IRELAND
The Economist
Jun 14th 2014 | DUBLIN
CATHERINE CORLESS, a farmer, housewife and local historian in Tuam, a small town in the west of Ireland, struggled for four years to establish the truth about two questions: how many children died in a local mother-and-baby home between 1925 and 1961, and where were their bodies buried? Although she received little help, she has succeeded in answering the first question. A government inquiry should soon help to answer the second.
Her recently completed research showed that 796 children had died in the town’s home for unmarried mothers in those 36 years. The home, previously a workhouse, was run by the nuns of Bon Secours, a Roman Catholic order of French origin; the rate of infant mortality was well above the national average.
The revelation of the very large number of baby deaths, and the suggestion, as yet unproven, that many infants may have been buried in a mass grave in the grounds of the former care-home, has stirred the national conscience. It has also shed light on a shadowy chapter in Ireland’s history: how the church, the state and society as a whole treated unmarried women and their children. The women were shown little compassion and generally shunned as social outcasts. Many were disowned by their families; polite society dismissed them as “fallen”. Since their offspring were born out of wedlock, they were stigmatised, too. Unmarried mothers and their children were seen as a “ problem” best solved by removing them from society and by sending them to institutional care and isolation.
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