TUAM (IRELAND)
The Times/The Sunday Times [London, England]
July 19, 2025
By Brenda Power
Excavation of almost 800 bodies from the former mother and baby home has proven divisive, but the infants deserve Christian burials
British MPs passed a law last month to decriminalise women in England and Wales who terminate their pregnancies after 24 weeks, potentially up to full term.
The landslide vote in the House of Commons was prompted by cases such as that of Nicola Packer, who was prosecuted for taking medication to induce an abortion at 26 weeks.
Packer, now 45, claimed she thought she was only six weeks pregnant when she took the medication in 2020, after which her stillborn baby was delivered. She was acquitted in May.
I’m using the word “baby” rather than “foetus”, uncomfortable as some may find that language, because nobody in the UK ever dreamt of referring to the 23-week gestation baby that nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of attempting to murder as a foetus.
Letby is serving whole-life sentences for killing seven babies, six of whom were born prematurely. But had their mothers not wanted those babies, rather than imploring medics to do all they could to save their infants’ lives, they would indeed have been foetuses, and nobody would have faced prosecution for killing them.
Abortion is a subject that demands sensitivity, of course, but also some delicate and even downright hypocritical linguistic footwork to avoid causing offence or upset.
Like the majority of the electorate in 2018, I voted for abortion because I believe in women’s right to choose, but I am clear-eyed about the fact that this right comes into direct conflict with the right to life of babies/foetuses. There has to be a cut-off point in terms of gestation because — and here’s where us mothers can pull rank — there is undeniably a point at which another person enters the equation.
As the late Nell McCafferty put it during a debate around the abortion referendum: “It’s not that I am unable, I am unwilling to face some of the facts about abortion. I am forced to advocate for abortion, but it’s grim and I’m sick of it … Here we are, 100 years after slaughters like the Somme … offering abortions on request.” I believe that sums up most thinking people’s conflicted view, and it’s not just the usual suspects who are horrified by the revelation that almost 11,000 babies were aborted in this country last year.
It is clear that some women are using it as a form of birth control, at a time when there are more and safer alternative contraception methods than ever before. If the government caves in to left-wing pressure and increases the 12-week limit, for which the public voted, or scraps the mandatory three-day “cooling off” wait before accessing an abortion, also part of the pre-referendum pledge to voters, that will be a profound and cowardly betrayal. If the three-day wait is indeed impeding some women in obtaining an abortion, just how much higher would those activists wish that 11,000 figure to be?
I am surprised, though, that some of those lamenting our abortion statistics are also challenging the validity and necessity of the Tuam dig. Last week, excavations began at the site of the former Bon Secours mother and baby home in the town to exhume, identify where possible, and reinter the remains of some 796 infants buried in an unmarked mass grave in a concrete vault that may have been part of the institution’s sewerage system.
Given that most of the babies were baptised, it seems extraordinary that religious people would have cast them into an unconsecrated pit, but in 2014 the Bon Secours sisters acknowledged that babies who died at the home “were buried in a disrespectful and unacceptable way”.
It is, however, unfair to use the Tuam story as another stick with which to beat the Catholic Church. The nuns ran the home on behalf of Galway county council and if they didn’t have sufficient resources to provide ample nutrition and medical care for sick babies, that wasn’t their fault.
And they didn’t go out rounding up unmarried mothers and incarcerating them. These unfortunate women were delivered to the home — when the whole of society knew exactly how they and their babies were treated there — by their families, and abandoned by the fathers of their children, in many cases to prevent the farm falling into the hands of a “bastard”.
But however they came to be there, it appears undeniable that almost 800 tiny skeletons are lying beneath a green area in the housing estate that now stands on the site of the home. However they died, whether from deliberate neglect or untreatable disease, they should have been given Christian burials and grave markers. As baptised souls, they should have been buried in consecrated ground. Divisive, inflammatory and invidious as some Catholics may feel this process to be, there is no excuse for leaving them in that place.
And it is difficult to see how one could voice full-throated advocacy for the humanity of unborn babies, and be content to leave hundreds of born babies lying in a tangled heap in a makeshift grave.
If it is dreadful to kill unborn babies and dispose of their remains in hospital incinerators like so much biological waste, or flush them down toilets after taking abortifacient medication — and it certainly is, whatever your stance on abortion — then it’s surely not OK to throw born babies into a disused sewage pit, put concrete over it and forget about them.
State sobers up on alcohol warning labels
The Italians, at least, will be relieved to know that the Irish government’s plans to label wine bottles with health warnings is likely to be parked until 2029, if not scrapped entirely.
When the proposal was first announced two years ago, the largest farmers’ union in Italy, Coldiretti, had called the “terrifying” warnings, which would alert drinkers to the risk of cancer and heart disease from alcohol as well as dangers of drinking during pregnancy, a “direct attack” on the country’s wine producers. And while noting that Ireland wasn’t a significant importer of Italian wine, the chianti producers’ consortium said that if other EU countries were to follow Ireland’s lead it would do “inestimable” damage to their business.
The domestic alcohol lobby had also opposed the plan, due to be introduced in the Public Health (Alcohol) Act next May, arguing that it would add to production costs at a time when the sector was already facing challenges from the Trump administration’s tariff threats.
Now the government has apparently decided to “move with Europe” and “do it together”, as Peter Burke, the enterprise minister, put it, rather than rushing to be the first EU country to introduce the measure. “Acting unilaterally on a sector that is vulnerable through tariffs is not a good idea,” Burke said.
Ibec, the business lobby group, might argue that the same could be said of the Control of Economic Territory (Occupied Territories) Bill, having cautioned last week that an “isolationist” and “anti-Israel” approach risked “reputational damage” to Ireland, particularly at a time when President Trump already has our pharmaceutical sector in his sights. But, despite last Friday’s poll showing growing public disquiet over the bill, nothing, it seems, will stop us wanting to be first in Europe on that score.