Mother and baby home families urged to check medical schools
PEOPLE searching for the graves of relatives who were in mother and baby homes have been advised to investigate if the remains were used for medical research.
Children’s rights campaigners say people who cannot find their loved ones’ graves should be told of the possibility their bodies were used in teaching hospitals and university medical departments.
Campaigner Eunan Duffy, who was born in a mother and baby home in Newry, Co. Down, has uncovered details of 27 children whose remains were donated to Queen’s University Belfast from such homes.
No parental consent was legally required in many of the recorded cases, according to Mr Duffy. He has asked the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) for a meeting to pursue a further investigation.
Mr Duffy says it’s an ‘uncomfortable truth’ that some missing people were used for medical research without their families’ permission. He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘It’s not a nice thing to contemplate but it happened and relatives should be aware. If they can’t find a record of their relatives’ burial, then they may have ended up there. This practice happened all over Ireland.
‘In the Thorndale home [in Belfast] there was no evidence of consent being given pre-1970 and even the cause of death was not given. I’ve tried to track people… but the authorities haven’t always been that helpful. This whole area needs further investigation. How many families didn’t give consent, were the homes paid and how much?’
The Northern Ireland assembly has also called for an investigation into the practice.
MLA Sinéad McLaughlin, who chaired the committee on institutional abuse in the last assembly, said in March, ‘The circumstances of the historical acquisition of bodies for anatomical study in Northern Ireland needs to be thoroughly researched’.
Mr Duffy says evidence given to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation here suggests at least 1,000 children’s remains were used in this way.
And he questions why the final report of the Commission of Investigation (2021), chose to ‘almost ignore’ the subject while an earlier report examined it in detail.
In response to queries from the MoS, the Department of Children said the use of body parts for medical research has been covered by the commission’s interim report and that no further investigation was planned. It said the fifth interim report of the commission found that, over a 57year period, more than 950 ‘deserted and abandoned and illegitimate’ children who died in the Dublin Union workhouse and associated institutions were sent to medical schools at UCD, Trinity and the Royal College of Surgeons. It states that 932 babies and children were aged between 10 minutes and 15 years at the time of death, while 27 were stillborn.
The sending of the bodies of unclaimed deceased residents of all ages was common practice until the 1960s and it was given legal backing by the Anatomy Act of 1832.
The Combined Anatomical Register of the Dublin Medical Schools records that all but 18 of the children received as anatomical subjects were ‘illegitimate’. Many of the stillborn infants had a note reading ‘not to be interred’ in their records.
The Commission noted: ‘It may be that stillborn infants were preserved as “wet specimens” for display purposes…’
‘Were the mother and baby homes paid and how much? ’