LONDON (AP) – The prime minister of Ireland said on Tuesday that the country must “face the whole truth of our past”, as a long-awaited report reported decades of damage caused by church-run homes for women unmarried women and their babies, where thousands of children died.
Micheal Martin said that young women and their children have paid a high price for Ireland’s “perverse religious morality” in recent decades.
“We had a completely distorted attitude towards sexuality and intimacy. Young mothers and their sons and daughters paid a terrible price for this dysfunction, ”he said.
Martin said he would make a formal apology on behalf of the state in the Irish parliament on Wednesday.
The final report of a survey of mothers and babies’ homes said that 9,000 children died in 18 different homes for mothers and babies during the 20th century. Fifteen percent of all children born in homes died, almost double the national infant mortality rate.
The report said that “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 reckoning process in overwhelming Roman Catholic Ireland, with a history of abuse at church-run institutions, including the rejection and shame of single mothers, many of whom have been pressured to deliver their babies for adoption.
Church-run homes in Ireland housed orphans, single pregnant women and their babies for most of the 20th century. Institutions have been subject to intense public scrutiny since historian Catherine Corless in 2014 tracked the death certificates of nearly 800 children who died in the former Bon Secours home for mothers and babies in Tuam, County Galway, in western Ireland – but only managed to find a record cemetery for a child.
Later, investigators found a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children in an underground sewer structure on the grounds of the house, which was administered by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961
The commission of inquiry said that about 56,000 single mothers and about 57,000 children lived in the homes it investigated, with the highest number of admissions in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The last of the houses did not close until 1998.
“Although homes for mothers and babies are not a peculiarly Irish phenomenon, the proportion of single Irish mothers who were admitted to mothers and babies or county homes in the 20th century was probably the largest in the world,” said the report.
The commission said that women’s lives “were damaged by pregnancy outside of marriage and the responses of the father of their children, their immediate families and the wider community.
“The vast majority of children in institutions were ‘illegitimate’ and therefore suffered discrimination for most of their lives,” added the report.
The prime minister said the report “poses profound questions for the whole of Irish society”.
“What was described in this report was not imposed on us by any foreign power,” he said. “We did it for ourselves, as a society. “