But no burial records
The full horrors of Tuam are about to be dug up.
The full excavation of a mass grave of babies and young children at Tuam in County Galway is under way. The exhumations will be carried out at the site of an institution for unmarried mothers, which operated between 1925 and 1961.
The story came to international attention 11 years ago, after amateur historian Catherine Corless discovered there were death certificates for 796 babies and children who were in the institution, but no burial records. In 2017, investigators found what they described as “significant quantities of human remains” at the site.
What the BBC carefully does not spell out is that 706 dead babies and children is a massive number and indicates neglect at best and horrors at worst. The Irish Catholic church is under the microscope again and it’s not going to be pretty.
The bodies were in underground chambers in a disused sewage system.
Because the Irish Catholic Church saw them as so much garbage. But hey, don’t you dare have an abortion. You have to gestate that fetus to term and then push it out so that we can starve and torture it to death.
The institution, which was known as St Mary’s mother-and-baby home, was run by Catholic religious order the Bon Secours Sisters and owned by Galway County Council.
Yeah really very wonderful bon secours there. Top notch. Almost as good as handing the babies over to a pack of wolves.
Scientists say the remains are largely “commingled” – in other words, the bones are mixed up.
Because the babies were thrown into the sewer system like so much garbage.
It’s heartbreaking. These were children born around the same time as my parents’ generation and mine. But because they were born to mothers who were still children themselves, who had often been raped, and abandoned, and because they weren’t blond and blue-eyed baby boys (those were confiscated, fed well, and sold to Americans), they and their mothers were abused and starved to death. And the whole country turned a blind eye, terrified of the power of the church.
A week or so ago I was on a history forum in which a bunch of people were defending the Catholic Church in Ireland as having been wonderful for stepping up and providing social services and support when no-one else would. I couldn’t contribute to the discussion because I was too furious to type coherently.