IRELAND
Irish Examiner
By Susan Lohan
Amidst the tsunami of speculation about the whereabouts of the bodies of almost 800 children from the former Tuam mother-and-baby home, some sceptics have settled on the belief that 796 bodies could not be contained in this small plot of land.
This is a cynical distraction from the core issue of ‘illegitimate’ children dying at such homes at a rate five times higher than that for ‘legitimate’ children, and not just from readily curable common childhood diseases but also, more sinisterly, from malnutrition.
It is a distraction from the real point that no one knows where exactly the remains of these children are; a distraction from the question of why the State funded such homes “to care for” these children whilst they actively prevented their own mothers from doing so; and a distraction from the scandals that State inspection reports from these homes were not acted upon.
It is, above all else, a distraction from the dawning realisation on the public’s part that all of these facts have been known by successive governments and have all been communicated to every single minister for children since the post came into existence in 2000.
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