Report highlights horror of how Ireland treated unwed mothers and their babies
Inquiry into lives of women and children in 18 institutions reveals shocking abuse
A damning report into how the Roman Catholic Church and Irish state officials colluded to run 18 homes for unwed mothers and their children is being released in Dublin. It catalogues horrific abuse where at least 9,000 children died and their bodies discarded in unmarked graves or worse, mothers and children forced into hard work for little or no money, and all with the approval of Irish officials who were aware of the abuses being carried out by the religious nuns and brothers running the institutions.
What is Ireland’s Mother and Baby Scandal?
An Irish inquiry into alarming death rates among newborns at church-run homes for unwed mothers handed down its final report on Tuesday, laying bare one of the Catholic Church’s darkest chapters and leading to demands for state compensation.
Living conditions in the institutions and mortality among mothers and babies were among the issues examined, as well as post-mortem practices, vaccine trials conducted on children, illegal adoption and social attitudes.
It has already been revealed by one Sunday newspaper that the report will say 9,000 babies and children died in the homes – run by nuns and Catholic religious orders with support from the Irish state.
What kicked off the inquiry?
The inquiry was launched six years ago after evidence of an unmarked mass graveyard at Tuam was uncovered by amateur local historian Catherine Corless, who said she had been haunted by childhood memories of skinny children from the home.
The remains of 802 children, from newborns to three-year-olds, were buried between 1925 and 1961 in just one of the so-called Mother and Baby Homes, a 2017 interim report found. Then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny described the burial site at Tuam, in the western county of Galway, as a “chamber of horrors”. But the scale of the problem nationwide only came to light during the five-year investigation.
What does the report cover?
The investigation took five years and looked at the lives of women and children in 18 institutions during the period from 1922 to 1998.
One of the things that hit me was the extent to which this was an enormous societal failure and an enormous societal shame that we have a stolen generation of children who did not get the upbringing they should have.
The document, which is 3,000 pages long, will be distributed to survivors before it is made available to the wider public.
The report is a culmination of the commission’s findings on practices and procedures in 14 mother-and-baby homes and four county homes over a 76-year period.
What did the report look at?
Living conditions in the institutions and mortality among mothers and babies were among the issues examined, as well as post-mortem practices, vaccine trials conducted on children, illegal adoption and social attitudes.
It has already been revealed by one Sunday newspaper that the report will say 9,000 babies and children died in the homes.
How bad was it?
Government records show that the mortality rate for children at the homes where tens of thousands of women, including rape victims, were sent to give birth, was often more than five times that of those born to married parents.
A first-person account
Mary Harney was born in the Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork in 1949. She spent the first two-and-a-half years of her life there, with her mother, before being fostered to a family in Cork city. She was neglected and abused in her foster home, and at the age of five was removed and sent to the Good Shepherd Industrial School in Sunday’s Well. She refers to her time in the Good Shepherd as incarceration, and gave this account of her time there to Irish media recently:
“We were polishing floors on our hands and knees, cleaning the headstones in the graveyard with wire brushes so that our knuckles were bleeding One of the things we had to do was what was called teasing a mattress. So, bear in mind that many of the children were emotionally and mentally disturbed, and they wet the bed. When we were assigned to work on these chores, one of the things we had to do was to slit open the horsehair mattress and take all the stuffing out of it. And we were in a room where there were no windows. These mattresses that were urine soaked, we had to tease the stuffing in them, the dust in them went up our noses. We would have to tease it from one side of the room, put it in the other side and then re-stuff the mattress with dry horsehair-type stuff. We had black snot for weeks after … nowadays, it would be considered a crime to make a child do that…. We repaired our own shoes, we cut the leather, we sewed the shoes until our fingers were bleeding with the wax thread. And that was considered normal, nobody considered that to be a problem.”
But there are other scandals too …
The Catholic Church’s reputation in Ireland has been shattered by a series of scandals over paedophile priests, abuse at workhouses, forced adoptions of illegitimate babies and other painful issues.
Pope Francis begged forgiveness for the scandals during the first papal visit to the country in almost four decades in 2018.
Relatives have alleged the babies were mistreated because they were born to unmarried women who, like their children, were seen as a stain on Ireland’s image as a devout Catholic nation.
What was the church’s role?
The catholic church ran many of Ireland’s social services in the 20th century. While run by nuns, the homes received state funding and, as adoption agencies, were also regulated by the state.
Those babies … were just discarded. They were not seen as human beings at all. They were just seen as things to be discarded, not treated with any dignity or respect, and it’s time to turn the tables to give healing back to all the survivors.
Another source of anger for survivors is the policy of the religious organisations – and the state – to impede them from tracing each other. Ireland denies adopted people the legal right to their own information and files.
The report is understood to chronicle many of the lies and obfuscations of priests, nuns and officials.
“It’s a crucial moment. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to come out,” said Anne Harris, 70, who gave birth to a son in an institution in County Cork in 1970. “Irish society was quite rigid and judgmental about children born out of wedlock. These huge institutions were where women were just put away out of sight.”
Changing attitudes
By 1970 the worst abuses were over and she was one of the women whose families paid for their institutionalisation during pregnancy. Those unable to pay had to cook, scrub floors and do other manual work. Harris has written a novel, Unspoken, based on her successful search for her son.
The 2013 film Philomena starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan was based on Philomena Lee, who battled to find the son she was forced to give up for adoption in the 1950s.
A window on the past
While Irish voters have overwhelmingly approved abortion and gay marriage in referendums in recent years, the Mother and Baby Home scandal has revived anguish over how women and children were treated in the not-too-distant past.
Will it help heal the victims?
Joan Burton, a former deputy prime minister who was born into such a home in 1949, said the investigation’s findings were a landmark in documenting a system that risks being forgotten in a liberalising country no longer beholden to the Catholic church.
“The report will reveal, particularly to a new generation of younger people, what Ireland once did to women who had the audacity to love outside of marriage and to bear children who had to be ‘given up’,” she wrote in the Irish Independent. “It will give us as a society an opportunity to ask why this form of brutality was tolerated for so long.”
What they’re saying
“It’s a crucial moment. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to come out. Irish society was quite rigid and judgmental about children born out of wedlock. These huge institutions were where women were just put away out of sight.”
- Anne Harris, 70, who gave birth to a son in an institution in County Cork in 1970.
“I don’t want to hear any platitudes from him, things that we’ve heard about the Magdalene Laundries and other places. ‘Oh, we’re sorry, it shouldn’t have happened.’ Well, it did happen, and you were responsible. The Irish government was utterly and totally responsible, whether society was involved or whether the religious orders colluded, the responsibility is on their doorstep.”
- Mary Harney, who was born in the Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork in 1949
“I have my health battles. With all the stress and worry over the years, I ruined myself with smoking and worrying. It’s bad at the moment but I am just praying to keep strong and to stay alive until I see justice done. I believe I will get to the truth eventually.”
- Ann O’Gorman, who was 17 in the summer of 1971 when she gave birth to baby Evelyn in a church-run home in Cork.