LONDON (AP) – Ireland’s prime minister said on Tuesday that the country should “respect the full truth of our past” as a long-awaited report damaged decades of damage to church homes for unmarried women and their babies, where thousands of babies are dead.
Micheal Martin said young women and their children had paid a heavy price for Ireland’s “perverted religious morality” in recent decades.
“We had a completely skewed attitude towards sexuality and intimacy. “Young mothers and their sons and daughters paid a terrible price for the dysfunction,” he said.
Martin said he would formally apologize on behalf of the state in Ireland’s Parliament on Wednesday.
The final report of an investigation into the mother-and-baby homes said that 9,000 children died in 18 different mother-and-baby homes in the 20th century. Fifteen percent of all children born in the homes are dead, nearly double the nationwide infant mortality rate.
The report says ‘the very high mortality rates were known to local and national authorities at the time and were recorded in official publications.’
The investigation is part of a process of reckoning in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland with a history of abuse in church institutions, including the shame and shame of unmarried mothers, many of whom have been put under pressure to give up babies for adoption.
Churches run in Ireland for most of the 20th century housed orphans, unmarried pregnant women, and their babies. The institutions have been the subject of serious public scrutiny since historian Catherine Corless in 2014 found death certificates for nearly 800 children who died in the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway in Western Ireland – but could only a funeral finds record for one child.
Investigators later found a mass grave containing the remains of infants and young children in an underground sewer structure on the grounds of the house, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961.
The commission of inquiry said about 56,000 unmarried mothers and about 57,000 children lived in the homes it surveyed, with the most admissions in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The last houses only closed in 1998.
“Although maternal and baby homes were not a peculiar Irish phenomenon, the proportion of Irish single mothers admitted to maternal and baby homes or graveyards in the 20th century was probably the highest in the world,” the report said.
The commission said the women’s lives “were ruined by pregnancy out of wedlock, and the responses of the father of their child, their immediate families and the wider community.
“The vast majority of the children in the institutions were ‘illegitimate’ and consequently discriminated against for most of their lives,” the report added.
The prime minister said the report “raises in-depth questions for Irish society”.
“What is described in this report was not imposed on us by any foreign power,” he said. “We did it as a society to ourselves. ‘