We owe these poor victims a full inquiry

IF, AS now looks likely, the Government orders a full investigation into the unrecorded burials of babies and children in Tuam, it must not be simply for the optics.

Two weeks after the Irish Mail On Sunday brought the story to international attention though, some are lagging behind. They include Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam, who effectively passed the buck to the sisters themselves. In turn, the sisters have said the nuns involved are all dead and they think they have no records that might help.

But the body perhaps slowest to catch up is the Garda Síochána. It issued a statement during the week saying the site had been investigated in 2012 and proved to be a Famine grave. In fact, the Tuam mother and baby home site under debate is 150 metres away from the one identified by the Garda.

A radar examination commissioned by the MoS shows unidentified objects that demand urgent investigation, which would mean exhuming the site.

And this is only one of a dozen sites which hold the bodies of thousands of innocents failed by the State.

If there is to be an inquiry, it must be conducted thoroughly and with vigour. We have had enough of standing idly by while children who should have been protected were instead betrayed. We owe it to them all – the poor, the malnourished, the beaten, the abused – to find out what really happened and to have them reinterred with the dignity they deserve.