IRELAND
Irish Examiner
Two seven-year-old girls have handed ministers a petition signed by 30,000 people demanding a judge lead the inquiry into church-run, state-sanctioned institutions for single mothers.
Dasha Klyaritskaya-Hilliard and her friend, Juliette Bruce Merzouk, from Dublin, took the message on behalf of people in more than a dozen countries who joined an online campaign urging the Government to escalate investigations.
Robin Hilliard, Dasha’s father, from Dalkey, Co Dublin, helped create the petition with a friend, Amanda Maloney, from Limerick, following revelations about the deaths of 796 infants at a mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway between 1925 and 1961.
“I’m old enough to remember the reputation of some of those places as a kid. And now that the thing has come out in the open it seems you have to wonder how was this allowed to happen and what on earth were people thinking,” he said.
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