IRELAND
Irish Central
Niall O’Dowd @niallodowd June 14,2014
There are some undeniable facts about the unmarried mother’s homes in Ireland from the time they were established in the 1920s until they were closed sometime in the 1960s.
Children died needlessly by the thousands in them. Many, possibly 800 in Galway, were buried without coffins, thrown in the earth, some in a septic tank.
Some deniers have claimed there were high rates of deaths anyway due to the times. But 100 out of 162 babies in Bessborough in Cork?
Here is what happened there. A conscientious health official, Dr .James Deeny, visited, and here are his exact words written in 1951:
“Shortly afterwards, when in Cork, I went to Bessborough. It was a beautiful institution, built on to a lovely old house just before the war, and seemed to be well-run and spotlessly clean. I marched up and down and around about and could not make out what was wrong; at last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually for a Chief Medical Adviser, examined them.
“Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhea, carefully covered up. There was obviously a staphylococcus infection about.
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