Thousands of babies and children died in 18 of Ireland’s mother and baby homes — church-run institutions where unmarried women were sent to deliver their babies in secret, often against their will — over eight decades, according to a landmark report.
On Tuesday, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters — which was set up to investigate what happened in 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes from 1922 to 1998 — announced the 9,000 deaths as part of the final findings of its near six-year inquiry.
Around 56,000 women were sent to the 18 institutions investigated, where some 57,000 children were born, according to the report.
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, even though it was “known to local and national authorities” and was “recorded in official publications,” the report found.
Prior to 1960, mother and baby homes “did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact, they appear to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival,” it added.
The report called the infant mortality rates the most “disquieting feature of these institutions.”
Speaking on Tuesday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that the report “opens a window onto a deeply misogynistic culture in Ireland over several decades,” and that the report “reveals significant failures of the state and of society.”
The report, which runs to more than 2,800 pages, 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.
Survivor Philomena Lee, who spent years searching for the son she was forced to give up for adoption said in a statement on Sunday that she had “waited decades for this moment — the moment when Ireland reveals how tens of thousands of unmarried mothers, such as I, and the tens of thousands of our beloved children, such as my dear son Anthony, were torn asunder, simply because we were unwed at the moment our children were born.”
During her time at the Sean Ross Abbey mother and baby home, Lee said that she was “deprived” of her liberty, independence and autonomy, and was “subject to the tyranny of the nuns,” who told mothers daily that they were to atone for their sins by “working for our keep and surrendering our children to the nuns for forced adoption.”
Lee, whose story was told in an Oscar-nominated movie starring Judi Dench, added that she was “taunted” by the nuns during a difficult labor, who she says told her that the “pain was a punishment for my promiscuity.”
Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Tipperary, which operated as a mother and baby home from 1930 to 1970.
The commission’s final report reported that this practice was not unusual.
For many survivors and advocate groups, there is concern that the report fails to vindicate their experience.
Susan Lohan, co-founder of the Adoption Rights Alliance, told national broadcaster RTE that the institutions were a “form of social engineering,” and that the “state and church worked in concert to ensure that women — unmarried mothers and girls who were deemed to be a threat to the moral tone of the country” were “incarcerated behind these very high walls to ensure that they would not impact or offend public morality.”
On Tuesday, Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Affairs Roderic O’Gorman said: “The report makes clear that for decades, Ireland had a stifling, oppressive and brutally misogynistic culture, where a pervasive stigmatization of unmarried mothers and their children robbed those individuals of their agency and sometimes their future.”
A memorial at the former site of the Tuam Home in County Galway, where the bodies of hundreds of babies who died there were put into a decommissioned sewage tank.
Survivors are expected to receive an official State apology from Taoiseach Micheál Martin, the Irish Prime Minister, on Wednesday.
But for many, that apology will not be enough.
Lohan told CNN that it should be the first of a series of apologies, noting that the commission’s scope only covered 18 institutions, while some 180 sites were part of a system that facilitated forced adoptions, enforced disappearances, enforced labor, the stripping of identity, the falsification of state documents and the forging of women’s signatures.
The report says that that “many allegations have been made that large sums of money were given to the institutions and agencies in Ireland that arranged foreign adoptions. Such allegations are impossible to prove and impossible to disprove.”
Lee also underlined the role that other state-run and private institutions played, saying in her statement that she “can only hope” that the authors of the report recognize that “those of us who were detained against our will … and who gave birth there, are not all of the mothers nor all of the children who have suffered.”
Tens of thousands went through other state-run hospitals and private institutions and “suffered the same fate,” she said.
“The state hasn’t dealt with its full involvement and the massive human rights abuses that came with it,” Lohan told RTE.
‘Destroyed’ records
In addition to the report’s public release on Tuesday, O’Gorman also brought forward legislation to advance the “burials legislation” to “support the excavation, exhumation and, where possible, identification of remains, and their dignified reburial” at the site in Tuam, County Galway, which was first identified by local historian Catherine Corless, whose tireless work was the catalyst for the commission’s launch, in 2014. The legislation will also apply to “any other site where intervention is reasonably required,” according to the Ministry of Children and Youth Affairs
Some 973 children died at, or near, the Tuam mother and baby home, according to the commission, which revealed that some of their remains had been found inside a decommissioned sewage tank.
Only 50 records of burials at Tuam have been located; others “may have been lost or destroyed over the years,” according to a March 2019 interim report.
The names of some of the 796 children who died at the Tuam home are seen at a memorial in County Galway in 2019.
Other interim reports, of which there are seven, have detailed further details of the horrific circumstances that mothers and their children faced inside these institutions.
A total of 900 babies born at or admitted to hospitals near County Cork’s Bessborough home died in infancy or early childhood.
In 1944, infant mortality rates at the Bessborough home peaked at 82%. Only 64 of those 900 babies’ graves have ever been located.
The commission also found that between 1920 and 1977, the bodies of more than 950 children who had died in some of the homes were sent to university medical schools for “anatomical studies.”
Restricted access
While the release of the final report closes a chapter on the commission’s work, survivors’ rights groups say their work is not over.
Survivors have long hoped that the commission would reveal more about allegations of arbitrary detention, cruelty and neglect, forced adoption and vaccine trials that went on inside the homes, as well as hold wrongdoers to account.
And crucially, they also hoped it would help them to access their personal records, including information about missing relatives and babies buried in unmarked graves.
In October, the government passed a law promising to seal the commission’s archive from survivors and the public for 30 years. Days later, the government changed its position, saying survivors of the homes were legally entitled to access their personal data.
Critics of the law had successfully argued that sealing the commission’s records was illegal under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an EU directive which gives individuals the right to access their data.
Now, survivors’ rights groups are warning that the government — and state agencies including the child and family agency, Tusla — are still restricting survivors’ access to their own records.
In a statement to CNN, Tusla put the issue of access back on the government, saying that “the absence of legislation to deal with the provision of information will continue to be a source of great anxiety for people, and the resolution of this issue is beyond the reach of Tusla.”
“We recognize the hurt and trauma experienced by those who are affected by the Commission’s report into Mother and Baby Homes, that are understandably searching their identity,” the statement said.
In the meantime, the agency is still routinely denying survivors — particularly adopted people — access to their own personal information, their birth certificates, their identities, and even their ethnicities, Lohan says.
“These abuses, they didn’t end in 1998 when the last of the dreadful places closed.”
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