The gloomy history of a network of religious institutions in Ireland that abused and shamed unmarried mothers and their children for much of the 20th century must be exposed.
A Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland has documented shocking death rates and numbness in institutions that have doubled as orphanages and adoption agencies.
The mother and baby housing commission is due to share a 3,000-page report with the system’s survivors on Tuesday. The five-year investigation led to the discovery of a mass grave of infants and children in Tuam, County Galway.
The taoiseach, Michéal Martin, will give a formal apology in the Dáil on Wednesday. Martin, who read the report, apparently found the content shocking and difficult to read.
It is estimated that 9,000 children died in 18 institutions between 1922 and 1998 when the last such house closed, according to a leak published in the Sunday Independent. The infant mortality rate is reportedly double the national rate, which underscores the impact of neglect, malnutrition and disease.
Another source of anger for survivors is the policies of religious organizations – and the state – to prevent them from locating each other. Ireland denies accepted people the legal right to their own information and files. It is understood that the report describes many of the lies and disguises of priests, nuns and officials.
“This is an important moment. I’m sorry it took so long to get out, “said Anne Harris, 70, who gave birth to a boy in a county in Cork County in 1970. Irish society was rather rigid and judgmental about children born out of wedlock. These large institutions were where women were put out of sight just out of sight. ”
Joan Burton, a former deputy prime minister who was born in such a house in 1949, said the findings of the inquiry are a beacon in the documentation of a system forgotten in a liberalizing country that is no longer for the Catholic Church is not considered.
“The report will, especially for a new generation of younger people, reveal what Ireland has ever done to women who had the audacity to love outside of marriage and to give birth to children who had to be ‘given up’,” she writes. the Irish Independent. . “It will give us as a society the opportunity to ask why this form of brutality has been tolerated for so long.”
The commission was set up in 2014 after a historian, Catherine Corless, found death certificates for nearly 800 children living in Bon Secours’ mother and baby home in Tuam, but only two funeral records. Excavations subsequently found that an underground structure was divided into 20 rooms with ‘significant amounts of human remains’, the commission said in an interim report.
The government on Monday apologized to the survivors for the media leak over the weekend, which undermines the promise to give them first access to the report before it is published. It is considering compensation and legislation to help mothers and their children locate each other should they wish to.
Harris said she was relatively happy: by 1970, the worst abuse was over and she was one of the women whose families paid for their institutionalization during pregnancy. Those who could not pay had to cook, scrub floors and do other handicrafts. Harris wrote 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 struggled to find the boy she had to force in the 1950s to give up for adoption.