Tuam Baby Burials Suggest an Insidious Agenda

By Kathy Sheridan
Irish Times
March 8, 2017

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yone who enjoys ramble around old Irish cemeteries will recognise them. Fine edifices of marble and granite, rendering glory to the mortal remains of senior churchmen, trumpeting a temporal hierarchy even in death.

Meanwhile, stories of the despised unbaptised – stillborns and foetuses – denied a burial in sacred ground and destined for the loveless afterlife of limbo, lie deep in us still.

So, it is not just the disposal of foetal and infant remains in a disused waste facility that stuns the heart. It is the fact that a religious order buried even baptised children in unconsecrated ground – as it surely did, since a fifth of those identified in the death certificates were more than a year old.

Punch-drunk from stories of savagery in religious institutions, the one remaining excuse was that it was all about the twisted saving of souls. Tuam disproves that. Something else was afoot.

We know that many of the children who survived the mother and baby homes, ended up in the industrial schools, and that some of the mothers themselves ended up in the Magdalen laundries, all becoming, in effect, cogs in a vast interlocking system established by the Catholic Church.