OUR HOMES OF SHAME
Mother and baby homes report exposes dark chapter in our history ++ One in six children died amid ‘appalling’ infant mortality ++ Blame for Church, State AND society ++ Religious orders urged to compensate victims
THE Taoiseach has launched an unflinching criticism of homes run by the Church in the past.
Following harrowing revelations of the suffering, cruelties and shocking number of early deaths i n mother and baby homes,
Micheál Martin denounced Ireland’s ‘ perverse religious morality’ of previous decades.
As pressure grew on the religious orders who ran the homes to compensate survivors, he said Ireland must ‘face up to the full truth of our past’.
Almost a century of abuse at the homes for unmarried women, where thousands of infants died, was laid bare yesterday in a damning report that detailed how around 9,000
children died in all, adding up to a mortality rate of 15%. The proportion of children who died before their first birthday in one home, Bessborough, in Co. Cork, was as high as 75% in 1943, it found.
The Commission of Investigation that exposed the appalling details said that before 1960, the homes did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact they were more likely to die there.
Mr Martin said: ‘ We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy. Young mothers and their sons and daughters paid a terrible price for that dysfunction.’ He said he would make a formal apology on behalf of the State in the Dáil today.
The head of the Catholic Church in Ireland last night apologised to the survivors of the mother and baby homes.
Archbishop of Armagh Eamon Martin said the Church was clearly part of a culture in which people were frequently stigmatised, judged and rejected.
He said the survivors must be helped and supported, but made no mention of compensation.
However, the Government has committed to providing compensation to some survivors, with the Taoiseach saying the Church should make‘ a significant contribution’ towards the State redress scheme.
He said: ‘I’ve taken the first step today by writing to the religious organisations, seeking to meet
No mention of compensation
them on that issue. And I think it is appropriate that there is a significant contribution f rom religious organisations, towards the State’s restorative recognition scheme, and I look forward to engaging with them on that issue.’
He declined to say what percentage of the costs he believed the Church should pay.
However, there was also no mention of compensation in the statements issued yesterday by the various religious charities involved in the running of the homes decades ago.
And there was no response from either the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the Daughters of Charity, or the Good Shepherd Sisters yesterday when the Irish Daily Mail pressed the question of compensation.
All issued statements of apology and sympathised yesterday with the women and families affected.
The report, which covered 18 mother and baby homes where, over decades, young pregnant women were hidden f r om society, has laid bare one of the Irish Catholic Church’s darkest chapters.
Infants were taken from their mothers and sent overseas to be adopted. As well as this, in some cases, children i n the homes were given trial vaccines without consent. Anonymous testimony from residents compared the institutions to prisons, and they said they were verbally abused by nuns as ‘ sinners’ and ‘spawn of Satan’. Reviewers said Ireland was a cold, harsh environment for many, probably the majority, of residents during the earlier half of the period under consideration. The report said: ‘ It was especially cold and harsh for women. All women suffered serious discrimination. Women who gave birth outside marriage were subject to particularly harsh treatment.’ In his statement, the Taoiseach acknowledged that i t was a time of societal and Church pressure on unmarried mothers and that it dated back decades. Women were admitted to mother and baby homes and county homes because they failed to secure the support of their family and the father of their child, the report stated.
The commission said that they had no other option but to enter the institutions.
‘Their lives were blighted by pregnancy outside marriage, and the responses of the father of their child, their immediate families and the wider community,’ it added.
Women also suffered through traumatic labours without any pain relief.
One survivor recalled ‘women screaming, a woman who had lost her mind, and a room with small white coffins’.
Relatives have alleged the babies were mistreated because they were born to unmarried mothers who, like their children, were seen as a stain on Ireland’s i mage as a devout Catholic nation. The i nquiry said those admitted included girls as young as 12.
Government records show that the mortality rate for children at the homes, where 56,000 women and girls, including victims of rape and incest, were sent to give birth, was often more t han five times that of those born to married parents.
‘The report makes clear that for decades, Ireland had a stifling, oppressive and brutally misogynistic culture, where a pervasive stigmatisation of unmarried mothers and their children robbed those individuals of their agency and sometimes their future ,’ Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman said.
The Government said it would provide financial compensation and advance long-promised laws to excavate some of the remains and grant the residents, including many adoptees, greater access to personal information that has long been out of their reach.
However, reacting yesterday, a coalition of survivors’ groups said that while the report was ‘truly shocking’, they still had mixed feelings because it did not fully account for the role the State played in running the homes.
‘What occurred was but an aspect of the newly established State which was profoundly anti-women both in its laws and in its culture,’ the group said, describing Mr Martin’s statement that Irish society was to blame as a ‘cop-out’.
The investigation was launched
Seen as a stain on Catholic nation
six years ago after evidence of an unmarked mass graveyard at Tuam was uncovered by amateur local historian Catherine Corless.
Speaking to RTÉ, Ms Corless said the Taoiseach had ‘ l et survivors down again’.
The local historian, who watched a virtual presentation by Mr Martin for survivors and relatives, from her kitchen, ahead of the publication of the report, said she felt ‘quite deflated’ for the survivors, who had expected ‘an awful lot more’ from the Taoiseach.
She said: ‘There isn’t a lot in it for us really… In particular, we need to know what happened as regards all the deaths… how did the burials take place, in regards Tuam, who was responsible for discarding the babies and little toddlers in a sewage area. We need answers to that.’
Other survivors and advocate groups criticised the inquiry for concluding that it was impossible to prove or disprove allegations that large sums of money were given to agencies in Ireland that arranged foreign adoptions from the homes.
The report found no statutory regulations were in place for the f oreign adoptions of 1, 638 children, mostly sent to the United States.
Vaccine trials for diphtheria, polio, measles and rubella were also carried out on children without consent.
Archbishop of Armagh and all-Ireland primate Eamon Martin last night apologised in a statement. ‘I accept that the Church was clearly part of that culture in which people were frequently stigmatised, judged and rejected; for that, and for the long-lasting hurt and emotional distress that has resulted, I unreservedly apologise to the survivors and to all those who are personally impacted by the realities it (the report) uncovers,’ he said.
Mr O’Gorman has written to the religious orders seeking a meeting to discuss whether they will make an apology, contribute to the redress scheme and release records from the homes to be preserved.
In a statement, the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, who ran the Bessborough home in Cork in the early 1920s, and later at Roscrea and Castlepollard, said women were sent to their home due to ‘ societal and family pressure to have their babies in secret’. The order said it wanted to ‘sincerely apologise’ to those who ‘ did not get the care and support they needed’.
The retired Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, last night said: ‘The Church out-stepped its role and became a controlling Church’, in relation to how women and children were treated in mother and baby homes.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Drivetime, the former archbishop said those involved in the abuse ‘betrayed vulnerable women, they betrayed themselves and their calling and they betrayed the caring message of Jesus Christ’.
‘That should not have happened and there’s no half-way of interpreting reality to try and justify that,’ he said.
‘Betrayed their calling’