A government-commissioned report released on Tuesday found a shocking number of deaths and widespread abuse at religious institutions in Ireland for single mothers and their children. Survivors say the document is a small step towards accountability after decades of horrors.
The report, the culmination of a six-year investigation, detailed some 9,000 child deaths in 14 of the nation’s so-called mother and baby homes and four county homes over several decades, a mortality rate much higher than the rest of the population. The institutions, where single women and girls were sent to give birth in secret and were pressured to deliver their children for adoption, were also responsible for testing for unethical vaccines and traumatic emotional abuse, the report concluded.
For decades, the stories of these places and the atrocities committed in them were largely unspoken – despite calls from mothers who became virtual prisoners within their walls and children who spent their early years there, after sharing stories of abandonment and abuse .
But as the country took large steps to take into account the ugliest aspects of its conservative Roman Catholic roots, deeply intertwined with the founding of the state, there have been recent times when the scale of systemic abuse has been brought to light.
Tuesday was one of those days.
Ireland’s leader, or Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, at a news conference said that the report outlined a “dark, difficult and shameful chapter” of the country’s past, recognizing significant flaws on the part of the state, society and the church.
“This opens a window to a deeply misogynistic culture 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 this to ourselves as a society.”
Survivors of the houses say urgent action by the state is necessary, and many say the Roman Catholic Church, which runs the houses, needs to be held more fully accountable. O Coalition of mothers and babies who survive at home said they were disappointed with the “fundamentally incomplete” nature of the final report
The Church had been silent on the issue in the past, but on Tuesday, Eamon Martin, the archbishop of Armagh and head of the Irish Catholic Church, apologized. The Church, he said, was clearly part of a culture in which people “were often stigmatized, judged and rejected”.
“For that, and for the lasting pain and emotional suffering that has resulted,” said Archbishop Martin, “I apologize without reservation to the survivors.”
Martin and the country’s Minister of Childhood, Roderic O’Gorman, chatted with survivors early in the afternoon by video to discuss the content of the report, which is over 3,000 pages long. Martin said he would issue an official apology to Parliament on Wednesday, and O’Gorman promised that the government was committed to working with the survivors.
The homes of mothers and babies were run by religious orders from the 1920s onwards and financed by the Irish government. But the institutions where young people and girls have been taken, usually against their will, are not a thing of Ireland’s distant past. The last of the facilities was closed in 1998.
The commission concentrated on 18 institutions between 1922 and 1998 and was created after reports emerged that the remains of nearly 800 babies and children were buried in an unmarked mass grave in a house run by nuns in the city of Tuam, county of Galway.
Attention was initially drawn to the situation by extensive research by a local amateur historian, Catherine Corless, who collected records showing dozens of suspected deaths of babies and children at Santa Maria’s Mother and Baby Home, but with no graves associated with them. Mr Martin thanked her for the name on Tuesday, calling it a “tireless crusade of dignity and truth”.
“It was a long journey and it wasn’t easy,” Corless said in an interview Tuesday morning. As the evidence has accumulated over the years, she said she felt compelled to pressure the government to take notice. “That’s all I could do: keep talking, keep being a voice for people who had no voice.”
In the wake of its work, the government was forced to pay attention and formed the commission in 2015. A significant number of remains were found at the site in Tuam in 2017.
Ms. Corless acknowledged that Tuesday was a “big day” for the survivors, but said the state’s apology was simply not far enough. She said the Bon Secours nuns, who ran the facilities in Tuam, and the orders that supervised others, needed to be held responsible.
The atrocities did not happen only in Tuam. The 18 houses in Tuesday’s report span the country and are run by different groups of nuns. The Church ran the houses, but the newly founded Irish state worked side by side with them, making many institutions effectively state-owned, except in name.
The report detailed how 56,000 single mothers and about 57,000 children passed the homes investigated by the commission over a period of 76 years. He tried to differentiate between the early years of the house and those that came later.
“In the years before 1960, homes for mothers and babies did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact, they appear to have significantly reduced their prospects for survival, “said the report, adding that women and children” should not even have been in institutions “.
But she also said that there was “no evidence of the kind of gross abuse that occurred in industrial schools” and said that women were not forced by the state or the church to enter the houses, although they had little choice, a point that survivors were troubled by. with.
After the Irish newspaper Sunday Independent published details of the report this week, KRW Law Human Rights, which represents several survivors, said the leak further undermined confidence in the commission.
The commission’s file was handed over to the country’s children’s and families agency, although survivors expressed concerns about access to the materials. The government has promised to guarantee access to your personal information and said that counseling services are being offered.
O’Gorman said the government wrote to the religious orders involved to set up a meeting to apologize and seek compensation for the survivors.
Marie Arbuckle, a survivor from one of the houses in Dublin where she gave birth to a son in 1981, said the decades since have been painful and felt the report had barely scratched the surface.
“Taking a baby from the mother, how can you say it is not abuse?” she said. “No matter what excuses they make, you can’t take what they’ve stolen from us, but confess.”