https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-babies-and-children-found-at-tuam-orphanage-in-irelandA mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday.
Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said.
The commission said analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.
The home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns, received unmarried pregnant women to give birth. The women were separated from their children, who remained elsewhere in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted.
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This article from last year gives some background:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/catholic-church-ireland-magdalene-laundries-mother-baby-homes/Catherine Corless, a retired secretary turned amateur historian, worked tirelessly in early 2014 to get local officials, newspapers, and radio stations in Tuam, Ireland to care about her discovery.
Nearly eight hundred infants and children died in the town’s mother and baby home between 1925 and 1961, yet none, Corless revealed, received a proper burial. Burial records for the deaths seemed not to exist, leading Corless to the conclusion that many of the babies were likely buried in the home’s unused septic tank.
Corless’s persistence in demanding recognition of the deaths eventually paid off; international media outlets picked up the story that, while initially ignored in Ireland, shocked readers elsewhere and eventually garnered attention in the country.
While stories of young boys finding skeletons on the school’s grounds were deeply disturbing, behind them lay an even more tragic story — Ireland’s long history of imprisoning women and children in industrial schools, reformatories, mother and baby homes, Magdalene laundries, and psychiatric facilities. How did Ireland become a country where institutionalization was the preferred response to poverty, “immorality,” and other social ills?
The Catholic Church is often held up as the primary culprit, but it is not the only guilty party in this story. It acted in partnership with the state and elites, creating an institutional nexus that rejected social-democratic solutions to poverty and pushed back against women’s liberation. Instead, the effects of poverty became transformed into moral issues to be solved by institutionalization — a process that undergirded Ireland’s carceral state and profoundly impacted the treatment of women and children in the country.
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Topic: Tuam babies: mass grave found