Prime minister: ‘Perverse’ morality drove church-run institutions

Ireland’s prime minister said Tuesday that the country must “face up to the full truth of our past,” as a long-awaited report recounted decades of harm done by church-run homes for unmarried women and their babies, where thousands of infants died. Micheal Martin said young women and their children had paid a heavy price for Ireland’s “perverse religious morality” in past decades. “We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy. Young mothers and their sons and daughters paid a terrible price for that dysfunction,” he said.

Martin said he would make a formal apology on behalf of the state in Ireland’s parliament today. The final report of an inquiry into the mother and baby homes said 9,000 children died in 18 different mother and baby homes during the 20th century. Fifteen percent of all children born in the homes died, almost double the nationwide infant mortality rate. The report said “the very high mortality rates were known to local and national authorities at the time and were recorded in official publications.”

The inquiry is part of a process of reckoning in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland with a history of abuses in church-run institutions, including the shunning and shaming of unwed mothers, many of whom were pressured into giving up babies for adoption.

Church-run homes in Ireland housed orphans, unmarried pregnant women and their babies for most of the 20th century. The institutions have been subject to intense public scrutiny since historian Catherine Corless in 2014 tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, in western Ireland — but could only find a burial record for one child.