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Searcher08 wrote:Strongly recommend seeing the brilliant movie
The Magdalene Sisters - here is the trailer, but it seems to be on Youtube in sections.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hga3kqwuBSc
I would have happily fed the particular nuns who did this head first into a woodchipper by the end of the film.
Silver lining.The revelations have also had the effect of stripping the Catholic Church, which once set the agenda in Ireland, of much of its moral authority and political power.
Mass septic tank grave 'containing the skeletons of 800 babies' at site of Irish home for unmarried mothers
Hundreds of babies and toddlers believed to be buried in Tuam, Co. Galway
The site lies next to a former home for single mothers and their children
The children's home was run by Bon Secours nuns between 1925 and 1961
Children were malnourished and neglected, which caused many of deaths
They also died of TB, pneumonia, measles, convulsions and gastroenteritis
Relative of one missing child has filed complaint with local police, the gardai
By Alison O'reilly
Published: 09:56, 2 June 2014 | Updated: 11:41, 2 June 2014
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2645870/Mass-grave-contains-bodies-800-babies-site-Irish-home-unmarried-mothers.html
The bodies of nearly 800 babies are believed to have been interred in a concrete tank beside a former home for unmarried mothers.
The dead babies are thought to have been secretly buried beside a home for single mothers and their children in County Galway, Ireland, over a period of 36 years.
It is suspected that 796 children were interred on unconsecrated ground without headstones or coffins next to the home run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam between 1925 and 1961.
Newly unearthed reports show that they suffered malnutrition and neglect, which caused the deaths of many, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.
The bodies of 796 babies and children are believed to lie next to the former children's home at Tuam, Co. Galway
The babies were usually buried in a plain shroud without a coffin in a plot that had housed a water tank attached to the workhouse that preceded the mother and child home.
No memorial was erected to the dead children and the grave was left unmarked.
The site is now surrounded by a housing estate. But a missing persons report just filed to Irish police, gardai, means that the burial site may now be excavated.
A relative of one boy who lived there, William Joseph Dolan, has made a formal complaint to gardai after she failed to find his death certificate, despite records in the home stating that he had died.
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A source close to the investigation said: 'No-one knows the total number of babies in the grave.
There are 796 death records but they are only the ones we know of.
'God knows who else is in the grave. It's been lying there for years and no-one knows the full extent or total of bodies down there.'
The existence of the grave was uncovered by local woman Catherine Corless, who compiled the records of 796 babies who died at the home. She has established a group called the Children's Home Graveyard Committee to erect a memorial.
She said: 'People who had relations there are the most interested. They are delighted something is being done.
Horror: The scandal of the babies in the mass grave was discovered by local historian, Catherine Corless
'When I was doing the research, someone mentioned there was a graveyard there for babies but I found out there was more to it than that.'
With the help of the Births and Deaths Registrar in Galway, Mrs Corless researched all children whose place of death was marked 'Children's Home, Tuam'. Galway County Council has all the cemetery books for Mayo and Galway, and with the help of the archivist there, Mrs Corless cross-checked the grave records.
She said: 'There was just one child who was buried in a family plot in the graveyard in Tuam. That's how I am certain there are 796 children in the mass grave. These girls were run out of their family home and never taken back, so why would they take the babies back to bury them, either?'
Bridget Dolan: Her two sons were placed in the Mother and Baby home at Tuam and both are recorded as having died there
The records state that a young single mother called Bridget Dolan from Clonfert, Co. Galway, gave birth to two boys who were placed in the home.
John Desmond Dolan was born on 22 February 1946 weighing 8lb 9oz. His birth was recorded as 'normal' but he died from measles on 11 June 1947.
His brother, William Joseph Dolan, was born on 21 May 1950 and was said to have died the following year, but there is no death certificate for William.
His relative, who asked not to be named, said: 'I just want to know what happened to him. He may have passed on, yet there is no death certificate. I believe he might have been fostered out, and then moved to the US.
'He could still be alive, or he's with his brother in the grave. I want to find out.'
A local health board inspection report carried out in 1944 reveals the conditions the children and their mothers lived in.
It reveals that in April that year, 271 children were listed as living there with 61 single mothers, a total of 333 - way over its capacity of 243.
One 13-month-old boy was described as a 'miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over bodily functions and probably mentally defective'.
In the same room was a 'delicate' ten-month-old baby who was a 'child of itinerants', while one five-year-old child was described as having 'hands growing near shoulders'.
Another 31 infants in the same room were described as 'poor babies, emaciated and not thriving'.
The majority were aged between three weeks and 13 months and were 'fragile, pot-bellied and emaciated'.
The oldest child who died there was Sheila Tuohy, aged nine, in 1934. One of the youngest was Thomas Duffy, aged two days.
Teresa Kelly, chairman of the Children's Home Graveyard Committee, said an excavation was long overdue.
'It's an awful story,' she said. 'It's a mass grave. Many of the babies were malnourished. We want to make sure those children's identities are acknowledged. They had names, they were human beings, not animals.'
The grave was discovered in the 1970s by 12-year-old friends, Barry Sweeney and Francis Hopkins.
Mr Sweeney said: 'It was a concrete slab and we used to play there but there was always something hollow underneath it so we decided to bust it open and it was full to the brim of skeletons.
'The priest came over and blessed it. I don't know what they did with it after that. You could see all the skulls.'
The home closed in 1961.
'ABSOLUTELY FREEZING AND FULL OF YOUNG KIDS RUNNING AROUND'
An 85-year-old woman who survived the children's home in Tuam has told of the miserable conditions at the home, where she was placed in 1932.
The woman, who gave her name only as Mary, and now lives in the west of Ireland, spent four years in the home before being placed with a foster family.
She said: 'I remember going into the home when I was about four. There was a massive hall in it and it was full of young kids running round and they were dirty and cold.
'There were well over 100 children in there and there were three or four nuns who minded us.
'The building was very old and we were let out the odd time, but at night the place was absolutely freezing with big stone walls.
'When we were eating it was in this big long hall and they gave us all this soup out of a big pot, which I remember very well. It was rotten to taste, but it was better than starving.'
Mary recalled that the children were 'rarely washed', and often wore the same clothes for weeks at a time.
She said: 'We were filthy dirty. I remember one time when I soiled myself, the nuns ducked me down into a big cold bath and I never liked nuns after that.'
The Catholic Irish babies scandal: It gets much worse
New revelations about unauthorized vaccine trials
MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS Follow
The Catholic Irish babies scandal: It gets much worse
It gets worse. One week after revelations of how over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers cavalierly disposed of the bodies of nearly 800 babies and toddlers on a site that held a septic tank, new reports are leveling a whole different set of charges about what happened to the children of those Irish homes.
In harrowing new information revealed this weekend, the Daily Mail has uncovered medical records that suggest 2,051 children across several Irish care homes were given a diphtheria vaccine from pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome in a suspected illegal drug trial that ran from 1930 to 1936. As the Mail reports, “Michael Dwyer, of Cork University’s School of History, found the child vaccination data by trawling through tens of thousands of medical journal articles and archive files. He discovered that the trials were carried out before the vaccine was made available for commercial use in the UK.” There is no evidence yet – and there may never be – that any family consent was ever offered, or about how many children had adverse effects or died as a result of the vaccinations. Dwyer told the Mail, “The fact that no record of these trials can be found in the files relating to the Department of Local Government and Public Health, the Municipal Health Reports relating to Cork and Dublin, or the Wellcome Archives in London, suggests that vaccine trials would not have been acceptable to government, municipal authorities, or the general public. However, the fact that reports of these trials were published in the most prestigious medical journals suggests that this type of human experimentation was largely accepted by medical practitioners and facilitated by authorities in charge of children’s residential institutions.” In a related story, GSK — formerly Wellcome — revealed Monday on Newstalk Radio that 298 children in 10 different care homes were involved in medical trials in the ’60s and ’70s that left “80 children ill after they were accidentally administered a vaccine intended for cattle.”
Irish Minister of State for Training and Skills Ciaran Cannon has called for a public inquiry into the treatment of the children and their deaths. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has also called for an investigation, adding that it should be free of Catholic Church interference. “We have to look at the whole culture of mother and baby homes; they’re talking about medical experiments there,” he told RTE Radio this weekend. “They’re very complicated and very sensitive issues, but the only way we will come out of this particular period of our history is when the truth comes out.” And a spokesman for GSK said the latest revelations, “if true, are clearly very distressing.”
This is not even the first time information on these kinds of vaccine trials has come to light. In 2010, the Irish Independent uncovered how children born in the homes were subjected to a single “four-in-one” vaccine trial without their mothers’ permission. The children often didn’t even know what they’d been subjected to until well into adulthood. Appallingly, Ireland had no laws regarding medical testing on humans until 1987. Mari Steed, who was born at the Bessborough home in the ’60s, told the Sunday Independent, “We were used as human guinea pigs.”
What Ireland is only now beginning to fully investigate and understand is a story involving potentially thousands of children who were almost certainly neglected and mistreated, and whose deaths were addressed as a mere trash disposal issue. It is now believed a total of upward of 4,000 children were similarly disposed of in other homes across the country. It’s a story of untold even higher numbers of children who were unwitting subjects in a vaccine test that further refused to see them as human beings, capable of fear and pain. And an interesting insight into why so many children may have been so casually treated and tossed away was revealed in a recent feature on the scandal in the Independent. Babies born to unwed mothers – and this, let it be noted, would have included mothers who were raped – “were denied baptism and, if they died from the illness and disease rife in such facilities, also denied a Christian burial.” In other words, the Catholic institutions that these women and their children were forced to turn to as their only refuge viciously turned their backs on them — treating them, quite literally, as garbage. This is abuse of the highest order. Abuse in life, abuse in death. Carried out by religious orders so warped, so perverted in their utter lack of mercy that they participated in the suffering of an unfathomable number of babies and children. This is what the Catholic Church of Ireland is capable of, when it is given free rein over the bodies of its most vulnerable members. And an official inquiry hasn’t even begun. As Michael Dwyer told the Mail this weekend, “What I have found is just the tip of a very large and submerged iceberg.”
“They were babies” – remains found in Irish church home’s sewers confirmed as human
A significant amount of remains found in the sewers of a former church-run home for unmarried mothers in Ireland have been confirmed as human. The remains, found in a disused sewer in the town of Tuam in western Ireland, are said to range from newborns to three-year-old toddlers. The revelation follows decades of rumours and suspicion that hundreds of infants were buried in a mass grave at the site. A government-ordered commission began test excavations in October 2014. The latest findings have now backed up a historian’s claim that up to 800 children may lie in the unmarked grave at the former home. “Significant quantities of human remains have been discovered in at least 17 of the 20 underground chambers which were examined,” the commission’s report said. The commission did not say how many babies’ remains were recovered or how many might still be buried in what are believed to be the home’s sewage and waste water system. Mass grave of babies and children found at Tuam orphanage in Ireland https://t.co/RSssmNhTQX— The Guardian (@guardian) 3 mars 2017 The Sisters of Bon Secours The remains were identified by radio carbon dating. They range from 35-week-old foetuses to three-year-olds, dated from between 1925 and 1961, when the home was run by the Sisters of Bon Secours. Why was the inquiry launched? A local historian said there was evidence of an unmarked graveyard at the home. Records showed almost 800 children died between 1925 and 1961. The commission is investigating 17 other church-run institutions around the country. “A stain in Ireland’s image” The Catholic Church in Ireland has been rocked by a series of scandals over the abuse and neglect of children. The Church ran many of Ireland’s social services in the 20th century, including mother-and-baby homes where tens of thousands of unmarried pregnant women, including rape victims, were sent to give birth. Unmarried mothers and their children were seen as a stain on Ireland’s image as a devout Catholic nation. Government records show that in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the mortality rate for “illegitimate” children was often more than five times that of those born to married parents. On average, more than one in four children born out of wedlock died. Ireland’s Ministerfor Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, said Friday’s news was “sad and disturbing”. She added the commission of inquiry would work with local authorities to investigate further and decide what should happen to the remains. “This news is very disturbing and of course will touch every one’s heart.The information I have received confirms these suspicions and importantly they trace the remains specifically to the period of the home’s operation rather than to earlier times in our history such as during the famine,” Zappone told reporters. The full statement from Minister Katherine Zappone on the finding of remains at the former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam: pic.twitter.com/awu09Dc99X— TheJournal.ie (@thejournal_ie) 3 mars 2017 Why isn’t #Tuam being treated as a crime scene? Are we gonna use the ‘oh but they were different times’ rhetoric some more? pic.twitter.com/4EEZFlnmNE— Andréa Farrell (@anerdabags) 3 mars 2017 What they are saying In 2014, the Archbishop of Tuam said he was “horrified and saddened” by the historian’s discovery. “If something happened in Tuam, it probably happened in other mother-and-baby homes around the country,” – the Archbishop of Dublin, 2014. Media: Euronews News
http://www.sfgate.com/news/media/They-w ... 777178.php
Tuam babies scandal will only get more ‘shocking’
Saturday, March 04, 2017
By Conall Ó Fátharta
Irish Examiner Reporter
The crucial point to note here is that despite all the hand-wringing by politicians, and the repeated utterances of that word “shocking” — the State was well aware of issues around infant deaths and Tuam long before Ms Corless’ work became global news, writes Conal Ó’Fartharta
Cllr Karey McHugh and Cllr Shaun Cunniffe leave Tuam Town Hall where a meeting was held for residents who live near the Mother and Baby Home.
“Shocking” was the word used by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission and Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone in reacting to the discovery of “significant quantities” of human remains at Tuam.
It’s a word that crops up again and again in relation to the story of Ireland’s mother and baby home system.
That very word was used in an unpublished internal HSE report in 2012 to describe the “wholly epidemic” levels of child death in Cork’s Bessborough Mother and Baby Home — 472 infants and 10 women in a 19-year period.
Two government departments were aware of this information — but an inquiry wasn’t launched for almost another two years.
Local historian, Catherine Corless, has been rightly commended for her tireless work uncovering the details of the 796 infants who died at the Tuam home.
She also faced some online abuse concerning the septic tank aspect of the story. The commission has now confirmed that this headline-grabbing part of the story appears to be true.
Ms Corless faced all praise and opprobrium with the simple grace of a woman focused on the bigger issue of getting to the truth. In the end, that’s all that matters.
Flowers and tributes left in 2014 at the site of the unmarked mass grave containing the remains of nearly 800 infants who died at the Bon Secours mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway from 1925-1961.
The crucial point to note here is that despite all the hand-wringing by politicians, and the repeated utterances of that word “shocking” — the State was well aware of issues around infant deaths and Tuam long before Ms Corless’ work became global news. Not only were exact numbers of infant deaths at some of the State’s more notorious mother and baby homes in the HSE’s possession since 2011, they had informed two government departments about them.
Even more remarkably, the HSE’s concerns about Tuam were so advanced by 2012, that senior management stated that the minister needed to be informed so a full State inquiry could be launched. As part of the HSE’s examination of the State’s role in the Magdalene Laundries as part of the McAleese inquiry, it was examining both the Tuam and Bessborough Mother and Baby Homes.
In Galway, a social worker raised extreme concerns about an archive of material uncovered relating to Tuam Mother and Baby Home. These concerns, that up to 1,000 children may have been “trafficked” to the US from the Tuam home, were recorded in an internal note of a teleconference in October 2012 with then assistant director of Child and Family Services, Phil Garland, and then Medical Intelligence Unit head, Davida De La Harpe.
The note highlighted concerns raised by the principal social worker for adoption in HSE West who had found “a large archive of photographs, documentation and correspondence relating to children sent for adoption to the USA” and “documentation in relation to discharges and admissions to psychiatric institutions in the Western area”.
Among other things found were letters to parents asking for money for the upkeep of some children who had already been discharged or had died.
The social worker, “working in her own time and on her own dollar”, had compiled a list of “up to 1,000 names”, but said it was “not clear yet whether all of these relate to the ongoing examination of the Magdalene system, or whether they relate to the adoption of children by parents, possibly in the USA”.
At that point, the social worker was assembling a filing system “to enable her to link names to letters and to payments”.
The note reads: “This may prove to be a scandal that dwarfs other, more recent issues with the Church and State, because of the very emotive sensitivities around adoption of babies, with or without the will of the mother.
A concern is that, if there is evidence of trafficking babies, that it must have been facilitated by doctors, social workers etc, and a number of these health professionals may still be working in the system.”
Minister Katherine Zappone: ‘Shocking’ was the word to describe the discovery of ‘significant’ quantities of human remains Picture: Collins
It ends with a recommendation that, due to the gravity of what was being found in relation to the Tuam home, an “early warning” letter be written for the attention of the national director of the HSE’s Quality and Patient Safety Division, Philip Crowley, suggesting “that this goes all the way up to the minister”.
“It is more important to send this up to the minister as soon as possible: with a view to an inter-departmental committee and a fully fledged, fully resourced forensic investigation and State inquiry.”
That inquiry didn’t come until almost two years later — when the revelations of Catherine Corless and the overwhelming media attention forced the issue.
At around the same time in Cork, an unpublished report was prepared based on an examination of Bessborough records spanning from 1922 to 1982. These were transferred to the HSE by the order that ran the home — the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary — in 2011.
Taken from the order’s own death register, it reported that a “shocking” 470 children died at the home between 1934 and 1953, as well as 10 women. A staggering 273 of these deaths occured in a six-year period between 1939 and 1944.
However, the Irish Examiner revealed in 2015 that the order reported higher numbers to state inspectors during this period. It is unclear why an order would do such a thing; but the HSE report said: “Whether indeed all of these children actually died while in Bessboro or whether they were brokered into clandestine adoption arrangements, both foreign and domestic, has dire implications for the Church and State and not least for the children and families themselves.”
The report outlined how the records revealed that women and children were “little more than a commodity for trade amongst religious orders”.
It also spoke of a culture of “institutionalisation and human trafficking” among various religious orders and State-funded institutions.
The HSE report was dismissed as “conjecture” when it was made public in 2015.
This is a scandal that will only get more “shocking”. The commission needs to examine the sites of all mother and baby homes. It is clear that the issue of infant mortality was not confined to Tuam and the State has ample evidence in its possession. It needs a wider set of terms of reference so the full scale of illegal adoptions can be examined through the myriad of connected adoption agencies and private and State maternity homes.
It is noteworthy that successive governments resisted a full audit of adoption records held by the State. This is despite former adoption agencies and even the Adoption Authority itself privately admitting that the number of illegal adoptions could run into the thousands.
This is a scandal that involves the living and the dead. Tuam has been the touchpaper that has lit the fuse
http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints ... 44383.html
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