The sad story of a network of religious institutions in Ireland that abused and embarrassed single mothers and their children for much of the 20th century must be revealed.
A judicial investigation commission on Ireland’s mothers and baby homes has documented shocking death rates and insensitivity in institutions that have doubled as orphanages and adoption agencies.
The mother and baby home commission is expected to share a 3,000-page report with survivors of the system on Tuesday. His five-year investigation was prompted by the discovery of a mass grave of babies and children in Tuam, County Galway.
Taoiseach, Michéal Martin, is due to give a formal state apology in Dáil on Wednesday. Martin, who read the report, reportedly found the content shocking and difficult to read.
He estimates that 9,000 children died in 18 institutions between 1922 and 1998, when the last house of its kind was closed, according to a leak published in the Sunday Independent. The infant mortality rate would have been twice the national rate, underlining the impact of neglect, malnutrition and disease.
Another source of anger for survivors is the policy of religious organizations – and the state – to prevent them from being located. Ireland denies adopted people the legal right to their own information and files. The report is understood as a chronicle of many of the lies and obfuscations of priests, nuns and officials.
“It is a crucial moment. I’m sorry it took so long to show up, ”said Anne Harris, 70, who gave birth to a son at an institution in County Cork in 1970.“ Irish society was very strict and critical about children born out of wedlock. These huge institutions were where women were simply put out of sight. “
Joan Burton, a former deputy prime minister who was born in such a house in 1949, said the findings of the investigation were a milestone in documenting a system that is in danger of being overlooked in a country in the process of liberalization that did not. is more indebted to the Catholic Church.
“The report will reveal, particularly for a new generation of young people, what Ireland has already done with women who had the audacity to love outside of marriage and to have children who needed to be ‘abandoned’,” she wrote in the Irish Independent. “This will give us, as a society, the opportunity to ask why this form of brutality has been tolerated for so long.”
The commission was formed in 2014 after a historian, Catherine Corless, found death certificates for almost 800 children who lived in the Bon Secours mothers and babies home in Tuam, but burial records for just two. The excavations later found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant amounts of human remains,” the commission said in an interim report.
The government apologized on Monday to the survivors for the media leak over the weekend, which undermined the promise to give them first access to the report before publication. It is considering compensation and legislation to help mothers and their children track each other, if they wish.
Harris said she was relatively lucky: in 1970, the worst abuses had passed and she was one of the women whose families paid for hospitalization during pregnancy. Those who could not afford to pay had to cook, mop the floors and do other handiwork. Harris wrote a novel, Unspoken, based on his successful search for his son.
The 2013 film, Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, was based on Philomena Lee, who struggled to find the son she was forced to give up for adoption in the 1950s.