IRELAND
The Journal
THE REMAINS OF infants and toddlers lay for decades at the site at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, unmarked, unvisited, unknown.
Investigators for the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Inquiry yesterday confirmed both that they had uncovered “a significant number” of those children’s remains – and that they dated back to the era during which the home was operational.
Very few pictures from the home exist but thanks to the tireless work of historian Catherine Corless, we do have the names of 796 children who died there between 1925 and 1960.
The infant mortality rate at the home was double that of even other mother and baby homes around the country at the time. Young children in the Tuam home succumbed to deaths from afflictions as heartbreakingly banal as the flu and, although only in a small number of cases, ear infections.
The most common causes of death were “debility from birth” (25%), 15% from “respiratory diseases”, 10% each from influenza and the measles, 8% born too premature to survive, 6% from whooping cough and in smaller numbers of epilepsy/convulsions, gastroenteritis, meningitis, congenital heart disease and congenital syphilis, skin diseases, chicken pox and one per cent – 10 children – of malnutrition.
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