More than 900 of the 3,349 children held in the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam – known as ‘The Home’ – died in their ‘care’. The figures paint a horrifying picture. 80 percent were less than a year old. Across these institutions, infant mortality rates were four times higher than the national average.
It is only thanks to the work of the historian Catherine Corless, and the victims’ families, that these crimes are finally coming to light, despite the relentless coverups by the authorities. In her work, Corless uncovered a stomach-churning truth: 796 children who died at Tuam had their remains dumped into a sewer tank.
In July of this year, excavation of this mass grave finally began. It’s hoped that with this some closure can be brought to the affected families. But the rot runs deep.
This is only a peek into the barbaric legacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland. True justice will require the overthrow of this whole rotten system!
Mother and baby homes
When Corless began her investigation, she was met with a conspiracy of silence – from the Bon Secours Sisters, Galway County Council, and Church leaders. We now know why: all of them have blood on their hands.
The Home was founded in 1925 and operated by the Bon Secours Sisters until 1961. The building was a repurposed Famine-era workhouse, one of a dozen such homes operating under Church control from 1922 until 1998.
Women and children locked in these homes were branded as sinners and punished as such. This is no doubt how the Church authorities must have justified to themselves the deaths of the 9,000 children who perished across these homes.
The miserable conditions were also compounded by the public stigma that came with it – and the virtual isolation of their residents from the outside world – turning their lives into a genuine nightmare. Of the more than 5,000 women and children who passed through the Home, those who survived were left with serious mental scars. Across Ireland that figure is as high as 100,000.
A conscious cover-up
None of this was a secret to the authorities. State, Church and government officials all knew, but did nothing about it. On the contrary, they colluded in the cover-up.
All the way back in the 1970s two children playing near the Home found the bones of the children which are now being excavated. Authorities swiftly dismissed them as Famine victims, despite knowing the Famine burials were elsewhere.
Local and Church authorities would have certainly been aware of the truth. Galway County Council ran inspections of the Home, and in 1949, after some of the worst years of deaths, declared “everything was in good order” and the Home in “excellent condition”. It wasn’t until Corless’ investigation that the truth began to emerge.
At a national level, the rot was just as deep. In 1948 the then-Minister for Health Dr Noel Browne proposed a modest Mother and Child scheme inspired by the NHS. It would have provided healthcare to all children under 16 and pregnant women – potentially ending the Church’s monopoly over women’s and children’s care.
So the Church hierarchy struck back. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid – one of the chief architects of the Catholic Church’s ‘special position’ in De Valera’s constitution – denounced the plan, and the Fine Gael-led government quickly caved in. The result: another half a century of abuse and thousands more deaths were unleashed on the most vulnerable in Ireland.
Church and state: a bloody legacy
The fact is the State was never interested in confronting the Church. Since the Free State’s inception, they leaned on the Church’s moral authority to support their rule. That meant upholding the Church’s control over family life and protecting it from accountability.
Still today – even after a never-ending sleaze of scandals have discredited the Church in the eyes of many – the State strives to protect them and themselves. Their own report on Mother and Baby Homes scandalously concluded:
“Women who gave birth outside marriage were subject to particularly harsh treatment. Responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families […] it must be acknowledged that the institutions under investigation provided a refuge – a harsh refuge in some cases – when the families provided no refuge at all.”
So we’re told the deprived families who were ostracised by the Church and state are to blame! This is the most disgusting distortion of reality one could imagine! The responsibility for these crimes lies squarely with the Irish State, the Catholic Church, and the political parties that sustained them, chief among them Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
The current excavations hope to bring closure to the victims of this institutionalised abuse with the decency of a proper burial.
It’s long overdue as well that Ireland once and for all bury the ghosts of our past and lay the rule of the Church, and all those who facilitated it, to rest.
