At last, official apology over Ireland’s baby deaths shame

THE Irish government is to deliver an official apology today over the churchrun homes where 9,000 babies and young children died.

The scandal was uncovered in 2014 after human remains were found in the grounds of a former home for single mothers in County Galway.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin said young women and their children had paid a heavy price for his country’s ‘perverse religious morality’. He added: ‘We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy. As a nation we must face up to the full truth of our past. We did this to ourselves as a society – we treated women exceptionally badly; we treated children extremely badly.

‘We embraced judgmentalism, moral certainty, a perverse religious morality and control which was so damaging. What was very striking was the absence of basic kindness.’

A major report, which took five years to produce, said mortality rates for

‘Warped attitude to sexuality’

babies and young children in the 18 homes it investigated were twice as high as those for other children. It made 53 recommendations, including compensation for women who lived in the homes and memorials to the victims.

It said that while in the 1920s many pregnant girls taken into the homes were farm workers, numbers rose to a peak in the 1960s and 1970s, when ‘many of the women were clerical workers, civil servants, professional women and schoolgirls and students’.

It added: ‘About 9,000 children died in the institutions under investigation – about 15 per cent of all the children who were in them. In the years before 1960, mother-and-baby homes did not save the lives of “illegitimate” children; in fact, they appear to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival. The very high mortality rates were known to the authorities at the time.’

Until 1973 there were no social benefits for unmarried mothers, so women had no alternative to going into a home, except to flee to Britain.