The Irish Prime Minister says the country must “face the full truth of our past” as a long-awaited report recounted the decades of damage caused by church houses to single women and their babies, where thousands of children died.
LONDON – The Irish Prime Minister said on Tuesday that the country must “face the full truth of our past” as a long-awaited report recounted decades of damage caused by church houses to single women and their babies, where thousands of children died.
Prime Minister Micheal Martin said young women and their children had paid a high price for Ireland’s “perverse religious morality” in recent decades.
“We had a totally distorted attitude towards sexuality and intimacy. Young mothers and their sons and daughters paid a terrible price for this dysfunction, ”she said.
Martin said he would apologize formally on behalf of the state to the Irish parliament on Wednesday.
The final report of a survey of mothers ’and babies’ homes said 9,000 children died in 18 different mothers ’and babies’ homes during the 20th century. Fifteen percent of all children in households died, nearly double the national infant mortality rate, according to the report. The main causes included respiratory infections and gastroenteritis, also known as stomach flu.
The report said that “very high mortality rates were known to local and national authorities at the time and were recorded in official publications.”
But, according to the document, “there is no evidence of public concern about conditions in the homes of mothers and babies or about the terrible mortality among children born in these homes, even though many of the facts were in the public domain.”
The investigation is part of a countdown process to an overwhelming Catholic Ireland with a history of abuse in church-run institutions, including the flight and embarrassment of unmarried mothers, many of whom were pressured to give babies for adoption.
Church-run houses in Ireland housed orphans, unmarried pregnant women and their babies for most of the 20th century. Institutions have been the subject of intense public scrutiny since historian Catherine Corless, in 2014, located the death certificates of nearly 800 children who died at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby home in Tuam, in the county. of Galway, in the west of Ireland, but could only find a record burial for a child.
Investigators 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 approximately 56,000 single mothers and about 57,000 children had lived in the homes it investigated, with the highest incomes in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The last of the houses did not close until 1998.
“While mother and baby homes were not a peculiarly Irish phenomenon, the proportion of Irish single mothers who moved into mother and baby homes or county (state-run) homes in the 20th century was probably the highest in the world, “according to the report. dit.
The commission said women’s lives “were affected by the pregnancy outside of marriage and by the responses of their child’s father, their close families and the community at large.
“The vast majority of children in institutions were‘ illegitimate ’and as a result suffered discrimination for most of their lives,” the report adds.
The Prime Minister said the report “presents profound questions to all of Irish society”.
“What has been described in this report was not imposed on us by any foreign power,” he said. “We did it ourselves, as a society. “