IRELAND
Irish Times
Sharon Foley
Fri, Jun 6, 2014
It is hard not to be horrified, sickened and shocked at the heartbreaking revelations that 796 babies died and may have been buried in a mass grave in the grounds of a home run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours in Tuam, Co Galway, between 1925 and 1961.
As a mother, I am mourning to my core the loss of these precious lives. It is nearly beyond my capacity to understand how helpless, tiny human beings could have been apparently discarded and treated in this way.
The full facts surrounding the deaths will probably never be established. But the question on all our minds is what happened these babies? Did they die when the mother was in childbirth? Did they die from malnutrition and neglect? Did they die from an illness that is now easily treatable? Did they die alone?
These infants died in a mother and baby home at a disgraceful period in Ireland when unmarried mothers were banished and hidden away and cruelly forced to give up their infants for adoption on birth.
As founding chief executive of the government-funded Crisis Pregnancy Agency, I understand the trauma of a crisis pregnancy and our shameful history in failing to support Irish girls and women who were pregnant and unmarried.
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