PM: ‘Perverse’ morality behind church-run homes

Ireland’s prime minister said Tuesday, local time, that the country must ‘‘face up to the full truth of our past,’’ as a long-awaited report recounted decades of harmdone by church-run homes for unmarriedwomen and their babies, where thousands of infants died. Prime Minister

Micheal Martin said youngwomen and their children had paid a heavy price for Ireland’s ‘‘perverse religious morality’’ in past decades. Martin said he would make a formal apology on behalf of the state in Ireland’s parliament. The final report of an inquiry into the mother-and-baby homes said that 9000 children died in 18 different mother and baby homes during the

20th century. Fifteen per cent of all children in the homes died, almost double the nationwide infant mortality rate, the report said. The commission said about 56,000 unmarried mothers and about 57,000 children had lived in the homes it investigated. The last of the homes did not shut until 1998.