LONDON (AP) – Irish Prime Minister apologized on Wednesday to thousands of single women and their children who suffered pain, shame and stigma in church-run institutions, saying their government was determined to start to correct the country’s mistakes.
Prime Minister Micheal Martin’s apologies came a day after the final report of an investigation said 9,000 children died in 18 homes of mothers and babies (housing women and girls who became pregnant out of wedlock) during the twentieth century. The investigation was part of a computational process in overwhelming Catholic Ireland, where church-run institutions were often linked to a history of abuse.
Martin said Ireland must recognize the scandal as part of its national history and “show our deep sorrow”. He apologized on behalf of his government for the “serious generational error” received by mothers and their babies who ended up in institutions.
“They shouldn’t have been there,” he told the Irish parliament. “The state failed you, mothers and children in these homes.”
Martin said it was deeply distressing that the authorities at the time knew of the very high mortality rate in households, but he did not appear to have intervened. The report states that 15% of all children in households died due to diseases and infections such as stomach flu, almost double the infant mortality rate nationwide.
Martin added: “We must learn the lesson that institutionalization creates power structures and abuses of power, and we will never again have to be an option for our country in any case.”
Church-run houses in Ireland housed orphans, unmarried pregnant women and their babies for most of the 20th century. Mothers were abandoned by their families and hidden out of shame, and many of the children were separated from their mothers by adoption.
Institutions were subjected to intense scrutiny after in 2014 historian Catherine Corless located the death certificates of almost 800 children who died in a mother and baby home in the west of Ireland, but could only find a burial record for a child.
Researchers later found a mass grave containing the remains of infants and young children in an underground sewage structure on the grounds of the house, run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961.
The commission of inquiry said about 56,000 single mothers and about 57,000 children had lived in the homes it investigated. Most were admitted in the 1960s and early 1970s.