Justice for the silent casualties

THE lowly receptacle in which some of the remains of the Tuam babies have been discovered says it all about their pitiful station in life. Surplus to requirements in a spiritually and financially bereft country which existed under the thumb of the Catholic Church, these so-called ‘children of sin’ were laid to rest in a series of underground chambers that have all the hallmarks of the old-style sewage containers and septic tanks that were designed to control the flow of human excrement.

The findings by the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes of skeletal remains of babies and young children authenticate what was long suspected locally of the cruel regime run by the Bon Secours sisters at St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, where a callous disregard for ‘illegitimate’ children and disdain for so-called ‘fallen women’ underpinned life.

Our reaction of shock and horror at the macabre revelations show that despite years of scandals and revelations about the abuse of mothers and children in mother and baby homes, orphanages, industrial schools and Magdalene laundries, we are still thankfully not inured to fresh bodies of evidence shining even more light on the dark and disturbing history of Hidden Ireland.

The commission was established following a 2014 report by Alison O’Reilly in the Irish Mail on Sunday of up to 800 children dying in the Tuam home and being interred in a mass grave.

Local historian Catherine Corless originally lifted the lid on this shameful secret when she unearthed the death certificates for 796 children at the Bon Secoursrun home, where the infant-mortality rate was far higher than the general population, raising suspicions about a lack of hygiene, nutrition and health care.

When no one would listen, she persevered. When she uncovered documents and evidence that confirmed her hunch that the human remains found on the grounds of the Tuam Mother and Baby home belonged to the home’s inhabitants, she was dismissed out of hand.

Eyewitness accounts from locals of ‘piles of bones’ being seen in a hole in the ground in the 1970s did not bolster her case in the minds of the powers-that-be. She was told the site was that of a mass grave from Famine times.

The Irish Mail on Sunday was similarly dismissed when it also helped shatter the culture of concealment around the Tuam home.

Terry Prone, one of the country’s leading PR women, representing the Bon Secours order, wrote to a French TV journalist to play down the story of a mass grave.

On Friday’s Seán O’Rourke RTÉ radio show, Prone finally relented, agreeing that there ‘now appears to be a whole lot more to it’.

The commission’s discovery of ‘significant quantities of foetal remains, as well as those of children up to three years’ silences the sceptics.

The mother and baby home operated from 1925 to 1961 and, according to the commission, scientific tests carried out on the samples tally with this timescale, particularly the 1950s.

The commission is continuing its investigation into who was responsible for disposing of human remains in this hideous manner.

This question was frequently asked by the Irish Mail on Sunday, which, over a two-year period, broke several stories confirming the presence of an unmarked children’s grave on the grounds of the now infamous institution.

THIS paper carried a transcript of a recording from Julia Devaney, a domestic servant at the Tuam home, who spoke of children ‘dying like flies’ in the home. She said: ‘Scores of children died under a year and whooping cough was epidemic. Sure they had a little graveyard of their own up there. It’s still there, it’s walled in now.’

We also carried health inspection reports from the 1940s, showing that one-third of the infants died in just one year. The report described children as ‘pot-bellied and emaciated’, as intellectually disabled and unfit for industrial school. Many of the babies were said to be delicate, wasted and fragile.

At the time, the sole doctor was 80 years old and there was no isolation unit to separate children with contagious diseases.

It is important, of course, to understand the cultural backdrop against which children of single mothers were treated so miserably. The stranglehold of a church that preached moral purity and sexual repression above all else tells only part of the story.

The religious orders of nuns and priests, who implemented church dogma in a heavy-handed fashion and often without recourse to the tenets of Christian compassion and forgiveness, is another factor.

But there is also the grim and frequently unacknowledged reality of the thousands of Irish families who, either out of shame, fear or moral scruples, turned their backs on girls who ‘got into trouble’, abandoning them to a system which, if not widely known as cruel and inhumane, was at the very least

Iknown to extract from the women penance for their ‘grievous sin’. N the case of the Tuam home, mothers who gave birth were separated from their children and required to do unpaid work for a year .The children who survived the regime stayed until they were fostered, adopted or old enough for an industrial school.

But while this disturbing story uncovers the painful truth of our not-too-distant past, it is also a vindication of the very journalistic values that now face profound threat from so many different quarters.

With the rise of ‘fake news’, a ‘post-truth’ society and the decimation of the traditional funding model for the media industry, the future of journalism grows more precarious as society’s reliance on ersatz news via social media becomes more entrenched.

Yet the scandal of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home shows the vital role that tried and trusted journalistic methods of investigation and scrupulous research, of tenacity and dogged persistence, play in uncovering the truth and informing the public of what goes on behind the scenes, both today and yesterday.

Without the dedication and integrity of historian Catherine Corless or the commitment of this newspaper to championing her work and that of the journalists who worked on the story, the secrets of the Tuam home would still lie buried in the rotten chambers of that unmarked grave and the lives and deaths of 800 infants would be consigned to our unwritten history.

But now we must look to what more can be done to rescue these lost children from oblivion.

The commission must clearly be allowed complete its work and produce its recommendation.

NO effort should be spared in identifying the children. It is impossible to give each one a separate burial but we must look at the possibility of exhumation and selecting a peaceful spot where they can be finally laid to rest with the dignity and blessing they deserve. This must be done with the approval of their families, many of whom have already submitted exhumation requests to Galway County Council.

It is also incumbent on the Bon Secours nuns to apologise for the sins of the past and the State must issue a formal apology.

The reticence of the Bon Secours in the face of a continuing stream of damning evidence about the Tuam home has been inexplicable. Its statement that after the closure of the home in 1961 it entrusted all records to Galway County Council was a blatant attempt to wash its hand of the entire controversy.

Alarmingly, it suggests that for all the seismic scandals that have rocked the church, its priority is still to shore up its diminishing authority, rather than seeking justice for the thousands of souls who were short-changed in its care.

The resignation of Marie Collins from the Vatican commission on clerical sex abuse because of the belligerent attitude of some of its members bears this out.

And when all this is done, we must endeavour to repeat the grim but vital process at every institution of church or State where there lies an unmarked grave.

For a variety of reasons – some connected to the fact that a number of survivors are still alive – the plan to erect a memorial to victims of institutional abuse has stalled over the years.

But there should be no such hesitation about a memorial to the innocent infants and children who, forsaken by society and the State, were denied the dignity of a Christian burial.

Such a monument would remind us of a dark episode in our history but it would also enshrine in perpetuity the existence of 796 children, many of whom – like Mary Murphy, Bridget Lally, Patrick Egan and Michael Hanley – have been identified and who lost their lives within the hard and unyielding walls of the Tuam Mother and Baby home.

It was finding justice for these silent casualties of a brutal care system that drove the Irish Mail on Sunday’s long campaign.