IRELAND
Forbes
Eamonn Fingleton Contributor
In this space last week I challenged the sensational tabloid story of the moment: the idea that nuns at an orphanage in Ireland had “dumped” nearly eight hundred babies’ bodies in a functioning septic tank. The story had caused global outrage – but, as I pointed out, it not only did not ring true but no media organization had come even close to establishing the facts. Many of the reports were contradictory and even the most reliable-sounding evidence was at best confusing.
My reservations have now been vindicated and the “796 babies dumped in a septic tank” story has been revealed as one of the most outrageous press hoaxes in recent years. To their credit, some of the world’s more reputable news organizations have revisited the facts and published correctives. In particular the Washington Post and the New York Times have tacitly admitted that the implied image of satanic depravity that turned the story into a global sensation – that of wicked-witch nuns shoveling countless tiny human forms into a maelstrom of excrement and urine – almost certainly never happened. Their updated accounts can be read here and here.
At the end of the day, these facts seem well founded:
1. A total of 796 babies and children died at an orphanage in the town of Tuam in County Galway.
2. Even judged by the standards of the time (the orphanage operated between 1925 and 1961), this represented a disturbingly high death rate.
3. The babies’ final resting place has gone unrecorded.
4. Basing their opinion on practice at other such institutions at the time, experts believe that the babies were buried in unmarked graves within the grounds of the orphanage.
5. In the mid-1970s, two boys playing on the site came upon what seemed like a crypt in which the skeletons of perhaps 20 babies were discovered.
6. Some observers have recently concluded that the so-called crypt had at one stage been a sewage tank dating from the nineteenth century.
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