The grim history of a network of religious institutions in Ireland that abused and shamed unmarried mothers and their children for much of the 20th century is to be laid bare.
A judicial commission of investigation into Ireland’s mother and baby homes has documented shocking death rates and callousness in institutions that doubled as orphanages and adoption agencies.
The mother and baby homes commission is to share a 3,000-page report with survivors of the system on Tuesday. Its five-year investigation was prompted by the discovery of a mass grave of babies and children in Tuam, County Galway.
The taoiseach, Michéal Martin, is to give a formal state apology in the Dáil on Wednesday. Martin, who has read the report, reportedly found the contents shocking and difficult to read.
It estimates 9,000 children died in 18 institutions between 1922 and 1998 when the last such home closed, according to a leak published in the Sunday Independent. The infant mortality rate is said to have been double the national rate, underlining the impact of neglect, malnutrition and disease.
Another source of anger for survivors is the policy of the religious organisations – and the state – to impede them from tracing each other. Ireland denies adopted people the legal right to their own information and files. The report is understood to chronicle many of the lies and obfuscations of priests, nuns and officials.
“It’s a crucial moment. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to come out,” said Anne Harris, 70, who gave birth to a son in an institution in County Cork in 1970. “Irish society was quite rigid and judgmental about children born out of wedlock. These huge institutions were where women were just put away out of sight.”
Joan Burton, a former deputy prime minister who was born into such a home in 1949, said the investigation’s findings were a landmark in documenting a system that risks being forgotten in a liberalising country no longer beholden to the Catholic church.
“The report will reveal, particularly to a new generation of younger people, what Ireland once did to women who had the audacity to love outside of marriage and to bear children who had to be ‘given up’,” she wrote in the Irish Independent. “It will give us as a society an opportunity to ask why this form of brutality was tolerated for so long.”
The commission was formed in 2014 after a historian, Catherine Corless, found death certificates for nearly 800 children who were residents at Bon Secours mother and baby home in Tuam but burial records for only two. Excavations subsequently found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the commission said in an interim report.
The government apologised on Monday to survivors for the media leak over the weekend, which undermined a promise to give them first access to the report before publication. It is considering compensation and legislation to help mothers and their children trace each other, should they wish.
Harris said she was relatively lucky: by 1970 the worst abuses were over and she was one of the women whose families paid for their institutionalisation during pregnancy. Those unable to pay had to cook, scrub floors and do other manual work. Harris has written a novel, Unspoken, based on her successful search for her son.
The 2013 film Philomena starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan was based on Philomena Lee, who battled to find the son she was forced to give up for adoption in the 1950s.
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