Mother and baby site graves must be investigated
Experts call for coroners to lead ‘unprecedented’ probe
CORONERS should be instructed to investigate mass graves at mother and baby homes, survivor groups and experts have insisted.
Legal expert Phil Scraton said while costs will be “unprecedented”, a price “cannot be put on truth and accountability”.
The Oireachtas Children’s Committee has heard from a range of experts and campaigners as it scrutinised the Industrial Burials Bill.
The proposed legislation will enable an agency to be set up to oversee exhumations of remains.
Campaigners want coroners involved in the investigation of the burials of up to 9,000 babies.
TDS and senators heard a team of archaeologists found 17 chambers of sewage filled with the remains of infants, older babies and children up to four years old “discarded without coffins, one on top of the other”.
A report in January found the institutions for unmarried women who got pregnant produced high levels of infant death and misogyny. Many were run by Catholic nuns.
There has been criticism around the proposals in the legislation to disapply the powers of the Coroners Act during the excavation process.
OBLIGATIONS
Human rights lecturer at NUI Galway Dr Maeve O’rourke said she raised the issue previously.
She added: “We have set out that the coroner has obligations and that was the first question I raised – what is the explanation for the absence of inquests to date?
“We need real answers. What are the civil servants saying as to why the coroner has been disapplied in this law. Do they think it’s too expensive?”
Phil Scraton, professor emeritus, School of Law at Queen’s University in Belfast, said: “The important issue for me is it will cost what it takes. I don’t think we can put a price on truth and we cannot put a price on accountability.
“So whilst I acknowledge this will be unprecedented in its costs and organisation, it is a price that
will have to be paid.” Campaigner Susan Lohan said it will be an “incredibly long process” to examine every single death.
But she insisted religious orders must be “held to account”.
And campaigner Catherine Corless said the State has an obligation to ensure justice.
She added: “These were individual babies, Irish citizens, they could be with us still, they could be sitting here in the Dail.”
Her research revealed 796 babies and children had been “indecently buried in a defunct sewage system” at Tuam between 1925 and 1961.