IRELAND
International Business Times
By Josh Robbins
August 8, 2017
A man who survived vaccine trials as a child growing up in a notorious Catholic orphanage says he believes there are more children secretly buried in a cemetery that was attached to the project.
David Kinsella, 59, spent the first four years of his life St Patrick’s on Dublin’s Navan Road – one of nine ‘Mother and Baby Homes’ that operated in Ireland in the last century, accommodating women who fell pregnant out of wedlock and their offspring.
A series of revelations have exposed that some of the homes subjected the children to vaccine trials at the behest of major pharmaceutical companies. They were separated from their mothers at birth, who would then typically work for a year to pay back the Catholic church.
David was hospitalised six times and required a blood transfusion after he was pumped full of drugs at the Navan Road facility, he told the Irish Mirror. He could not talk or walk when he was adopted a the age of four.
Infant mortality rates at the home were high as a result of the drug trials and other mistreatment of the children, including chronic malnutrition. It is estimated that between 2,000 and 3,000 children died there between its opening in 1904 and closure in 1985.
Many of dead were buried in a special mass grave in Glasnevin Cemetery, known as an ‘Angels Plot’, but it has also been revealed that several hundred were donated to medical institutions for research purposes. A memorial is taking place on Sunday 13 August at the plot in Glasnevin and David is attending.
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