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Ireland PM to Apologize for Infant Deaths in Church Run Homes for Unmarried Women
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January 13, 2021
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0:53Now PlayingIreland's prime minister on Tuesday said he would issue a formal state apology in parliament for the treatment of women and children at so-called "Mother and Baby Homes" and county institutions, where thousands of infants died and were sometimes buried in mass graves.
Micheal Martin made the announcement in Dublin as he led the presentation of a government-commissioned report into decades of unfathomable violence and humiliation against women and children at these homes, many of them run by the church.
He said the report described "a dark, difficult and shameful chapter of very recent Irish history".
According to the commission, in the years 1945-46, the death rate among infants in mother and baby homes was almost twice that of the national average for "illegitimate" children.
A total of about 9,000 children died in the institutions under investigation - about 15% of all the children who were in the institutions, a mortality rate the commision called "disquieting".
Some of the institutions were owned and run by the local health authorities - the county homes, Pelletstown, Tuam and Kilrush. Others were owned and run by religious orders, for example the three homes run by the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary - Bessborough, Sean Ross, Castlepollard (the Sacred Heart homes).
For most of the 20th century, these "homes" in Ireland housed orphans, unmarried pregnant women and their babies.
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 - but could only find a burial record for one child.
Investigators later found a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children in an underground sewage structure on the grounds of the home, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961.
The last of Ireland's mother-and-baby homes did not shut down until the late 1990s.
The inquiry is part of a process of reckoning in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland to come to terms 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 their babies for adoption.
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