UNITED STATES
Esquire
Charles Pierce
In other news from the Motherland, it long had been suspected that babies were killed and disposed of at what always is mistakenly called an “orphanage” in Tuam, County Galway. A remarkable woman named Catherine Corless, a local historian, was struck by the fact that the local registry had recorded 800 death certificates from the facility but only listed two actual burials. Corless ferociously pursued the investigation and she was finally (and tragically) proven correct this week. From The Guardian:
A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday. Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said. The commission said DNA analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961. The home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious order of nuns, received unmarried pregnant women to give birth. The women were separated from their children, who remained elsewhere in the home, raised by nuns, until they could be adopted.
This is a very mild description of what really went on, as Limerick historian Liam Hogan has been explaining on his essential stream on the electric Twitter machine. The children were separated from their mothers, who often got shuffled into the infamous Magdalene Laundries. The children then were put up for adoption. Hogan has links to Irish newspapers going back years describing the repressive, sex-hysterical Catholic theocratic impulse behind facilities like the one in Tuam. Some of the clips describe a bureaucracy of death only a couple of steps beyond that of Buchenwald.
God damn the people who did this, and whoever in the Church enabled it. And a bit of a hymn for the departed, most of whom never really had a prayer.
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