DUBLIN: Thousands of children died in Ireland’s mother and baby homes run by Ireland’s Catholic Church where unmarried women were sent to deliver their babies in secret, often against their will from the 1920s to 1990s, an inquiry found on Tuesday.
The 3000-page report, which covered 18 Mother and Baby Homes where young pregnant women were hidden from society, is the latest in a series of government-commissioned papers that have laid bare some of the Catholic Church’s darkest chapters.
Some 9,000 children died at the homes between 1922 and 1998. The 3,000-page report also described the emotional abuse women were subjected to in the so-called mother-and-baby homes, particularly when they gave birth.
The mother-and-baby homes, many run by nuns and members of the Catholic Church, operated for most of the 20th century, the last home closed as recently as 1998. They received state funding and also acted as adoption agencies.
According to the report, around 56,000 women were sent to the 18 institutions investigated, where some 57,000 children were born. “One in seven of those children (15%) didn’t survive long enough to leave the homes, yet no alarm was raised by the State over the high mortality rates,” it added.
The report was released just days after its key findings were leaked to a national newspaper, compounding the pain and anguish of survivors who have waited years for the final report, and who had been promised a first view of it by the Minister of Children.
“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 in a statement.
The Minister informed that the government will issue a formal state apology to the many thousands of women and children affected and will provide financial recognition to the specific groups identified in the report.
“It will also advance long-promised laws to support excavation, exhumation and, where possible, identification of remains at burial sites at the homes where children as young as newborns were buried,” he added.
Ireland has traditionally been a Catholic stronghold, but decades of abuse scandals have damaged the church’s reputation and weakened its influence. Pope Francis begged forgiveness for the mother-and-baby homes scandal during his first papal visit to the country in almost four decades in 2018.
