mother had been so withholding, so unsettled.

As if part of some cosmic riddle, the answer was provided in the absence of one. On her mother’s birth certificate, in the space reserved for the name of the father: nothing.
Her mother had been conceived out of wedlock.

Other telltale strands to the woman’s early years came to be known: Fostered out, moving from family to family before finding work as a domestic. Then harboring until death a secret she found shameful enough to keep from her husband.

“That she went through her life, that she didn’t like telling us,” Catherine said. “That she was ashamed to tell us…”

In this patch of pain and regret, a seed was planted.

The revelations about her mother fueled in Catherine an interest in understanding the forces that shape who we are and how we behave. While attending a rigorous night course in local history, she learned an invaluable lesson:
“If you don’t find something, you don’t leave it. You ask why it’s not there. You use ‘why’ a lot.”

With the children grown, Catherine began contributing essays to the journal of the Old Tuam Society about local history, all the while grappling with debilitating headaches and anxiety attacks. The episodes might last for days, with the only relief at times coming from lying on the floor, still, away from light.

Burrowing deep into the past, though, provided welcome distraction, and at some point she chose to delve into the subject of the old mother and baby home: its beginnings as a workhouse, its place in Tuam history, the usual. Nothing deep.

But there were almost no extant photographs of the home, and most of the locals were reluctant to talk. Every question Catherine raised led to another, the fullness of truth never quite within reach. Why, for example, did one corner of the property feature a well-manicured grotto centered around a statue of the Blessed Virgin?

Oh that, a few neighbors said. A while back an older couple created the peaceful space to mark where two local lads once found some bones in a concrete pit.
Famine victims, maybe.

The story made no sense to Catherine. The famine dead weren’t buried that way.
Who were these boys? What did they see?


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Frannie Hopkins. Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times


Frannie Hopkins was about 9, Barry Sweeney, about 7. The two were at the fledgling stage of boyhood mischief as they monkeyed around some crab apple trees, all within view of the deserted home that figured in their fertile imagination.

Some evenings, Frannie’s father would delay his pint at the Thatch Bar, at the top of the town, until he had watched his son race down the Athenry Road, dodging ghosts from the old home to his left and the cemetery to his right, all the way to the family’s door. But on this autumn day in the early 1970s, the boys were daring in the daylight.

Jumping into some overgrowth at the property’s southwest corner, they landed on a concrete slab that echoed in answer. Curious, they pushed aside the lid to reveal a shallow, tank-like space containing a gruesome jumble of skulls and bones.

Frannie nudge-bumped Barry, and the younger lad fell in. He started to cry, as any boy would, so Frannie pulled him out and then the two boys were running away, laughing in fun or out of fright. They told everyone they met, prompting Frannie’s father to say he’d get a right kick in the arse if he went back to that spot.

County workers soon arrived to level that corner of the property. The police said they were only famine bones. A priest said a prayer. And that was that.

In adulthood, Barry Sweeney would go to England to find work, and Frannie Hopkins would travel the world as an Irish soldier. Both would return to Tuam, where their shared story would come up now and then in the pub or on the street.

People would tell them they were either mistaken or lying. Barry would become upset that anyone would doubt a story that had so affected him, but Frannie would take pains to reassure him.

Barry, he would say. The truth will out.


The Marys, Patricks and Johns

Now, 40 years later, here was Catherine Corless, amateur historian, trying to unearth that truth, applying what she had learned in her community center research class: Use “why” a lot.

When her headaches and panic attacks eased, she pored over old newspapers in a blur of microfilm. She spent hours studying historic maps in the special collections department of the library at the national university in Galway City. One day she copied a modern map of Tuam on tracing paper and placed it over a town map from 1890.

And there it was, in the cartographic details from another time: A tank for the home’s old septic system sat precisely where the two boys had made their ghastly discovery. It was part of the Victorian-era system’s warren of tunnels and chambers, all of which had been disconnected in the late 1930s.

Did this mean, then, that the two lads had stumbled upon the bones of home babies? Buried in an old sewage area?

“I couldn’t understand it,” Catherine said. “The horror of the idea.”

Acting on instinct, she purchased a random sample from the government of 200 death certificates for children who had died at the home. Then, sitting at the Tuam cemetery’s edge in the van of its caretaker, she checked those death certificates against all the burials recorded by hand in two oversize books.

Only two children from the home had been buried in the town graveyard. Both were orphans, both “legitimate.”

Neither the Bon Secours order nor the county council could explain the absence of burial records for home babies, although it was suggested that relatives had probably claimed the bodies to bury in their own family plots. Given the ostracizing stigma attached at the time to illegitimacy, Catherine found this absurd.

In December 2012, Catherine’s essay, titled “The Home,” appeared in the historical journal of Tuam.

After providing a general history of the facility, it laid out the results of her research, including the missing burial records and the disused septic tank where two boys had stumbled upon some bones.

“Is it possible that a large number of those little children were buried in that little plot at the rear of the former Home?” she wrote. “And if so, why is it not acknowledged as a proper cemetery?”

She also shared her own memories, including that joke she and a classmate had played on two home babies long ago. “I thought it funny at the time how those little girls hungrily grabbed the empty sweet papers, but the memory of it now haunts me,” she wrote.

Her daring essay implicitly raised a provocative question: Had Catholic nuns, working in service of the state, buried the bodies of hundreds of children in the septic system? Catherine braced for condemnation from government and clergy — but none came. It was as if she had written nothing at all.

There was a time when Catherine wanted only to have a plaque erected in memory of these forgotten children. But now she felt that she owed them much more. “No one cared,” she said. “And that’s my driving force all the time: No one cared.”

She kept digging, eventually paying for another spreadsheet that listed the names, ages, and death dates of all the “illegitimate” children who had died in the home during its 36-year existence.

The sobering final tally: 796.


Five-month-old Patrick Derrane was the first to die, from gastroenteritis. Weeks later, Mary Blake, less than 4 months old and anemic since birth. A month after that, 3-month-old Matthew Griffin, of meningitis. Then James Murray, fine one moment, dead the next. He was 4 weeks old.

In all, seven children died at the mother and baby home in 1925, the year it opened. The holidays were especially tough, with 11-month-old Peter Lally dying of intestinal tuberculosis on Christmas Day, and 1-year-old Julia Hynes dying the next day, St. Stephen’s Day, after a three-month bout of bronchitis.
Measles. Influenza. Gastroenteritis. Meningitis. Whooping cough. Tuberculosis. Severe undernourishment, also known as marasmus.

Nine home babies died in 1930. Eleven in 1931. Twenty-four in 1932. Thirty-two in 1933.

The Tuam home was not alone. Children born out of wedlock during this period were nearly four times more likely to die than “legitimate” children, with those in institutions at particular risk. The reasons may be many — poor prenatal care, insufficient government funding, little or no training of staff – but this is certain: It was no secret.

In 1934, the Irish parliament was informed of the inordinate number of deaths among this group of children. “One must come to the conclusion that they are not looked after with the same care and attention as that given to ordinary children,” a public health official said.

Thirty died in the Tuam home that year.
In 1938, it was 26. In 1940, 34. In 1944, 40.

In 1947, a government health inspector filed a report describing the conditions of infants in the nursery: “a miserable emaciated child…delicate…occasional fits…emaciated and delicate…fragile abscess on hip…not thriving wizened limbs emaciated…pot-bellied emaciated…a very poor baby…”

That year, 52 died.

Catherine felt obligated to these children. Continuing to plumb the depths of the past, she eventually cross-checked her spreadsheet of 796 deceased home babies with the burial records of cemeteries throughout counties Galway and Mayo. Not one match.

“They’re not in the main Tuam graveyard where they should have been put initially,” she remembers thinking. “They’re not in their mothers’ hometown graveyards. Where are they?”

Catherine, of course, already knew.


The Truth Outs, a Nation Reels

Catherine lives simply, almost monastically. She favors practical clothing, usually black, and has never been one for a night at the pub. She doesn’t drink alcohol or eat meat. Give her a bowl of muesli at the kitchen table and she’ll be grand.

Those headaches and anxiety attacks, though, remain a part of her withdrawn life. Aidan, her husband, has become accustomed to attending wakes and weddings by himself. A few years ago, he booked a Mediterranean cruise for two; he travelled alone.

“A very quiet, introverted person, wrapped up in her own thoughts,” Aidan said of his wife. “Suffering, if you like.”

But thoughts of the dead children of Tuam pushed Catherine beyond her fears.

Believing that the body of even one “legitimate” baby found in a septic tank would have prompted an outcry, she suspected that the silence met by her essay spoke to a reluctance to revisit the painful past — a past that had consumed her own mother.

Now she was angry.

Adding to her fury was the knowledge that when a Tuam hospital run by the Bon Secours closed in 2002, the religious order disinterred the bodies of a dozen nuns and reinterred them in consecrated ground outside the nearby pilgrimage town of Knock.

“I feel it at times: that those poor little souls were crying out for recognition, a recognition they never got in their little, short lives,” Catherine said. “It was a wrong that just had to be righted some way.”

Seeing no other option, she contacted a reporter for The Irish Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper. Not long after, in the spring of 2014, a front-page story appeared about a certain seven acres in Tuam.

It became the talk of Ireland.


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The grounds of the old mother and baby home. Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times


All who had been quiet before — the clerics, politicians and government officials — now conveyed shock and sadness, while the besieged Bon Secours sisters hired a public relations consultant whose email to a documentarian did little for the religious order’s reputation:

“If you come here, you’ll find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying ‘Yeah, a few bones were found — but this was an area where Famine victims were buried. So?’”

The news from Tuam had shocked many in the country, but the dismissive email reflected the lurking doubts about Catherine’s work. She was, after all, only a housewife.

Mary Moriarty was getting her light-blond hair done at a salon in Tuam one day when the beauty-parlor chatter turned to this troublemaker Catherine Corless.

The entire matter should be forgotten and put behind us, someone said.
Mary, a grandmother well known in town for her advocacy work, would have none of it.

Well, she said. Every child is entitled to their name, and their mothers could be any one of us but for the grace of God.

She left the salon, introduced herself by telephone to Catherine, and recounted a story that she rarely shared.


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Mary Moriarty. Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times


In 1975, Mary was a young married mother living in one of the new subsidized houses built on the old mother and baby home property. One morning, close to Halloween, a neighbor told her that a boy was running about with a skull on a stick.

The boy, Martin, said he had found his prize in the overgrown muck, and there were loads more.

What the boy mistook for a plastic toy was actually the skull of a child, with a nearly complete set of teeth. “That’s not plastic, Martin,” Mary recalled saying. “You have to put it back where you found it.”

Mary and a couple of neighbors followed the boy through the weeds and rubble, across the soft wet ground. Suddenly, the earth beneath her feet began to give, and down she fell into some cave or tunnel, with just enough light to illuminate the subterranean scene.

As far as she could see were little bundles stacked one on top of another, like packets in a grocery, each about the size of a large soda bottle and wrapped tight in graying cloth.

When her friends pulled her up, Mary’s legs were scratched and her mind was on fire. What had she seen? That very morning, she reached out to a person in town who might know. Soon a stout older woman arrived on a bicycle, her faithful dogs trotting by her side.

Julia Carter Devaney, who used to work at the home.
“Ah, yeah, that’s where the little babies is,” Mary recalled her saying as she came to a stop.

Julia bent down at the hole and peered in. Mary never forgot what the older woman said next: “Many a little one I carried out in the nighttime.”

Mary did not know what to make of this. Perhaps these were the bodies of stillborns – and therefore unbaptized. Stillborns. Yes, that’s what they must be.

Eighteen months after falling into the hole, Mary gave birth to her son Kevin at a Tuam hospital run by the Bon Secours sisters. After breakfast, a nun presented her with her newborn, who was swathed like a little mummy.

The young mother’s mind instantly recalled those stacks of graying bundles, and straightaway she unwrapped her precious child.

Now, after listening to the woman’s tale, Catherine asked whether Mary would be willing to tell her story on national radio.
Of course.


The Dead and the Living

The veteran geophysicist guided her mower-like contraption over the thick grass, back and forth across a carefully measured grid. Equipped with ground-penetrating radar, the machine sent radio waves through the topsoil and down into the dark earth.

The curious machine was hunting for secrets concealed in the ground of the old mother and baby home, all beneath the gaze of a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

This subterranean trawling was being conducted on an early autumn day in 2015 for the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, a panel created by an embarrassed government in response to Catherine’s research. Its charge: to examine a once-accepted way of Irish life in all its social and historical complexity.

The commission’s investigation into the homes — a network that by the late 1970s was falling into disuse — is focused on 18 institutions scattered across Ireland: in the capital city of Dublin, and in Counties Clare, Cork, Donegal, Galway, Kilkenny, Meath, Tipperary and Westmeath.

The high infant mortality rate in some of these facilities was startling. In the Bessborough home in Cork, 478 children died from 1934 to 1953 — or about one death every two weeks.

The investigation’s broad mandate also includes scrutiny of the network’s links to the notorious Magdalen Laundries. The apparent coercion of unmarried mothers to surrender their children for adoption, often to Catholic Americans.


The vaccine trials carried out on mother-and-baby-home children for pharmaceutical companies. The use of home-baby remains for anatomical study at medical colleges.

It was all part of a church-state arrangement that, decades earlier, a longtime government health inspector named Alice Litster had repeatedly denounced, mostly to silence. This system marginalized defenseless Irish women, she asserted, and turned their unfortunate offspring into “infant martyrs of convenience, respectability, and fear.”


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The home. via Noel O'Donoghue


The Tuam case incited furious condemnation of a Catholic Church already weakened by a litany of sexual abuse scandals. Others countered that the sisters of Bon Secours had essentially been subcontractors of the Irish state.

But laying the blame entirely on the church or the state seemed too simple — perhaps even too convenient. After all, many of these abandoned children had fathers and grandparents and aunts and uncles.

The bitter truth was that the mother and baby homes mirrored the Mother Ireland of the time.

As its investigation continued, the commission would occasionally provide cryptic updates of its work in Tuam. In September 2016, for example, it announced that forensic archaeologists would be digging trenches to resolve questions “in relation to the interment of human remains.”

While she waited for the commission to complete its work, the woman responsible for this national self-examination, Catherine Corless, returned in a way to those days when her children and the children of neighbors packed the house. Only now the ones gathering about her were in their 60s and 70s, with hair of silver.


Home Babies.

Often lost in the uproar over the many children who died at the Tuam home were the stories of those who had survived. And once Catherine’s research became international news, they began calling and emailing her, seeing in this introverted woman their only hope of trying to find out who their mothers were, who their siblings were — who they were.

Catherine assumed the role of pro bono private detective, following paper trails that often led to some cemetery in England, where many unmarried mothers had gone to start anew. The children they were separated from, she said, needed to hear that their mother had “fared all right.”

Before long, some of these survivors were gathering at the Corless house for a cup of tea and a chat. In their habits and manners of speech, they reminded Catherine of someone close to her who also had been born out of wedlock.

“They all have a kind of low self-esteem,” she said. “They feel inadequate. They feel a bit inferior to other people. It mirrored, really, the way my mother was.”

During her research, Catherine had built a detailed, wood-and-clay model of the home, large enough to cover a dining-room table. It had helped her to visualize.

Now she and Aidan would occasionally remove the model from a high shelf in the barn out back so that survivors could do the same. They would touch the gray walls and peer into the small windows, as if to imagine themselves in the arms of their mothers.


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P. J. Haverty. Below, holding a picture of himself and his mother in 1975. Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times

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Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times


P. J. Haverty, a retired mechanic, sat at the Corless kitchen table one day, sipping tea and eating a ham-and-butter sandwich. He was born in 1951, the son of a 27-year-old woman who had been left at the home by her father when she was eight months pregnant. Eileen was her name, and she seemed to vanish a year after giving birth.

The white-haired man remembers only a few snapshot moments of the home.

Wetting the bed mattresses that would then be propped against the window to dry. Seeing himself for the first time in a car’s side-view mirror. Walking out the door with his new foster parents, the father choosing him because he looked sturdy for farm work, the mother because he had smiled at her.

P. J. was happy enough until his teens, when he was called a “bastard,” and people avoided the pew he sat in, and girls at a dance tittered at the sight of him.

“If the parents found out,” he said, “they’d tell them to keep away from that lad, you don’t know where he came from.”

He considered drowning himself in the fast-moving river that coursed through his foster father’s field. “The things that I was called,” he said. “I just thought everyone was against me.”

Thanks to a hint dropped here, a secret whispered there, P. J. managed in adulthood to locate his birth mother in South London. Plump and with graying hair, she reassured him that she hadn’t abandoned him. After leaving the Tuam home, she had taken a cleaning job at a nearby hospital and, for more than five years, returned every week to demand that she be given back her child — only to be turned away at the door.

P. J.’s voice caught as he recalled what his mother, now dead, had said she told the nuns to no avail.
“That’s my son you have in there. I want to rear him. I want to look after him.”


‘Chamber of Horrors’

It was true.

In early March of this year, the Mother and Baby Homes Commission reported that “significant quantities of human remains” had been discovered on the grounds of the Tuam home.

The ground-penetrating radar and delicate excavation had revealed what appeared to be a decommissioned septic tank. And in 17 of that septic system’s 20 chambers, investigators found many human bones.

A small sampling revealed that they were of children, ranging in age from 35 fetal weeks to three years, and all dating from the home’s 36 years of operation.

Expressing shock, the commission vowed to continue its investigation into “who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way.”

Once again, Ireland’s past had returned to haunt.

His voice trembling with passion, the prime minister, Enda Kenny, addressed the Irish legislature on what he called the “chamber of horrors” discovered in Tuam. In the “so-called good old days,” he said, Irish society “did not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings.”

“We dug deep and we dug deeper still,” he said. “To bury our compassion, to bury our mercy, to bury our humanity itself.”

Though the prime minister said that “no nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children,” others directed their wrath at the Catholic Church and, of course, the Bon Secours order, whose only response so far has been to express its “continued cooperation and support” for the commission’s work.

The Corless household, meanwhile, became an international newsroom, with family members fielding the constant telephone calls and accommodating the television crews forever at the door.

Catherine answered every question out of duty, not vanity. But when Ireland’s most popular television program, “The Late Late Show,” invited her to appear as a guest, she balked.

There was her ever-present anxiety, which now limited her driving to little more than weekly five-mile runs to the SuperValu grocery in Tuam. More than that, she feared being accused of self-aggrandizement at the expense of dead children.

With her family all but demanding that she accept — Imagine how many home-baby survivors, suffering in silence, might be reached — Catherine reluctantly consented, but only if she would already be seated when the program returned from a commercial break. She did not want to be summoned from the curtain to unwanted applause.

Aidan drove her into Galway City to buy an outfit: black pants and a black top, of course, brightened slightly with a silver trim. Then up to Dublin.

“I was a mess,” Catherine recalled. “But I said: ‘This is it. I have to do it.’”

When she finished telling the story of the Tuam home on live television, the audience rose in what the host described as a very rare standing ovation. Catherine nodded, smiled slightly, tightly, and exhaled. Watching on a monitor in an adjacent room, her husband fought back tears.

“I’m married to her for 40 years,” he said later, still astonished. “And I don’t know her at all.”


Catherine’s Final Quest

Photographs of grandchildren adorn the tan walls. A silver kettle rests on the stove. A laptop computer sits open on the counter, beside a window that looks out on a garden, a bird feeder and, beyond, an undulating field of grass.

This is the kitchen of Catherine Corless, and her office. She conducts her online research here, and keeps assorted documents on the kitchen table for easy retrieval when yet another call comes in. Can you help me find my mother, my sister, my… She never refuses.

The future of the Tuam grounds that her questioning disturbed has yet to be revealed. The government is grappling with many complexities, including the sad fact that the remains of infants and children, the Marys and Patricks, the Bridgets and Johns, are commingled.

One option is to leave everything as is. Another is to disinter the remains for possible identification and proper burial — although it is unclear whether DNA evidence can be recovered from those who died so young, and so long ago.

Other issues also need resolution. Potential compensation for home baby survivors; litigation against the Bon Secours sisters, who run a vast health-care network; the propriety of children playing above the bones of other children.

And there remains the maddening mystery of why a Catholic order of nuns would bury these children in such a manner. Was it to save a few pounds for the cost of each burial? Was it meant as a kind of catacombs, in echo of the order’s French roots?


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A shrine built to honor the children. Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times


The baptism of these children entitled them under canon law to a funeral Mass and burial in consecrated ground. But perhaps the baptismal cleansing of their “original sin” was not enough to also wipe away the shameful nature of their conception. Perhaps, having been born out of wedlock in an Ireland of another time, they simply did not matter.

Her auburn hair cut short, Catherine stands now at her computer, gazing through the window at the garden that blesses her with a sense of oneness with it all. Her begonias are blood-red bursts, her lobelias the bluest of blue, her mind forever returning to the past.

A candy wrapper. Empty.

She has searched school and government records many, many times. So far, though, she has been unable to find the name of one particular little girl from the mother and baby home, her long-ago classmate.

“It would be nice to meet her,” Catherine says, leaving no doubt as to what she would say if given the chance.


At Tuam

Among the hundreds of children who stare up at us from their septic tank
is James Muldoon, who died in 1927 at the age of four months. At least he would never be forced to thank the Lord for mercies large or small.

That cry to high heaven
must come from Brendan Muldoon, who died in 1943
at a mere five weeks.

A teenage nun bows before an unleavened
host held up by a priest like a moon held up by an ash tree.

In 1947 the eleven month old Bridget Muldoon, a namesake of the mother
who would shortly give birth to me, has already distinguished herself as being a bit of a bother, while Dermott Muldoon, three months old in 1950, is about to join the ranks of my foster-sisters and foster-brothers.

in that unthinkable world where a wasp may recognize another wasp’s face
and an elephant grieve for an elephant down at the watering place.

Paul Muldoon
, 27 October, 2017





What Really Happened at the Mother and Baby Home?





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Ladybbird 05-03-19 03:35

re: TUAM-Irelands' Scandal: Mass Illegitimate Babies Graves & Maltreatment of Mothers
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by ThundaJoe (Post 1417662)
Thanks - interesting story. Kind of makes you wonder how many other places this kind of thing has happened ....


I agree ThundaJoe, sadly there is more to come with an everlasting pain of the few survivors..

Very sad that so many of the survivors in situations like this or similar never reply..

I think the Catholic churches and faith in many Priests therein is destroying itself.

Thanks for commentating.
.

Ladybbird 16-02-20 03:48

re: TUAM-Irelands' Scandal: Mass Illegitimate Babies Graves & Maltreatment of Mothers
 
Irish Mother and Baby Home Survivors Frustrated as Delay of Report is Likely

@IrishCentral 13 Feb, 2020



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The next report from the Irish Mother and Baby Home Investigation Commission, originally due 18 February, is likely to be delayed as a new government is being set up

With the next report from the Mother and Baby Home Investigation Commission likely to be delayed, survivors of Ireland’s notorious institutions are continuing to express their frustrations.

On 7 January, a spokesperson confirmed that the Commission’s next report, due on 18 February, is “on schedule,” but The Irish Times notes that Ireland’s recent General Election and the process of forming a new government will likely delay the report's delivery.

The February 2020 deadline was an extension of a previous extension of the deadline. The Commission most recently published its fifth interim report in April 2019.

The Commission was established by the Irish government in 2015 "to provide a full account of what happened to women and children in these homes during the period 1922 to 1998.

"The scope of the Commission's remit is broad, and includes several specific areas of practice and procedure in the care, welfare, entry arrangements and exit pathways for the women and children who were residents of the named 14 institutions and a representative sample of County identified for investigation."

The Commission has been organized under Ireland's Department of Children and Youth Affairs. The chair of that Department, Independent TD Katherine Zappone, lost her seat in Ireland's recent General Election and said over the weekend that she plans to "bow out" of Irish politics, potentially leaving the progress of the report in limbo.

Zappone said: "I had the privilege of serving the people of Dublin South West for the past four years - and I want to say thank you to them for that opportunity - and as Children's Mini
ster.

"So I have decided that I will just continue my change work now outside of Irish politics.”


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The loss of Zappone's seat comes about a week after Irish mother and baby home survivors and their families staged a protest outside of her Dublin office.

A spokesperson from the protest told The Irish Mirror on 1 February: “We are distressed over the total lack of health and welfare provision for survivors - almost six years since the issue came to world attention.”

“Minister Zappone promised two successive UN rapporteurs would visit Ireland to oversee justice for survivors. Neither ever came.

“Minister Zappone allowed Tusla and the HSE to delay providing files to the State inquiry and thus a three year inquiry is actually taking five years.

“Minister Zappone refused to publish recommendations from the survivors forum she herself had established and blocked any discussion of redress in the forum.”

“Minister Zappone hid behind a claimed need for new legislation to empower exhumations at baby home sites but has failed to enact legislation.

“She has failed to vindicate survivors right to prompt surveys and investigations at Bessborough and other sites where mass remains are suspected.”

Dublin resident David Kinsella, who was born in St Patrick’s Mother and Baby Home in Dublin, expressed similar frustrations; he told The Echo that further delays “leaves survivors in limbo.”

“Minister Zappone has found ways to delay the publication and can walk away after the election,” he said.

“While I understand and respect the Tuam babies need a proper burial with their families, that can go on as long as it needs to go on, but survivors have not got that time."

“For God’s sake, we want nothing more or less than other survivors got, like the Magdalene women, redress and recognition, nothing more and nothing less.”

Ladybbird 29-06-20 10:11

Magdalene NUNS Asylum Slaves- "Irelands' Dirty Laundry"
 
How Ireland's Nuns Turned ‘Fallen Women’ Into Slaves

Until 1996, pregnant or promiscuous women could be incarcerated for life in Magdalene Laundries.

Erin Blakemore 29 June 2020


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When the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some land they owned in Dublin, Ireland, to pay their debts in 1992, the nuns followed the proper procedures. They petitioned officials for permission to move the bodies of women buried in the cemetery at their Donnybrook laundry, which between 1837 and 1992 served as a workhouse and home for “fallen women.”


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But the cemetery at Donnybrook was no ordinary resting place: It was a mass grave. Inside were the bodies of scores of unknown women: the undocumented, uncared-about inmates of one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. Their lives—and later their deaths—had been shrouded in secrecy.

For more than two centuries, women in Ireland were sent to institutions like Donnybrook as a punishment for having sex outside of marriage. Unwed mothers, flirtatious women and others deemed unfit for society were forced to labor under the strict supervision of nuns for months or years, sometimes even for life.

When the mass grave at Donnybrook was discovered, the 155 unmarked tombs touched off a scandal that exposed the extent and horrors of the Magdalene laundries. As women came forward to share their experiences of being held against their will in restrictive workhouses, the Irish public reacted with outrage.


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The interior of the now derelict Sisters of Our Lady of Charity Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott St in Dublin's north inner city on the day of The Irish Government has apologised to the thousands of women locked up in Catholic-run workhouses known as Magdalene laundries between 1922 and 1996. (Photo by Julien Behal/PA Images via Getty Images)


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When the Magdalene Movement first took hold in the mid-18th century, the campaign to put “fallen women” to work was supported by both the Catholic and Protestant churches, with women serving short terms inside the asylums with the goal of rehabilitation. Over the years, however, the Magdalene laundries—named for the Biblical figure Mary Magdalene—became primarily Catholic institutions, and the stints grew longer and longer. Women sent there were often charged with “redeeming themselves” through lace-making, needlework or doing laundry.


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Though most residents had not been convicted of any crime, conditions inside were prison-like. “Redemption might sometimes involve a variety of coercive measures, including shaven heads, institutional uniforms, bread and water diets, restricted visiting, supervised correspondence, solitary confinement and even flogging,”writes historian Helen J. Self.


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Ireland’s first such institution, the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females in Dublin, was founded by the Protestant Church of Ireland in 1765. At the time, there was a worry that prostitution in Irish cities was on the rise and that “wayward” women who had been seduced, had sex outside of marriage, or gotten pregnant out of wedlock were susceptible to becoming prostitutes. Soon, parents began to send their unmarried daughters to the institutions to hide their pregnancies.

Initially, a majority of women entered the institutionsvoluntarily and served out multi-year terms in which they learned a “respectable” profession. The idea was that they’d employ these skills to earn money after being released; their work supported the institution while they were there.


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Nursery in the Sean Ross Abbey. (Credit: Brian Lockier/Adoption Rights Alliance)


But over time, the institutions became more like prisons, with many different groups of women being routed through the system, sometimes by the Irish government. There were inmates imported from psychiatric institutions and jails, women with special needs, victims of rape and sexual assault, pregnant teenagers sent there by their parents, and girls deemed too flirtatious or tempting to men. Others were there for no obvious reason. Though the institutions were run by Catholic orders, they were supported by the Irish government, which funneled money toward the system in exchange for laundry services.

Nuns ruled the laundries with impunity, sometimes beating inmates and enforcing strict rules of silence. “You didn’t know when the next beating was going to come,”said survivor Mary Smith in an oral history.

Smith was incarcerated in the Sundays Well laundry in Cork after being raped; nuns told her it was “in case she got pregnant.” Once there, she was forced to cut her hair and take on a new name. She was not allowed to talk and was assigned backbreaking work in the laundry, where nuns regularly beat her for minor infractions and forced her to sleep in the cold. Due to the trauma she suffered, Smith doesn’t remember exactly how long she spent in Sundays Well. “To me it felt like my lifetime,” she said.


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Survivors (left to right) Maureen Sullivan, Mary McManus, Kitty Jennette and Mary Smith, at the Law Reform Commission offices in Dublin to discuss proposed compensation packages, for those who survived Catholic-run workhouses known as Magdalene laundries. (Credit: Julien Behal/PA Images/Getty Images)


Smith wasn’t alone. Often, women’s names were stripped from them; they were referred to by numbers or as “child” or “penitent.” Some inmates—often orphans or victims of rape or abuse—stayed there for a lifetime; others escaped and were brought back to the institutions.

Another survivor, Marina Gambold, was placed in a laundry by her local priest. She recalls being forced to eat off the floor after breaking a cup and getting locked outside in the cold for a minor infraction. “I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening,” she told the BBC in 2013. “I was starving with the hunger, I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast.”

Some pregnant woman were transferred to homes for unwed mothers, where they bore and temporarily lived with their babies and worked in conditions similar to those of the laundries. Babies were usually taken from their mothers and handed over to other families. In one of the most notorious homes, the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, scores of babies died. In 2014, remains of at least 796 babies were found in a septic tank in the home’s yard; the facility is still being investigated to reconstruct the story of what happened there.


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John Pascal Rodgers, who was born in Tuam, Ireland, at a home for unmarried mothers run by nuns, poses with a photograph of his mother Bridie Rodgers. (Credit: Paul FaithAFP/Getty Images)


How did such an abusive system endure for 231 years in Ireland? To start with, any talk of harsh treatment at the Magdalene laundries and mothers’ homes tended to be dismissed by the public, since the institutions were run by religious orders. Survivors who told others what they had been through were often shamed or ignored. Other women were too embarrassed to talk about their past and never told anyone about their experiences. Details on both the inmates and their lives are scant.

Estimates of the number of women who went through Irish Magdalene laundries vary, and most religious orders haverefused to provide archival information for investigators and historians. Up to 300,000 women are thought to have passed through the laundries in total, at least 10,000 of them since 1922. But despite a large number of survivors, the laundries went unchallenged until the 1990s.

Then, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some of its land in 1992. They applied to have 133 bodies moved from unmarked graves on the property, but the remains of 155 people were found. When journalists learned that only 75 death certificates existed, startled community members cried out for more information. The nunsexplained there had been an administrative error, cremated all of the remains, and reburied them in another mass grave.


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Kevin Flanagan with Marie Barry, who was born at a Bessboro Mother and Baby home, at the 2014 third annual Flowers for Magdalenes remembrance event in Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin, to mark all of the women incarcerated in the Magdalene laundries. (Credit: Brian Lawless/PA Images/Getty Images)


The discovery turned the Magdalene laundries from an open secret to front-page news. Suddenly, women began to testify about their experiences at the institutions, and to pressure the Irish government to hold the Catholic Church accountable and to pursue cases with the United Nations for human rights violations. Soon, the UN urged the Vatican to look into the matter, stating that “girls [at the laundries] were deprived of their identity, of education and often of food and essential medicines and were imposed with an obligation of silence and prohibited from having any contact with the outside world.”

As the Catholic Church remained silent, the Irish government released a report that acknowledged extensive government involvement in the laundries and the deep cruelty of the institutions. In 2013, Ireland’s presidentapologized to the Magdalene women and announced a compensation fund. However, the religious groups that ran the laundries have refused to contribute to the fund and have turned away researchers looking for more information about the laundries.

Due in part to the uproar surrounding the discovery of the mass grave, the last Magdalene laundry finally closed in 1996. Known as the Gloucester Street Laundry, it was home to 40 women, most of them elderly and many with developmental disabilities. Nine had no known relatives; all decided to stay with the nuns.

Although Smith managed to reclaim her own life, she understands the damage that long-term institutionalization can inflict. “My body went into shellshock when I went there. When that door closed, my life was over,” Smith recalled in her oral history. “You see all these women there and you know you’re going to end up like them and be psychologically damaged for the rest of your life.”



The Best Documentary Ever - 16x9 Slave Labour: Magdalene Laundries Disgraced Irish Catholic women




The Magdalene Sisters Asylum (2002) R | 1h 54min | Drama - TRAILER;


The Magdalene Sisters (2002)



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Nelliebly 16-03-21 14:56

Re: Search for 796 Buried Infants at Former Mother and Baby home
 
May they all RIP

Ladybbird 17-10-21 18:34

re: TUAM-Irelands' Scandal: Mass Illegitimate Babies Graves & Maltreatment of Mothers
 
Liam Neeson “Filled With Horror” Over Tuam Babies, to Go Ahead With Major Film

The 796Tuam Babies Scandal Rocked Ireland and The World

Now Liam Neeson has revealed he is going ahead with a major film project on the issue.


Irish Central 17 OCT 2021.



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Liam Neeson has revealed how he was filled with horror by the Tuam babies saga so much so that he plans a major film on the topic. 796 children died over a 36-year period and their bodies were thrown into sewer pits in a Tuam Mother and Baby Home.


Appearing on RTE’s “Late Late Show” Neeson stated journalist Dan Barry of The New York Times ran an in-depth piece on the scandal that touched his soul.

"I read this and I couldn't find the words. I'm Irish and I was brought up a Catholic and a very strong Catholic and I was filled with emotion. I was filled with horror, and I was filled with embarrassment.

"For the first time in my life and I've made some 93/94 films, I never felt this way before. I was lying on my bed, I shot up straight and I thought I'm going to do something about this. Whatever celebrity status I have in the film world, I'm going to do something."

He met with Catherine Corless, the local historian who revealed the story first.

"I was filming in Belfast, and I visited Catherine in Galway and her lovely husband, Aidan, three years ago. I spent a few hours, and I was just struck by the humility of this ordinary and extraordinary woman and her husband.

"She filled me in on this extraordinary story. So, we're going to do this film, we have a wonderful writer on board, and I told Catherine to be patient with us as the film process can take a long time, for example, Schindler's List took 10 years to get together until we got a script.

Neeson added: "This Tuam Babies [film] will not take 10 years, it's three years already but we're very near completion. Hopefully maybe in a years' time, we will start production on this to tell the story to the world."

He said: "I called my producer friend Jules Day, she works with Ridley Scott and for under 22 years and I said,

'I'm going to send you this article, I want you to read it, we're going to produce a film about this, we have to.

Don't ask me where the motivation is coming from, we have to do it.'

"She read it and said, 'yeah, I'm on board”- “so it will get done.”


Read More

The silence over Tuam's Mother and Baby Home will never lift


https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.Y...=0&w=300&h=300

Ladybbird 09-11-21 09:34

re: TUAM-Irelands' Scandal: Mass Illegitimate Babies Graves & Maltreatment of Mothers
 
Criminal Allegations Lodged Against Northern Irelands' Mother and Baby Homes

The PSNI has received six allegations against Northern Ireland Mother and Baby Homes since launching an investigation less than a month ago.

Irish Central 9 NOV 2021




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Six allegations of criminal activity related to Mother and Baby Homes in Northern Ireland have been received by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) since commencing an investigation into allegations of physical and sexual abuse involving the institutions on October 6.



The investigation was launched in October following the publication of the report entitled "Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses in Northern Ireland - Truth, Acknowledgement, and Accountability." The PSNI welcomed the publication of the report and said that dedicated officers were ready and waiting to investigate reports of these crimes.

“Unprecedented independent investigation” recommended for Northern Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes


2 November, the PSNI said that the reports lodged since the launch of the investigation last month are from a number of people who were adopted from different named institutions and also from some who either worked there or were residents within these institutions.

All those who have come forward have been spoken to by a specialist detective from the Historic Child Abuse Unit within the Public Protection Branch and have been offered the opportunity to have their account recorded so that a criminal investigation can take place.

All those in contact are also offered to be signposted to other services for help and support.

Officers are pleased that people are having the confidence after all these years to come forward and report. However, they believe there are still people out there who have suffered as a result of criminal activity taking place in these Homes.

Detective Chief Superintendent Anthony McNally, Head of Public Protection Branch said: “We recognise the profound impact on the lives of those who were in Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries, and the concerns of the wider public on how they were operated.

“Those who suffered abuse in these Homes or know somebody who did, or those who may have witnessed potential criminal activity take place, please contact us. We don’t want anyone to feel they have to suffer in silence anymore.

“We will continue to circulate the details of our dedicated reporting channels but would ask that our local communities help us in getting the message out across Northern Ireland that we have a team of officers ready to robustly investigate reports made to us.”

In October, McNally said: “I would encourage anyone who has been the victim of non-recent abuse or any criminal act arising out of these homes, or who has information likely to assist an investigation into a criminal act committed, to please come forward and report this. We care about what you have to say, will listen and support you, and will act to keep you and others safe.”

Anyone wishing to contact the dedicated Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries Investigative Team can do so via the
following options:

Email: [email protected]

Police Service of Northern Ireland who will pass on your details to the dedicated investigation team to make direct contact.


PSNI says that officers will deal with any matters reported in a sensitive manner and will, where possible, progress matters through investigation.

“Shame on us” - Church leaders apologize after Northern Ireland Mother and Baby Home report



The Truth Recovery Design Panel's report

The full report entitled ‘Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses in Northern Ireland – Truth, Acknowledgement, and Accountability' was launched by the Truth Recovery Panel, which was appointed by the Northern Ireland Executive, on October 5 at Stormont in Belfast.

The primary recommendation in the report is to establish an ‘Integrated Investigation’ by a non-statutory Independent Panel feeding into a statutory Public Inquiry.

The panel’s five core recommendations focus on: Adoption of Guiding Principles; Responsibilities of the Executive Office; An Integrated Truth Investigation; Access to Records; and Redress, Reparation, and Compensation

The full report can be viewed here.


Tuam Babies" Full Documentary.






johntygc 17-01-22 00:17

Re: Search for 796 Buried Infants at Former Mother and Baby home
 
Ah, the caring and godly Catholic Church..
Murderers and pedophiles!!

Ladybbird 02-03-22 18:30

Re: Magdalene NUNS Asylum Slaves- "Irelands' Dirty Laundry"
 
How a Galway Family Saved 15 Women From a Magdalene Laundry in The 1960s

"Ireland's Dirty Laundry", a new two-part RTÉ documentary, tells how Hugh and Ena McEntee and their three sons heroically rescued 15 girls from a laundry in Galway city in 1963.

Irish Central. 2 MAR 2022.



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A new two-part documentary examining the desperate escape attempts of young women trapped in Magdalene Laundries tells the gripping story of how one Galway family broke 15 women out of one laundry in the 1960s.



Ena McEntee, who took up a job in the Magdalene Home Laundry in Galway at the end of 1963, became appalled by the conditions faced by young women at the home and told her family about their plight when she got home.

Her teenage sons Andy and Hugo then hatched a plan to break the girls out of the home.

The plan involved Ena working on the inside and opening the laundry door for the girls.

Her two sons then led the girls down an alleyway at a sprint to a van driven by her husband Hugh, while her third and youngest son Declan waited in the back of the van to open the door.

Andy, who was 12 or 13 at the time of the rescue, told the documentary that he had never seen anyone as scared as the girls after the rescue.


"I never saw anybody as scared. I thought we were scared until I saw these girls coming down. We ran up. Hugo was standing at the end of the walkway and he took two girls hand in hand and I took two and we went back to the van," Andy McEntee said.

"We thought we were breaking every law in the book. We were not breaking the law at all. We thought we were stealing these girls. We were breaking them out of prison."



He said there was "utter relief" when the van reached the family home in a corporation estate in Mervue.

The girls stayed in the family home for several days after the breakout while Ena and Hugh made arrangements to get them to safety.

One evening, Hugh drove the girls to Athenry railway station and sent them on their way to England.

"My dad looked after the financing, the girls got on to what we called the boat train and they went to England that way," Andy said.

His brother Hugo recalled how the nuns at the Magdalene laundry eventually realized that his mother had freed the girls and sent her a letter informing her that her services were no longer required.

"he read it to us. In celebration, she went down and got a Guinness for my father. We laughed and laughed at the success we had."

"You were constantly being told, ‘Nobody loves you. Nobody wants you. Your mother dumped you," survivor Maureen Sullivan told the documentary.

Other survivors recalled how they lived in a prison-like system, with round-the-clock work and evening prayers.

Regarded as "Maggies, the women worked for nothing and faced extreme verbal cruelty and physical abuse simply because they were unmarried mothers or regarded as morally wayward.

Some women found themselves in the laundries for the crime of going to the cinema twice in a week.

Many women wrote desperate letters to relatives detailing the inhumane conditions they faced but later found out that the letters were never posted.

Roughly 12,000 women lived and worked in Magdalene Laundries between 1922 and 1996 when the last laundry closed on Seán McDermott Street in Dublin.


The dramatic story Ireland's Dirty Laundry will be told in the upcoming two-part documentary, which will air on RTÉ on 2 March and 9 March

The documentary examines....

How the State and individual families conspired with the Catholic Church to enslave young women in the laundries.


A number of survivors appear in the documentary, tearfully recalling the horrific experience of being sent away to work in the laundries.









Ladybbird 10-04-22 11:59

re: TUAM-Irelands' Scandal: Mass Illegitimate Babies Graves & Maltreatment of Mothers
 
Mother and Baby Home: Search For Her Siblings With NO Burial Records

Mary Donovan's sister Ann Veronica Finn died a day after she was born at the Bessborough mother and baby home in 1959, while her brother Joseph Vincent died a day later.

---NO Burial Records Exist for either baby.

Irish Central. 10 APR 2022.





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The sister of twin babies who died at the Bessborough mother and baby home in County Cork 63 years ago has called for a full investigation into the home, stating that she is deeply concerned that no burial records exist for her siblings.


Mary Donovan's brother Vincent Joseph Finn was born at Bessborough to 19-year-old mother Margaret Mary Finn on March 24, 1959. Her sister Ann Veronica was born 20 minutes later.

Ann Veronica died within a day after her birth, while Vincent Joseph died a day later. Both babies died of Atelectasis Prematurity, which causes a total or partial collapse of the lungs, at the nearby St. Finbarr's Hospital.

However, Mary Donovan said she is deeply concerned that no burial records exist for her siblings.

"My brother and sister would be 63, and I need to find them because if they are alive I need to know they’re okay, and if they’re dead they were human beings and not trash to be scattered or discarded," Donovan told the Cork Echo.



She said the word "America" appears on one document related to her siblings and admitted she was uncertain whether they were buried in Cork or alive in the USA.


Donovan criticized Cork City Council's decision to protect just one part of the grounds of the former mother and baby home and called for a full examination of the grounds.

"This is the uncertainty that relatives like me have to live with, and without a full investigation into Bessborough, and a full examination of the grounds, family members like me will never know the truth," she told the Cork Echo.


A total of 963 children died at the Bessborough mother and baby home between 1922 and 1998, according to a report by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation.

---However, burial records are only available for 64 of the children who died there, meaning that 859 children are unaccounted for.


Cork City Council has designated one section of the grounds as a landscape preservation zone, protecting it from future development.

The section was identified as a "children's burial ground" on an Ordnance Survey map dating back to 1950 and is part of an area that was refused development for an apartment development.

However, Donovan is calling for the entire site to be protected until it has been properly investigated.

"We want the same as what they want in Tuam. We want a full investigation of the Bessborough grounds, we want the babies found, we want a full DNA analysis of their remains, and we want them to be given a proper burial," Donovan said.



Read more
Ireland's Mother and Baby Home redress payments to max out at €125k per person



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.

Ladybbird 10-08-23 06:24

re: TUAM-Irelands' Mothers & Babies Scandal Explored in Powerful 'Stolen' Documentary
 
Scandal In Ireland: Mass Graves For Illegitimate Babies & Maltreatment of Mothers

Mass Grave at Tipperary Mother and Baby Home to be Scanned

Parcels of land surrounding the Angels' Plot at the former Catholic home, Sean Ross Abbey, will be searched for undetected graves.

BBC 10 AUG 2023


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Plans to scan the land on the grounds of the former Mother and Baby Home at Sean Ross Abbey, in Tipperary, have made significant progress according to We Are Still Here, a survivor's group.


Ireland's governmental Department of Children recently confirmed they would fund the scans of lands located near the "Angels' Plot", a burial site where numerous children who died at the facility were laid to rest.

Between the 1930s and 1990s, Sean Ross Abbey bore witness to a tragic number of child deaths. The exact number of children who died remains uncertain, but estimates suggest that the figure could be in the hundreds.

The causes of these deaths ranged from illnesses like tuberculosis and malnutrition to neglect and subpar medical care. These vulnerable children, born to unmarried mothers, were often subjected to harsh living conditions that contributed to their frailty.

The survivors group from Sean Ross Abbey, We Are Still Here, met with representatives of Tipperary County Council and the firm who will be carrying out the scans, Precision Utility Mapping, to discuss the need for the underground scans and how they will be carried out.

Teresa Collins, who was born at Sean Ross Abbey in 1963, told the Offaly Express, “It was hugely positive to make this move forward and to host representatives of Tipperary County Council and Precision Utility Mapping at the site where scans for any possible undetected burials will take place in the near future.

“This scan will take place on a parcel of land adjacent to the Angels’ Plot where the Commission of Investigation undertook investigations a number of years ago."


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The existence of the Angels' Plot came to light in the 1990s when former residents began to share their stories of the harsh treatment and neglect they suffered. Many believed that their deceased peers were buried in the Angels' Plot, prompting calls for investigations and accountability.


Collins continued “According to the Commission of Investigation, the total number of infant deaths having occurred at Sean Ross Abbey amounted to 1,078. However, it is not feasible to conclude that all burials occurred in the relatively confined space of the Angels’ Plot where the Commission of Investigation carried out some investigative works.

"This necessitates the need for separate scans of a particular area of land adjacent to the Angels’ Plot."

Research indicates that there were at least 18 Mother and Baby Homes operating in Ireland between the 1920s and 1990s. The exact number might vary depending on how one categorizes certain institutions that shared similar functions.

Some of the most well-known institutions include Sean Ross Abbey in County Tipperary, Bessborough in County Cork, and Tuam Mother and Baby Home in County Galway.


The child deaths at Sean Ross Abbey were intertwined with allegations of abuse. Many former residents and survivors have come forward with harrowing accounts of emotional, physical, and even sexual abuse perpetuated by nuns and staff members. The survivors recount tales of cruelty, neglect, and mistreatment, further darkening the reputation of the facility and those who were supposed to provide care.

As public awareness grew about the tragedies at Sean Ross Abbey, calls for accountability intensified. The Irish government initiated investigations into the operations of the facility and the actions of the Catholic Church. These investigations shed light on the suffering endured by unwed mothers and their children, revealing the systemic failures and abuses that were allowed to persist for decades.

In recent years, efforts have been made to honor the memory of the children who suffered and died at Sean Ross Abbey. Memorials and commemorations have been established to remember their lives and acknowledge the pain they endured. These efforts also serve as a reminder of the importance of uncovering historical injustices and seeking justice for the victims.

Scandal In Ireland: Mass Graves For Illegitimate Babies






Ladybbird 05-11-23 02:52

re: TUAM Mother & Baby Home Survivors-Compensation STILL NOT Paid After Yrs
 
Irelands' Mother and Baby Homes Explored in Powerful New Documentary

"Stolen" explores how over 80,000 unmarried mothers were incarcerated in religious institutions where children were often adopted within Ireland and abroad.


BBC 5 NOV 2023


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A powerful new documentary explores the Irish institutions that housed tens of thousands of unmarried mothers between 1922 and 1998.



Margo Harkin's "Stolen" explores how over 80,000 unmarried mothers were incarcerated in religious institutions run by nuns, shining a light on a period of Irish history when children were often adopted within Ireland and abroad - unaware of their birth story or the identity of their birth mother.

Other children were fostered out as cheap labor after they turned six, while over 9,000 babies and young children died in the institutions between 1922 and 1998 at a rate that was five times the national average.

The new two-hour documentary allows survivors to give their own accounts of life in the institutions, detailing their experiences of cruelty and loss.

It also explores survivors' ongoing campaign for the truth, including a demand for DNA testing of remains to allow families to identify their loved ones and find closure.

Others, in the absence of burial records, are seeking to find the location of their relatives' final resting place, while some survivors still hold out hope of finding a long-lost sibling, with the film investigating allegations that some children's deaths were fabricated to facilitate their adoption to the United States.

"Stolen" will additionally explore how the history of religious institutions was largely ignored until historian Catherine Corless uncovered that there were 796 babies and young children buried in an underground sewage plant at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway.

The documentary will also examine the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, which was established by the Irish Government following the discovery in Tuam and other mother and baby homes around the country.


The Commission published its report in 2021, confirming reports of infant mortality, poor hygiene, and misogyny. Then-Taoiseach Micheál Martin issued a State apology following the publication of the report.

However, the film explores how survivors are not satisfied with how the report found that there was no evidence that women were forced into the institutions, with the report additionally stating that there was no evidence of forced adoptions.





Ladybbird 29-01-24 15:08

Re: TUAM Mother & Baby Home Survivors-Compensation STILL NOT Paid After Yrs
 
Redress Payments For Tuam Mother and Baby Home Survivors Continue to be Delayed

- The Catholic Church Must PAY...They Made Enough Money When They SOLD Those STOLEN Babies


The Department of Children has stated that opening a redress scheme as soon as possible remains a "top priority"


IrishCentral 29 JAN 2024



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Mother and Baby Home survivors continue to wait for redress payments three years after Ireland's Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation recommended compensation for survivors.




The Department of Children has stated that opening a redress scheme as soon as possible remains a "top priority", according to the Irish Examiner.

The Department added that the redress scheme, which was due to be rolled out by the end of 2023, is set to open in Q1 of 2024.

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However, the Examiner reports that survivors are still waiting to receive the green light to apply.

UCC law professor Conor O'Mahony described the delay as "simply unfair" to aging survivors.

In 2021, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes recommended compensation for survivors in its final report and the Irish Government subsequently appointed a financial assessor to negotiate with seven religious institutions about compensation.

However, there is no legal framework compelling the religious orders to negotiate, according to the Examiner.

O'Mahony told the publication that the Government could open the scheme to survivors while negotiations are ongoing.

"There’s no need to wait until any contributions are handed over, just open the scheme and have it up and running," O'Mahony told the Irish Examiner.

The Commission's five-year inquiry, which was led by former judge Yvonne Murphy, found that over 9,000 children died in 18 institutions run by seven different religious orders between 1922 and 1998, double the mortality rate among children in the general population.

The final report also detailed shocking experiments and physical abuse carried out in the different institutions and recommended financial compensation for survivors.

Up to 34,000 people are eligible for compensation, but the scheme has faced criticism because it excludes certain categories of survivors, including babies who spent less than six months in an institution and those who were fostered out to local families.

O'Mahony said the Irish Government is attempting to lay financial responsibility on the seven religious orders as well as maintaining public finances.

The seven religious orders include the Bon Secours sisters, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of St John of God, and lay organization the Legion of Mary.

Children's Minister Roderic O'Gorman has sought financial contributions from each religious order, but only the Bon Secour nuns, who ran the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway between 1925 and 1961, have agreed to contribute to the redress scheme.

However, the Examiner reports that no deal has been secured with the Bon Secours nuns.

Peter Mulryan, a 79-year-old man who spent four years at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home before being fostered out to a family that abused him, labeled the delay as a "disgrace".

"The whole thing is a disgrace. I have never, ever received a penny from the State for the abuses and neglect I suffered," Mulryan told the Examiner.

"There isn’t a sign of anything. I am disgusted with it to be honest, what they are doing to us, they are playing a game of wait and die so they have less to give a few euros to."




Mulryan added that the delays were "prolonging our agony" and said he is skeptical that redress payments will be made this year.

"They say they are giving us redress this year, I take that with a pinch of salt, how many times did they promise this that, and the other?"



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