Irish Govt to apologise for ‘shameful chapter’

DUBLIN/TUAM: Thousands of infants died in Irish homes for unmarried mothers and their offspring mostly run by the Catholic Church from the 1920s to the 1990s, an inquiry found yesterday, an ‘‘appalling’’ mortality rate that reflected brutal living conditions.

The report, which covered 18 socalled Mother and Baby Homes where over decades young pregnant women were hidden from society, is the latest in a series of governmentcommissioned papers that have laid bare some of the Catholic Church’s worst abuses.

About 9000 children died in all, yesterday’s report found — a mortality rate of 15%. The proportion of children who died before their first birthday in one home, Bessborough, in County Cork, was as high as 75% in 1943.

Infants were taken from mothers and sent overseas to be adopted. Children were vaccinated without consent.

Anonymous testimony from residents compared the institutions to prisons where they were verbally abused by nuns as ‘‘sinners’’ and ‘‘spawn of Satan’’. Women suffered through traumatic labours without any pain relief.

One recalled ‘‘women screaming, a woman who had lost her mind, and a room with small white coffins’’.

The head of the Irish Catholic Church unreservedly apologised to survivors and praised their determination to bring to light ‘‘a dark chapter in the life of Church and society’’.

Government records show that the mortality rate for children at the homes where 56,000 women and girls, including victims of rape and incest, were sent to give birth, was often more than five times that of those born to married parents.

‘‘The report makes clear that for decades, Ireland had a stifling, oppressive and brutally misogynistic culture, where a pervasive stigmatisation of unmarried mothers and their children robbed those individuals of their agency and sometimes their future,’’ Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman said.

Prime minister Micheal Martin would make a formal apology to those affected by the scandal in Parliament this week for what he described as ‘‘a dark, difficult and shameful chapter of very recent Irish history’’.

The government said it would provide financial compensation and advance longpromised laws to excavate some of the remains and grant residents, including many adoptees, greater access to personal information that has long been out of their reach.