Mass grave of up to 800 dead babies exposed in County Galway Ireland

According to a report in the Irish Mail on Sunday, a mass grave has been located beside a former home for unmarried mothers and babies in County Galway. The grave is believed to contain the bodies of up to eight hundred babies, buried on the former grounds of the institution known locally as “The Home” in Tuam, north of Galway city, between 1925 and 1961

Run by the Bon Secours nuns, “The Home” housed thousands of unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children over those years.

According to Irish Mail on Sunday the causes of death listed for “as many as 796 children” included “malnutrition, measles, convulsions, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.”

The babies were usually buried without a coffin in a plot that had once housed “a water tank,” the report claims. No memorials were erected, the site was left unmarked and unmourned.

The staggering mortality rate of “The Home” was apparently replicated elsewhere in Ireland.

The Sean Ross Mother and Baby Home, portrayed in the award winning film “Philomena” this year, opened in Roscrea, County Tipperary in 1930. In its first year of operation 60 babies died out of a total of 120, a fifty percent infant mortality rate, more than four times higher than in the general population at the time.

Statistics show a quarter of all babies born outside marriage in the 1930’s in Ireland died before their first birthdays. As observers have remarked elsewhere, these were infant death rates from the 17th century.

In one year alone in the mid 1940’s in the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in County Cork, out of the 180 babies born 100 died.

Given the shockingly high mortality rates, it is hard not to conclude that the destabilizing threat these children represented to Irish society and its conservative religious ethos may have contributed to their untimely demise.

If 60 babies died in first year of the Sean Ross Abbey home alone, it’s a mathematical probability that hundreds more deaths could have occurred in the decades that followed (an estimated 50,000 babies were born in mother and baby homes throughout Ireland before they closed in the 1990’s).

The kids in the photo would have been washed and dressed up especially for this photo, there are cups and plates on the table but no food, and not one smiling face.

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Comment by Leigh James on June 21, 2014 at 3:46pm: Absolutely insidious. And the culprits are mere sons of hell, doing what they've done since the very beginning. Their father was a liar and a murderer from the beginning as well. Their time will come very quickly, rest assure.

Comment by James Power on June 1, 2014 at 4:59am: The tireless work of historian Catherine Corless has revealed that 796 children, the oldest nine years, the youngest two days old, are in that tank. Causes of death include “malnutrition, measles, convulsions, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia”. The tank is described as “filled to the brim with tiny bones and skulls”.

On Liveline radio show during the week, a clear picture emerged. Unmarried mothers incarcerated until they signed over their babies, healthy children sold to be adopted by wealthy Americans and disabled infants, who had no sale value, abandoned in “Dying Rooms”, and their bodies dumped by the brides of Christ in a septic tank.

This was a nationwide industry founded on human suffering. In a country utterly corrupted by its own twisted version of Catholicism and run by a complicit elite, young women who “fell pregnant” were condemned. They had sinned and were left to the mercy of perverts and brutes. Their children were a tainted commodity to be sold or discarded at the whim of people considered “religious”.

A further horror is that it seems highly unlikely Tuam was the only mother and baby home which starved infants and crammed their tiny bodies into unmarked graves. The dead children must number in the thousands.

To quote Bob Dylan, “Even Jesus would never forgive what you do”.

What was once “The Home” is now a housing estate. There are real homes there now, proper homes where families live and children play. I hope it’s a happy place.

Expect the usual Defenders of the Faith to trot out their well-practised ”few bad apples” lines. ”The vast majority of Catholic institutions did great good for Irish children,” they’ll tell us. They’ll wring their hands and drip sincerely that times were different then and nobody knew how bad it was.

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/mass-grave-galway-tuam-1494001-May2...