In a report released by the government on Tuesday, a shocking number of deaths and widespread abuse were found at religious institutions in Ireland for unmarried mothers and their children. Survivors say the document is a small step toward accountability after decades of atrocities.
The report, the culmination of a six-year investigation, set out about 9,000 child deaths at 14 of the country’s so-called mother and baby homes and four provincial homes over several decades, a death rate much higher than the rest of the population. The report found that the institutions, to which unmarried women and girls were sent to secretly give birth and were put under pressure to give up their children for adoption, were responsible for unethical vaccination trials.
For decades, the stories of these places and the atrocities in them were largely unspoken – despite calls from the mothers who became virtual prisoners within their walls and children who spent their earliest years there and later shared stories of neglect and abuse.
But as the country made progress with ugly aspects of its conservative Roman Catholic roots, deeply intertwined with the founding of the state, there were recent moments that the extent of systemic abuse was highlighted.
Tuesday was one of those days.
The leader of Ireland, or Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, told a news conference that the report set out a “dark, difficult and shameful chapter” from the country’s past, acknowledging the state’s failures, society and the church.
“It opens a window to a deep culture of misogyny in Ireland over several decades, with serious and systematic discrimination against women, especially those who have given birth outside of marriage,” he said. “We did it to ourselves as a society.”
Survivors of the houses say urgent action by the state is needed, and many believe that the Roman Catholic Church, which ran the houses, should be held more accountable. The Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors said it was disappointed with the ‘fundamentally incomplete’ nature of the final report
The church has been silent on the issue in the past, but Eamon Martin, Archbishop of Armagh and head of the Irish Catholic Church, apologized late Tuesday. According to him, the church was clearly part of a culture in which people were “regularly stigmatized, judged and rejected.”
“For that and for the prolonged painful and emotional distress that results,” Archbishop Martin said, “I apologize unconditionally to the survivors.”
Mr. Martin and the country’s children’s minister, Roderic O’Gorman, spoke to survivors by video earlier in the afternoon to discuss the contents of the more than 3,000 pages long report. Mr. Martin said he would issue an official apology to parliament on Wednesday, and O’Gorman promised the government was committed to working with survivors.
Mother and baby homes were run by religious orders, which began in the 1920s and were funded by the Irish government. But the institutions to which young women and girls have been taken, usually against their will, are not a thing of Ireland’s distant past. The last facilities were closed in 1998.
The commission focused on 18 institutions between 1922 and 1998, and was set up after reports emerged that the remains of nearly 800 babies and children were buried in an unmarked mass grave at a nuns-run home in the city of Tuam. in Galway.
The situation was initially established by the extensive research of a local, amateur historian, Catherine Corless, who compiled records of dozens of suspected infant and child deaths in the St. Louis area. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home shows, but no graves associated with it. . Mr. Martin thanked her on Tuesday and called her an ‘untiring crusader of dignity and truth’.
“It was a long journey and it was not easy,” Corless said in an interview Tuesday morning. As evidence has piled up over the years, she said she feels compelled to pressure the government to take notice. “That’s all I could do: keep talking, keep being a voice for the people who had no voice.”
In the wake of her work, the government was forced to pay attention and formed the commission in 2015. A significant number of human remains were found at the site in Tuam in 2017.
Corless acknowledged that Tuesday was a “big day” for survivors, but said the state’s apology simply did not go far enough. She said the Bon Secours nuns, who run the plant in Tuam, and assignments overseen by others should be held accountable.
The atrocities did not just take place in Tuam. The 18 houses in Tuesday’s report spanned the country and were run by different groups of nuns. The church ran the houses, but the newly formed Irish state worked hand-in-hand with them and made very effective state institutions in all but name.
The report set out how 56,000 unmarried mothers and about 57,000 children came through the homes that the commission investigated over a period of 76 years. An attempt was made to make a distinction between the earliest years of the house and those that came later.
“In the years before 1960, mother and baby homes did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact, it appears that they have significantly reduced their chances of survival, ”the report reads, adding that the women and children” should not have been in the institutions at all “.
But it is also said that there is ‘no evidence of the kind of gross abuse that has occurred in industrial schools’, saying that women are not forced by the state or church to enter the houses, although they are left with little choice has, ‘issue with.
After Ireland’s Sunday Independent published details of the report this week, KRW Law Human Rights, which represents a number of survivors, said the leak further undermined confidence in the commission.
The commission’s archive has been handed over to the country’s children’s and family agency, although survivors have expressed concern about access to the material. The government has promised to ensure access to their personal information and said counseling services are being offered.
Mr O’Gorman said the government had written to the relevant religious orders to arrange a meeting to apologize and demand compensation for the survivors.
Marie Arbuckle, a survivor of one of the houses in Dublin where she gave birth to a son in 1981, said the decades since had been painful and felt the report had barely scratched the surface.
“How can you take a baby away from a mother if it’s not abuse?” she said. “No matter what excuse they give, it can not take back what they have already stolen from us, but own it.”