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A MALIAN JIHADIST will seek forgiveness from his people for attacking the world heritage site of Timbuktu when he pleads guilty at an unprecedented case before an international war crimes court, his lawyer said this week.
Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi will become the first person to admit to war crimes charges before the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague at a joint hearing and sentencing due to be held in the coming months.
He stands accused of jointly ordering or carrying out the destruction of nine mausoleums and a section of Timbuktu’s famous Sidi Yahia mosque, a UNESCO-protected world heritage site dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries.
Mahdi is the first jihadist suspect to appear before the ICC and the first person to be solely charged with war crimes for an attack on a global historic and cultural monument.
Mahdi, who is aged around 40, had told his defence lawyer, Mohamed Aouini, he was “a Muslim who believes in justice.”
“He wants to be truthful to himself and he wants to admit the acts that he has committed,” Aouini told a hearing at the ICC Tuesday.
And he wants to ask at the same time for pardon from the people of Timbuktu and the Malian people.
“He regrets all the actions that he has committed,” Aouini added.
Destroying ancient shrines
Mahdi will admit a single charge of “the war crime of attacking buildings dedicated to religion and historic monuments” in 2012, when many of the ancient shrines were destroyed.
Reuters reported at the time that Jihadist Islamists in Timbuktu had destroyed a number of important world heritage sites in a bid erase all traces of what they regarded as un-Islamic idolatry.
The Jihadists broke down the doors to the Sidi Yahya Mosque – which locals had said must be remained shut until the end of the world.
Mahdi’s prosecution comes amid a global outcry over the razing by the so-called Islamic State group of sites in Iraq and Syria that bear testament to the world’s collective history.
ICC prosecutors say Mahdi was a leader of Ansar Dine, a mainly Tuareg group that controlled areas of Mali’s northern desert together with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and a third local group in early 2012.
Judge Raul Pangalangan said the court had hoped to open the trial in mid-June, but both the defence and prosecutors asked for longer to prepare, and suggested 25 August.
Pangalangan said judges were “willing to accommodate a request” to start the trial after the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr which ends the fasting month of Ramadan in early July.
“However the chamber emphasises that this trial needs to proceed expeditiously,” he warned, appearing to signal that late August was too far away. The judges will issue a decision on the trial’s start date later.
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If I went digging out my back garden and discovered over 800 skeletal remains the guards would be pitching forensic tents as far as the eye could see, plus it would be national headline news for weeks on end.Why is this any different? .
Because we don’t have a separation of church and state.
It’s different because it’s the Catholic Church! They held a grip on this country and still do in certain areas due to the elderly , it’s scandalous it really is so so sad them poor mothers to
This is a tragedy for those poor children,the church and state has a lot to answer for,there is reports on these places going back 60 to 70 years the state knew this was happening what sort of f##ked up place is this country we call Ireland.
Dam right pat, but I don’t think it’s going to take a lot more digging before someone who is still alive comes forward, the place closed in 1961 so there has to be women still alive that can answer some questions or shed some light on what the he’ll went on in that home, and I am pretty sure it’s going to make us all violently ill,
Parts of the Tuam babies story are beginning to become unhinged http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/tuam-mother-and-baby-home-the-trouble-with-the-septic-tank-story-1.1823393
Corless’ own work paints a very different picture of the home http://motherandbabyhome.com/booklet.pdf Not rosy, but hardly the story that was conveyed earlier thus week either.
And you’d be spending a large part of your weekend drinking Gardai coffee and sleeping on a cot.
Pat Mcrotch…
I can only assume that the authorities knew about this.
Until this very day.
And they lived in hope that the lid would stay on this barbarity.
Judging by the way foreign media is reporting on this, Ireland is moving close to being compared to atrocities that emerged from WW2.
And that weeks later neither the Gardai or the government are seen to be proactive.
If it were to unfold that thousands of bodies were disposed of in this fashion then Ireland will go down in history for this savageness.
Not just for throwing infant bodies into an unmarked grave but for the utter lack of empathy and compassion by reckless nuns ie. the roman catholic church.
Corless’ own work needs to be read by all those anti-Catholic bigots who are jumping on the band wagon without any concrete evidence.
There aren’t 800 skeletal remains there.
What she said was 796 children died while at St. Mary’s. Nobody knows where they were buried. There may be 20 or up to 200 bodies buried there. One of the children who discovered the tank said he thought there might be 20.
Let’s stick to facts.
Its the pro catholic apologists who would want to look at the evidence against the CC that has emerged since the mid 1990′s.
At every hands turn everybody who points to it is accused of ‘church bashing’ or not understanding that ‘they were different times’.
If ever the members of an organisation needed to take a good look as to why they consider it necessary to keep standing up for its now.
Look at the list of crimes that have emerged from the 20th century.
Spot on Paddy and if we all were to take a deep breath and forget our childhood brainwashing we would finally as a society “SEE THE LIGHT”
“Young People of Oirland”
THIS IS A SATANIC CULT- simple as ,
Sorry but it has ALL THE HALLMARKS OF A ORGANISED INTERNATIONAL SATANIC CULT,,
it INSTITUTIONALLY abuses,rapes, and murders children, it has put to death MILLIONS of people in a few thousand years ,,it lies deceits people and puts a them under a spell ,,It uses people FEAR to keep them meek and to PART WITH THEIR MONIES
As long as we fear DEATH there will always be a place for religion amongst the feeble of mind,,,
But as a TAX-EVADING INSTITUTE– IT HAS NO BUSSINES INVOLVING IN ANY STATE
and absolutely NO BUSSINES ANYWHERE NEAR CHILDREN,,,,
BREAK OFF THE SHACKLES PEOPLE TAKE BACK THE POWER WE ALL POSSES TO CHANGE OUR OWN LIVES AND RID THE SOCIETY OF THIS SATANIC CULT ONCE AND FOR ALL
well said Fergus ob in a nutshell barbaric fn church and state collusion
Greg, isn’t that a bit of an extreme statement. surely the truth lies in some grey area between the balck & the white.
how the RC doctrine is culturally interpreted is equally responsible. if u look at all the RC countries in the world – each has their own interpretation & implementation of the RC religion.
in Ireland the interpretation lens is via the male dominated RCC & male dominated STATE. it’s not exclusively a religously phenomenon. it takes the State to validate the the Church horrors. the self-serving, pious & silent Bystander laity were equally responsible. if u were around in those days ud likely be one of those sucking up to the ‘power’ of the RC authority to better your stsus in society? it’s easy to be reactive in retrospective hindsight. there are continued state atrosicties being served on the poor & disenfranched in Ireland that will in 50 years be seen to be barbaric. what is being done for those current horrors meted out by the Bankers aided by the State etc?
You’re so right!
Please sign to change that http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/call-for-separation-of-church-and-state-in-ireland
So the guards feel there is no suspicion of a crime that 800 babies bodies may all lay in a septic tank. Another embarrassment by the force.
Very poorly handled. Someone in the force is going to regret not taking this further
The guards that did make even a report that out a priest in a negative light was moved on! I am not defending them. I think they acted cowardly but the church had do much power they were arrogant about this. They were do arrogant they didn’t think something like this would come back to them (realistically it has not and will not). I wonder how many of the death cert are genuine. It was probably very easy just to write measles and throw the kid in the hole. I have heard horrible stories of leaving crying babies in rooms and letting ‘nature’ do its thing. Stories that are no longer hard to believe.
I don’t think it will affect to many guards but it is one of those things that can bring down governments, the government should step right in and instruct the garda to launch a full investigation into this home and every other home in the country, hearing the new minster for justice saying it’s up to the garda if they want to start an investigation is nothing sort of saying I have said something now my ass is covered, who cares weather the garda believes it should be done or not, the people of Ireland want it done for closer for these poor victims, the government will do to little to late yet again,
The fear that the church instilled in people, the shame that the church instilled.
Such a repressed state we had
It wasn’t just fear. They had the Power as well to do what they wanted. The Gardaí were their henchmen.
Were they still are and every day the garda fail to act casts more shame on them
That’s maybe why the gardai are so reluctant to investigate. All arms of the state and church, the judiciary etc and indeed society in general, were complicit in this.
Who cries for those poor little mites who’s last glimpse outside and a blue sky were mixed with the hope a mother or father might come and rescue them and show them love.
No..
A pit in the back of the home was their only future and to rot and be forgotten.
All facts..
Ireland
Shame on your history and your people for this discusting story..
I am ashamed to be Irish
On Wednesday 11th June at 7pm there will be a march from the Department of Children on Mespil Road to the Dáil. A candlelit vigil will be held at the Dáil and the names of the 796 children who perished at the hands of church and state criminal negligence will be read out. As each name is read out everyone there will take turns to bring up a child’s shoe or a bib or a toy or flowers….something to represent their little lives. The reading of the names will be interspersed with poetry and short recounts of the conditions the children endured.
Also one in Galway in Eyre Square at the same time
It’s sad that no one appears to be in any hurry over discovering what’s buried beneath this piece of land.have we as a nation lost our empathy in pursuit of wealth and power?…
Shane, did we ever have such empathy? These homes, along with the industrial schools and the Magdelane houses, were all in local communities. As mentioned in the excellent article above, conditions in these places were well known to the politicians and so presumably, to the local populations. Where was our empathy then? Where was the empathy, and the love, that a mother should be showing to a daughter who “got into trouble”?
But you’re right in that so many people didn’t seem to be shocked by this, even RTE didn’t report it properly until it went global.
Indoctrination inspires such fear Dermot. It’s not excuse but people speaking out in such a way as we are now wouldn’t have been possible nor too healthy until recent decades.
Dermot Lane, I find it interesting that you refer to the ” empathy, and the love, that a MOTHER should be showing to a daughter” who “got into trouble”. Yet again there is no mention of a man in these scenarios! It is as if there was no involvement of men at any stage in this story. The unwed were all women, those blamed for mistreating them were all women. Yet it was society that decided to send these women to have their babies in secret. And the society at the time was very largely a male dominated one where women had no autonomy and were seen as chattels of their husbands or fathers. And the fathers of these babies managed to live lives untouched by scandal . cruelty or ridicule!
@Griffin..Fathers of the children also came to my mind…There are so many factors involved here. This went on all over the world, not just Ireland, but the Irish are talking about it. These “Homes” were supposed to be “Sanctuaries” for these young pregnant girls, not torture chambers. The nuns made it a business, backed by the bishops, priests, and all the other religious orders and the state health board.Where were all the “Fathers” in all of this? !! These young girls did not get pregnant by themselves. So much hypocrisy still happening today not caring for the young and old in our society…Look at the HSC! The question we must all address is not just how we uncover this terrible past but how we recognise the same forces at work in the present and come together to defeat them…..Those that survived were lucky They broke their bodies but they couldn’t break their spirits. But the nightmares never leave them. My heart goes out to them all and to those who escaped I hope life treated them good.
well said Una – it’s a crime not to get hitched to man even in these so called enlightened liberal days???
Interesting that in the 1940s larger percentages of children in these homes died. The general population were on rations during WW2. Could it be that these poor children were on starvation diets seeing as they were so lowly regarded by Ireland at the time. Strange that the women were regarded as “fallen” but not the men!
I’m sure the sisters were stuffing their faces.
It’s not that strange actually, the Christian religion has always denigrated the female because the majority if pagan faiths they usurped in Europe were based around worship of Goddesses which recognised the biological role of motherhood as being the giver of life, not some man nailed to a stick. The Roman Empire changed that when they made Christianity the official religion of the empire. Fast forward centuries later to Ireland when the British withdrew from Ireland in 1922 & we had the Catholic Church just rubbing their hands with DeValeras approval to impose Rome’s idea of a theocratic state! Shades of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan anyone..?
Absolute power enabled the weakest of society to be swept under the carpet & the state, her institutions & the people went along with it. The power they hold even to this day is sickening! It’ll be a good day when the church finally crumbles into obscurity & fades from memory. Any of those clergy still alive who administered these homes should be very afraid. Hopefully the people will give the politicians no choice but to act, to bring some measure of justice for these victims of Pol Pot like genocide.
Well put The Catholic church has had the Irish people in their grip for 1500 years.
they should have been slung out along with the other invaders who came here
How are you “sure” Steve? Were you there?
@Micheal S. O’ Ceilleachair
“Strange that the women were regarded as “fallen” but not the men!”
The identities of the fathers of the babies couldn’t be proven at the time because DNA testing didn’t exist then.
It’s very unfortunate that religion is tied up with spirituality. Spirituality is a contemptuous joke at this stage if that was synonymous with catholicism. I was born an rc but have never subscribed to nuns, the original sin and bs of the likes. Higher power for sure, maybe it’s about time the church fell down so the truth can come to light!
The cast system of India comes to mind Michael and it’s still alive and well…..:-(
Whic other invaders – the Celts? The Vikings? The Normans?
796 babies = 796 broken hearted mothers, who were probably not even allowed to grieve at the time. As for people who give red thumbs to comment here shame on you. Rip little angels
Frances doesn’t give a duck. She knew in 2011 and did nothing. Some minister for children she was. To hear the bon secours sisters say they are deeply shocked and saddened really leaves a sour taste. They couldn’t give a duck either. They would gladly see a million people thrown into a mass grave if they don’t conform to Catholic doctrine. Every practicing Catholic should be taking a long hard look at themselves, but they won’t. They will put it to the back of their already empty heads and continue blindly following the cult.
Most of those mother superiors were animals
The State knew what was going on
The State does not care
Blame the nuns all you want
they could not have done what they did without the States cooperation
It is great for politicians to let the religious orders take all the blame
while some of them had fathers and grandfathers who knew all about what was going and did nothing
Political dynasties
If the people who died in 1916 knew how it was going to turn out
Would they have bothered?
The church needs to be removed from the state… While it still has a hold on some, the numbers are dwindling fast.. Especially with the truth finally emerging! Cut all ties between the church and schools etc. the govt need to do something to give the country back some dignity
The church needs to be removed.
“I believe in the separation of church and planet.” Eric Idle.
I just can’t believe that today we still are seeing the destruction the church caused this country and if this happened in this home, I’m just waiting for another of these stories to break. It’s bad enough that my grandmother got beaten in school for not knowing her catechism but that today, if you don’t have your child baptised, your child may have to travel to go to school because the local schools won’t take them.. Time for this stuff to stop
@Aoife Conway
“The church needs to be removed from the state…”
Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hiter, Mao Tse Tung, Enver Hoxha and Pol Pot “removed the Church from the State”. Your statement could be regarded as an expression of hatred towards Catholics. By the way, I mentioned Hitler because the Nazis murdered priests, e.g. Fr Maximilian Kolbe, Fr Bernhard Lichtenberg. Furthermore, the Nazis also attempted to murder Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty because he was rescuing Jews and Allied airmen. Therefore, I’m not in breach of Godwin’s law.
Hitler, most of the Nazi top brass and Mussolini were good Catholics.
The Vatican were only too happy to ally themselves with fascists.
@ Ciarán
‘Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hiter, Mao Tse Tung, Enver Hoxha and Pol Pot “removed the Church from the State”.’
I really don’t know what your point is, Hitler was a Roman Catholic, and Stalin was an Orthodox Christian seminarian, Mao Tse Tung used religious imagery to consolidate his power, everyone had to have his Little Red Book (bible).
The Nazi’s were fascist as you know, and their biggest ally was fascist Italy, who agreed to the foundation of The Vatican with the Lateran Treaty. You should also familiarise yourself with Eugenio Pacelli, or Pope Pius XII as his cult followers would have known him, and his anti-Semitism during WW2, Hitler’s Pope by John Cornwell might be a good place to start.
Given that the Catholic Church has inflicted more pain on so many generations of your fellow countrymen than any other organisation, maybe you could explain why you see fit to defend paedophiles, criminals and bigots?
@Kelly Davis-Jordan
Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich were brought up as Catholics but, upon reaching adulthood, they turned their backs on Catholicism. They were pagans. They had a huge interest in occultism.
You have made no serious attempt to respond to my point.
@Dungeon Master
My point was that Aoife Conway’s call for the removal of the Church from the State appears to be an expression of hate towards Catholics.
Hitler had turned his back on Christianity. He hated Christianity because he regarded it as a Jewish faith. Stalin was a seminarian in the early part of his life but became an atheist. Mao was an atheist. Pius XII never expressed hatred towards Jews.
I never saw fit to defend child abusers or bigots.
I don’t think you understand what paganism is.
Aoife Conway’s ‘call’ is correct,the RCC should be banned in this country just like the KKK is in the US (despite less crimes).
Claiming hatred is ridiculous,people choose to be catholics,they aren’t born catholics,it’s like crying because someone slagged you for being a Liverpool supporter,religious people need to grow a pair and stop pretending they are victims all the time
@Kelly Davis-Jordan
Paganism is the worshipping of false gods. There is only one true God.
How exactly is a call for the removal of the Church from the state an expression of hate towards Catholics exactly?
One true God? Ha ha! prove that one. Belief is not fact. I believe there is only one pink unicorn in the sky and he is our Lord and Father.
My call isn’t an expression of hate towards catholic people, most of my family are catholic.. It’s against the Catholic Church and it’s apparent exemption from the laws of the country. Our constitution makes specific reference to this being a catholic country and that is the basis of the laws in this country. The courts constantly say that the constitution is an ever evolving document to move with the times.. In light of the churches history of utter disregard to the laws in the country.. I really don’t see why the reference is still there
One true God? Is that the God of the Christians or the Muslims or other sufferers of mass delusion…
@Aoife Conway
Abuse of women and children was committed by a minority of the Catholic clergy. Stop tarring all Catholic clerics with the same brush.
@Matt Donovan
Christians, Jews and Muslims worship the same god.
And yet they all claim to worship the one true God & are intolerant of ‘idolaters’ They all worship a fiction with equal passion.
@Ciarán, what ALL of the clergy preached back then was abuse and led directly to women being incarcerated in these gulags, you are defending the indefensible on this thread.
Ciarán are you with Iona or my old pals from YD or whatever flag of convenience they hide behind these days by any chance?
Believe me Ciaran, Jews do not ‘worship’ the weird deity Catholics worship – a deity who through his minions (priests, nuns etc) encourages some of the most deviant behaviour possible. T
@Matt Donovan
I am not affiliated with the Iona Institute, Youth Defence or any other organisation. Actually, David Quinn wrote that Christianity in Ireland became something that was all too often more about punishment than mercy and forgiveness.
Hitler ceased being a Catholic at age eight and was baptised into the Lutheran Church. He never practiced Christianity as an adult and regarded Christianity as a great mistake. He intended liquidating the Catholic Church immediately after the war.
Mussolini also never practiced as a Catholic and his signing of the Lateran treaty was a combination of ongoing diplomacy between the Vatican and the Italian state since the seizure of the Papal States in 1865.
Pope Pius XII was the only international figure on the European mainland able to voice dissent against the Nazi regimes and was recognised in the US and Britain as such. The Catholic Church saved the lives of some 600,000 Jews during the war and Pius was warmly thanked by contemporary Jewish leaders in 1945 for his many efforts on behalf of Jewish sufferers.
@Michael Leahy
I’m glad that someone other than myself is talking sense on this forum.
ciaran, many of todays ‘religious’ festivals are based on so called ‘pagan’ feast days, without them we would not have the summer (may day) and winter(harvest festival) solstice, all hollows eve, and many other so called ‘holy days’ . modern religion borrows a lot more from pagan beliefs than you might realise
They either participated in this murder, or they knew of it and did nothing, just like with priestly child rapists, even their housekeepers knew, as in my case. Just whom do you suspect the rapists told in the confessionals? The curtains are being lifted and there is nothing there but sickos and angry women trying to recover themselves. Priest craft sealed their lips.
This is palpable BS. Have not heard of the 2,000 wives of Berlin Jewish doctors who protested until Hitler released their husbands? Google “Murphy Hitler was not an atheist” if you really are open to facts.
The defacto response of religious apologists is to point to Mao Tse Tung. Stalin et al as examples of what happens when you remove the benevolent influence of religious moral authority. This is completely fallacious as these people viewed religious authority as a competitor to their own supreme rule. You need only look at the Kim dynasty in North Korea and the pseudo religious iconography and mythos that surrounds them in order to reach this conclusion.
The assets of these “nuns” should be taken, that’s what all these people really care about. saving face, power and money
And that’s it exactly. Money is their god and always has been. If any threat was made to seize their assets they wouldn’t be hiding behind PR companies. They’d be singing like canaries.
When the Ryan report was published in 2009.. It gave an insight into the horrors and abuse of young people in care
Did we react as a nation and hold our heads in collective guilt and shame at the way we treated our young and those without voices ?
Or did we look to blame others ?
Have we embraced all the abuse as our abuse of young children?
Have we as nation have a malignant shame towards people who have been abused ?
If you really want to be annoyed ,outraged and do some serious soul searching .. I suggest reading the McCoy report into the abuse of disabled people
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCoy_Report
We as a nation allowed this to happen…
The phrase that sticks in my mind from the Ryan and Murphy reports is ” Undue deference shown to the clergy by the Gardai”. Given the experience in Canada,
http://www.victimsofviolence.on.ca/rev2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=331&Itemid=21
I believe that it is not only the religious orders involved in the abuse but also collusion by senior politicians and some Gardai. The biggest political fault has to be that of Eamonn DeValera who decided to enshrine “the special position of the Catholic Church” into the Constitution. This then gave them an air of untouchability.
Dave, also read Founded on Fear by Peter Tyrrell. This man came through the industrial school system, taken from his family simply because they were too poor.
All through the 50′s and 60′s he tried to highlight the suffering that he had endured in his time in Irish institutions. Nobody wanted to listen, and although he corresponded with Senator Owen Sheehy Skeffington, who also campaigned for reform in these places, eventually he was so disheartened and depressed by the lack of progress, that he burned himself alive on Hampstead Heath.
@Dave Cork
“Did we react as a nation and hold our heads in collective guilt and shame at the way we treated our young and those without voices ?”
Most people were unaware of the cruelty that took place in residential institutions. Most of those who were aware of these institutions trusted that the State and the Church were treated the women and children who were residents in these institutions well. Blaming the public amounts to collective punishment, which is against international law.
“Blaming the public amounts to collective punishment, which is against international law.”
You do realise the difference between blame and punishment, right?
So is the pit going to be examined fully as in a forensic team piece by piece to see exactly how many is in it and who they are??
May God bless every little soul.
“If there is a God he will have to beg my forgiveness” carved into a wall in Auschwitz.
If the gardai won’t act then maybe the UN will .
This is shocking well the Garda said that they will not be taking it any further . Well it will be interesting to see what the Daily Mail uncover as they went to Tuam to we’re the baby’s were buried with a X-ray Machaine .
It’s all very well to blame the institutions but the media did nothing about it either. And now the sad thing is the story seems to be being used by every media outlet going to exploit the story for cheap hits- with no real new reporting or investigating. Surely it is the responsibility of journalists to investigate these things not sit at computers rehashing speculations.
This class of children as opposed to ‘ordinary’ children. I take exception to this statement.
Bessboro had a 61% death rate for infants! Something tells me there are is a lot of digging to be done.
In the Irish Times today ‘Corless admits that it now seems impossible to her that more than 200 bodies could have been put in a working sewage tank.’ Let’s get all the facts before the Journal sensationalises and gains from children dying.
I don’t care if it’s 800 200 or just one the garda should have that septic tank dug up to see what is in it
The article states the tank stopped working in the 1930′s. The SS could fit 100′s of adults into a room before gassing them, the nuns could easily fit 100′s of bodies of babies & children into a septic tank. I’m surprised they didn’t feed them to the dogs! Bast@rds!
Read everything now about this issue with the following in mind:
- This issue has been sat on for years, there are many people, undoubtedly some in high places, who just want it to go away.
- The nuns have engaged the services of a PR agency, the Communications Clinic, a very skilled company who are excellent at their job and very highly regarded- after all they can boast among their clients “Cabinet Ministers, the CEO’s and Chairmen of some of Ireland’s largest PLC’s through to members of the Catholic Heirarchy and CEO’s of global charities.”.
- Among the owners of this agency is the Chairman of the RTE authority and the presenter of a radio show on national radio – I’m sure that will not affect the reporting of this story in any way, but it’s a good to know point.
I am not accusing anyone of anything, all I am saying is keep all this in mind when reading or hearing anything about this issue from here on.
Read the Irish Times article, semantics to say the least, and the journalist who wrote it, Rosita Boland, spent a serious amount of the article playing down what happened, I think the Irish Times are just butt-hurt because they ignored the story and then it went global, they got a good pasting in their comments section too. Of course, apologists for the church will be scrambling toward any article which saves their holy church face, reputation is more important to these people than the dead babies after all.
@ Katie Does, the Chairman you mention from RTÉ is also a former priest, just sayin’!
Let’s get all the facts? We should have them all by now. If there was a rumour of 800 tonnes of gold in the tank it’d be removed and cleaned and sold by now.
There shouldn’t even be the time for the story to be chaning this much – authorities need to get the finger out on this. I hate to draw politics into this but I’d say this would have been dealt with quicker in the lead up to the elections – though it would have been even more shameful to have seen it used for that.
So if it’s “only” 200 bodies, that would be less sensational?? If there is only one body in there, it should still be investigated. For far too long the church were allowed to run this country with an iron fist and it now seems that some in the Gardai would prefer if it was still like that.
Paul, this is not a situation where the facts of the burials mean a lot right now, there is a lot of anger and some truths have become casualties of that. It’s sad to see that even the words of Corless herself correcting some of the earlier reports by the Irish Mail (which were pretty clear, but have been widely misinterpreted) are considered “playing down” the tragic nature of the events.
Even rounding the number to ’800′ is disrespectful of the dead, but everyone is doing it, and everyone is angry, but few of the angry could actually name even one of the deceased children. We are at the catharsis stage here, and the real facts will come out in time. meanwhile it is becoming all the more likely that these institutions were harsh places where discipline and punishment were handed out with great cruelty, and that while the resources existed to make them relatively happy homes, those in charge did nothing to achieve that.
It seems that even though the nuns were profiting financially from having the children there, they were still prepared to let them die at a rate deplorable even by the standards of the time. Which is saying something.
Nail on head there Paul. If the nuns thought sacks of gold were in that sewer they’d descend on Tuam in their hundreds and be on their hands and knees digging now.
http://www.rabble.ie/2014/06/07/late-and-off-the-point/
Irish Times butt hurt is right..
I always knew nuns were a monstrous breed. To hell with these backward witches. Thank god this $hit is coming to light so that the ignorant religious righteousness can be highlighted for what it is. We are all human. Even those witches and get things wrong but we are all equally human. How dare they play god. I am so riled by this and the it’s grand attitude around the country.
Hey – don’t insult the witches.. A witch is a healer, the term comes from the Anglo Saxon word “Wicce” which means “Wise One”, they knew what herbs healed and which didn’t..
Their vilification was at the hands of the same church who’s many atrocities just keep coming (And they burned the witches).
Yes I stand corrected on that- just substituting the b itch word. All of the genuinely good ones excluded of course. Good and bad everywhere.
id love to hear from the people who red thumb some comments. sitting at home with their rosary beads defying the truth! This is another example of the churches attempt at control and another example of the bitter twisted losers who entered the religious orders to escape reality. Not one of those fat bitch nuns died of malnutrition. The dog on the street would have more compassion for a sick child. The sooner we remove the bullshit lie of religion from our society the better a community we will be. The people demand an investigation so that corrupt police force we have would want to start doing their jobs and stop protecting their elite friends in power.
I know someone who was continuously raped as a child by a head Christian brother. (It was reported to the guards).That same brother used to threaten him that if he told anyone he would kill him and bury him a graveyard near the school and say he just ran away ! We know many children were raped and tortured the question is how many might have been murdered that we don’t know of ?
This is shamefull, but not surprising, we all know the Catholic Church is a dirty vile paedophile ring since the foreign religion cay here and murdered and burned everyone who didn’t convert, The Anarchists in the Spanish civil war had the right idea, they pulled the Collardogs from the churches and caved their head in with hammers for their crimes against them, if the Irish had any balls we would have done the same, we know all this was happening all along, for generations!!
“the fighting Irish” my arse.
800 infants, what sort of country is this?
I hope for all our sakes they get as much attention as Annie McConville, otherwise we are just a nation of craven hand wringing sychophants. Those who were so outraged by that poor woman’s treatment can now give some attention to this appalling injustice.
26 pounds an infant, the real question should be how much did they bill the state for each burial?
Suffer the little children.
The religious institutions of the time were disgusting, how the government and gardai stood aside was disgusting BUT..the familys that sent their daughters/sisters grand children/nieces/nephews to these places are the most ignorant animals on earth, they knew what they faced but still sent them!! Thousands of women had children out of wedlock but were taken home and cared for by their families. I would like to see their statistics!..Institutions have a lot to answer and so do the families and fathers of these babies!
“The Bon Secours nuns released a statement through a PR company on Thursday.”
I presume you know who they are. It says something about Ireland and the events of 2011 that you feel constrained not to name them.
Katie Does mentions it above – it’s the Communications Clinic.
You can add your voice to the petition calling for a full enquiry here: https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Frances_Fitzgerald_Irish_Minister_for_Justice_and_Equality_A_full_Gardai_investigation_into_the_mass_grave_in_Tuam_Co_Ga/?dIzySbb&pv=9
Thanks kate I’ve put my name to the petition.
Probably not important but I wonder if Catherine Corless is a relative of the James Corless the girl in the letter said wasn’t to blame for getting her pregnant?
Blaming the church is too easy on this occasion. Reports from as early as 1925 show religious orders being approached to run these mother and baby homes, most of which were already in existence. They existed because the people of Ireland wanted them. Almost every big town in this country had a mother and baby home or an orphanage. Remember that it was only in the mid 80′s when illegitimate children finally got the right to inherit anything here! And before someone starts blaming the catholic church again, these places existed under British rule to uphold victorian English values. The church merely ran them afterwards. We need to look at our whole society and what was done by the state in our name, not just blame the church and forget about the state’s role in effectively imprisoning women for getting pregnant.
Our very own holocaust executed by the strong arm of the Catholic church. Hope these poor angels and their mothers are at peace
So will there be a forensic exhumation and investigation into the manner of the deaths of these children or not? “Too expensive”? It’s not like the hundreds of other peripheral Cillin around the country, where burials of infants developed over time, this was a dumping pit for newborns by the sounds of it. There were people associated with the place’s management, religious order or not.
Forget about Government/ Garda investigation into these matters. Nothing will happen. We should look to other means of impartial investigation and the role of the Daily Mail and similar news organisations is the way to go to bring international scrutiny on this horrendous situation.
More and more to come up the “sins” of the catholic church and STILL nothing happens…. well Karma will take care of these evil or that evil institution. CHildrens abuse, Murder all that happening and still its ok… ITS TIME TO GO, church not needed anymore… spirituality is so much deeper and more no control needed anymore… BYE!!! Breaks my heart wow 800 children ;-(
some of these facts dont add up.”The excellent researcher behind the @Limerick1914 Twitter account ” not my words that thee journal,£26 for each child and mother ! mutlipy by 118 equals £3068 so the home was overcrowed and only got £2800 so th state left thm short £268.00 which means 10.3 mother and childs dont get taken care of…also this is 5 years after the 1922 indpendance ..so really did the home get anything from the state? i think researcher needs to add up all the research and keep questioning. not saying this home like all the others were anplace nice to live in but more questions need to be asked…
how much was the state/council charging for pots of land for burial? from 1900 to 1961? there is still no cure for measles , we have now the mmr vacine not a cure . i would like to see and invistigation on why buried like that was it an epicdenic?
haing family members in their twilight years and lived in west of ireland i know if the hardship the whole country wasnt a nice place to live, most of us will never know the hardship of this time, i know of family membrs been buried in grave not marked due to cost. MORE INVISTIGATION ON THE ERA, TIMES….MORE DIGGING REPORTERS
Lack of Seperation of church and state is not an excuse to delay action on this. Why shouldnt the people responsible be brought to justice regardless of age/position? These wicked nuns are culpible and some must still be living
For those who think this is an “Irish problem” or a “Catholic created problem” go and read the history of the foundling hospitals in Britian.Similar institutions but in a protestant country. Read what parents do to their children so they get more begging in India Today, Right Now as you read this.
The problem was not reigion or geographical, the problem was and is Poverty.
Poor women could not afford to feed another mouth, the foundling hospitals were started by a man who passed a dump and heard new born babies crying, the women litterally threw them into the rubbish.
The way the economy is currently and if it continues with further austerity Ireland is going to need orphanages again and which of you is going to step forward to rear a couple of hundred kids that no one wants on little or no money. Do you spend the little money you have on the living to feed them or on burial plots? No, the nuns were not perfect, they were human and some were bad and some were good but they were the only ones doing anything in this country for the poor.
It is only 30 years since the Death of Ann Lovette, maybe if there was a mother and baby home her and her son would still be alive.
Ann, finally someone who writes sense. I cannot believe the moronic comments here.
No evidence ! Hang em anyway!
Can someone explain the difference from a humane point of view between a mass grave like this and the almost 4000 little irish bodies in incinerators in the uk 2012?
Yes, woman makes a choice she has to live with.
Nun who preaches love and forgiveness allows a vulnerable infant to die.
Mother superior or mother exerting their choice / playing god it’s all the same. It is not ok to kill babies. Period!!!’
Hugh O’Rourke says : Difference is that the 4,000 deaths in 2012 were 100% deliberate. While some controversy concerning neglect rages in the case of Tuam, no one believes the deaths were 100% deliberate. The second difference is that the numbers in the thirty six years between 1925 and 1961 were a fraction of the numbers killed in the past ten years.
Playing God. That statement means nothing to some people. A lot of terrible acts are committed in the name of same god.
I agree to some extent. Im not a fan of abortion but I understand why people do it!
But to compare abortion and a child being left to die in a room is not so simple!
But some deaths were 100% deliberate. I think thats a primary point. Its pretty naive to believe the nuns did everything they could. Have you not heard accounts from people of these institutions? They are horror stories!
If you have an issue with abortion thats fine, But don’t include in this thread. They are not related. Its not an excuse!
They’re separate topics with the same fundamental issue at their core. The truth hurts and maybe people don’t want to face the truth that a baby is a baby, whether legitimate, illegitimate, term, preterm, unborn, convenient or otherwise! Saying no more on this contentious issue but in 50 or 100 years time I wouldn’t be surprised if the same abhorrence is held towards you know what! Tuam is a desperate story and I hope going forward it can be handled and brought to a close with the dignity the families and the deceased deserve.
So is it true to say that no one knows if these skeletons are still there and they’ve not been seen since 1975?
From the media it was like they’d been seen recently.
Have you not being listening? Was the number 796 plucked from the air. The woman gathered records of all the deaths there. The number is the issue not the septic tank!
You clearly either haven’t fully read or understood my comment.
It was portrayed in the media that this was a recent find.
I never got that impression!
One learns something new every day!
So we should drop the hole case now?
It’s beyond despicable for you to describe this as a “hole case”.
I also believe you are intentionally misinterpreting my comments.
Deflect deflect, cannot answer a simple question can you. The bodies haven’t disappeared. How you can sit their and defend child murders is sickening.
Answer is that the case should not be dropped if there is a case.
of course there is a case you fool!
And what is that case?
I note you resorted to name calling – always a sign of a weak argument and one who cannot hold a debate.
paul the news to day on the paper thats is possibly 200, so someone picke the 700+ figure out of the sky..so what is is 2 or 2000 it doesnt matter we needa lot more facts need to be brought forward..what is the case? was there murder? was there an epidenmc? look at what they do these days in other countries with epidemics. mas gaves . is this the case here? remeber families threw away their daughters when they got into trouble…it’s not like today where they get free prams/housing and benfits.
if you cannot answer that you lack a basic level of comprehension. The church would be proud of you!
Whats your point? The records show 700 plus deaths. All of which were children. the churches record for human rights is horrific. This is just another case of acts of pure evil carried out by an organisation who preach love and forgiveness. people are understandably shocked and want to know more. the church has thankfully lost its strangle hold over our lives. We cannot just brush this aside, not enough has been done to punish the church for their wrong doings. They punished people for long enough for far less.
@Paul – I answered your question. I said IF there is a case to be answered then of course it should be pursued.
Surprised none of ye were outraged last October when this was first reported. Only when international media picks up the story does any give a fcuk.
Anyway wtf do you think happened to all the dead babies ? It was either a mass grave or incinerator for them back 50 years ago especially seen as they could not be buried in a catholic graveyard. The ignorance of people is outstanding
Yeah well I bet they’re sorry they didn’t cremate the ‘evidence’ now! Fukcing filth! Any society will be judged by how the most vulnerable & marginalised are treated by said society. And all this from a religion of peace, love & tolerance? I’ll say one thing, in the bible Satan killed about a dozen people; God drowned the entire world because he didn’t like his own handiwork!
You may wish to turn a blind eye and consider it to be just one of those things that happened, but that is the attitude of a society long gone. I think most people consider that the high infant mortality rate suggests that large numbers of children might not have died of natural causes. If you’re suggesting that society had a large part to play in this then you are correct, but people are rightly outraged.
From a practical perspective 800 people wouldn’t fit in that tank. I think it more likely the bones were put there years later as the site was excavated and developed and they were dug up in one spot and deposited in the (now unused) tank. The tank would have been in use whilst the home was there so it wouldn’t, couldn’t have been at that time. That in itself is disturbing. ….
But another thing I see no one asking: what about the doctors involved. There would have been some action by them; examinations, medications maybe, and I assume they would have signed the death certificates. Do the death certs have the names of who signed them ? I mean, what did they think was happening to all those body’s they’d just certified as dead ? And, practically, who physically buried them ? And how? You won’t see nuns making coffins or digging holes. And even I don’t think they would have tossed then in a hole. But someone did, with their full knowledge. And painful as it may be, but those people would most likely be local. …… Maybe that’s why this has been unspoken of for so long. ….
Garbage John but nice trolling. I don’t read the Connacht Tribune because I don’t live anywhere near there and neither does most of the country. It was only when the Mail ran with the story that more people became aware of this, and like a lot of people I don’t read the Mail either
It has been reported that one doctor whose name I can’t remember but a member of the staff at UCD was of the opinion that the reported high death rates in these homes was a matter of no importance to him. So with this kind of high handed arrogance and an attitude bordering on racism from a member of the medical profession it is not surprising that these horrors are coming to light now.
It is a grave . The world us full of them. It was used for over 100 years. It was NOT a septic tank. What crime was committed?
What the hell is the scandal?
Stupid, ignorant, cold…….
John you are a disgrace
Enda, why am I a disgrace? This thing may be just another grave. What makes it any different from 100s of other graves? There is absolutely no evidence that anything untoward whatsoever happened there? WHAT is the scandal?
really?
“The boys discovered some concrete slabs loosely covering a hollow. They moved the concrete and discovered a hole which, Frannie Hopkins has described as being “full of skeletons… of children”. sounds like a septic tank to me.
As I pointed out the last time you spewed your “used as a grave for over 100 years” misrepresentation, the 796 deaths in question occurred between 1925 and 1961, which, if you do the math, represents 35 years, not 100 years. Why do you persist in misrepresenting that fact?
The crime? The bones will tell their tale, and they’ll have a lot more veracity than you do.
The scandal john is the chance a septic tank was used as a grave , the 5 times the norm mortality rate , that the children in these homes could have being used for medical experiments that’s the scandal
He’s one of those “DON’T LOOK IN THERE!!! There’s nothing to see. There’s no body in there!!!” kind of people. Reminds me of the film “Magnolia” and the classic scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt3nUkzsjsg
You must have been a mother superior in a previous life john vander pants. Or else just a pi$$t@ker in this one!
Enda. Could have….. Could have…. What kind if argument us that?
You could apply this argument to every paupers/ child grave in the world.
It’s quite possible that these children were looked after by these nuns doing the best they could under very difficult circumstances.
Lack of education, adequate healthcare ( note there were not available medicines or knowledge that exist today) money, assistance from society at large.
All if this is possible too.
But, like the media, in the absence of absolutely any evidence you gave imagined they the worst possible scenarios that “could have” happened.
Any grave at all could also be the scene of some unknown crime. We just don’t know.
So, let’s investigate them all!
Seamus. The site had previously been a poor house with adjacent grave.
Are you saying that these children were murdered by nuns? Is that what you think?
A septic tank is no grave for any one if there’s a chance of even one body in that tank it should be looked into
when we were kids we found bones like this not saying where but it was one slab moved by the arth and bad weather and us kids counted 4 large skulls and 3 smaller ones… now i’m lucky i had parents and adults whom were level headed found out the truth not like this stroy blown out of context…no more should be printed on this story without more facts.. it’s now gone form 700+ to possibly 200? so called facts been irroded already..
Enda. See today’s irish times letter page. It was NOT a septic tank.
John, do you believe that did not take children from their mothers and give them away, do you believe they did not under feed for these children, treat them as a sin and different to other children??? Questions need to be answered and yes the question of murder is one! The area should be declared a crime scene!
Fergal. Of course the nuns ended up with these women and children. The reason is their families would not keep then, and the state asked the nuns to do so.
This is not news.
Conditions in these homes were very bad, but so were the conditions if the majority of citizens of the state.
Maybe the nuns could have done a better job. Would you have?
These nuns lived an awful existence too.
Can you imagine looking after 100s of pregnant women, newborns, children in the one building. Imagine the enormous challenges ?
The amount if food needed, the healthcare, the cleaning? Even the noise ?
All the while the rest of the population refused to have anything to do with these unfortunate women and children?
The nuns looked after what no one else would even speak to.
John see the plans of the home it states a septic tank in that area
Enda. just cos it’s in that area does not mean that 800 bodies were there too. This whole story is based on what schoolboys saw, or claimed they saw 40 years ago.
Bones in a pit.
So 1+ 1 = 79.
less than 5 minuets on google threw up this article from 2012, a much more likely scenario is that this is a famine grave when the huge death toll would have led to panic burials to try to reduce disease – http://historicgraves.com/blog/miscellanea/probable-workhouse-famine-burials-tuam
John it takes a special type of sickness to minimalise the plight of these unfortunates.
Are you perhaps a retired priest with a troubled mind?
At it’s most innocuous there was a mortality rate of 26% in this home when the norm was 7%, it seems death stalked the very stairwells of this establishment.
What was the mortality rate of the nuns running the homes? Clearly not 26% or anything near it, check the nuns graveyard.
So let’s presume they were the disinterred bones from an infants angel plot.
Someone still decided to place them enmass into an old septic tank……hardly consecrated ground?
Interestingly there were in local papers of the time complaints from local residents regarding the stench emanating from the septic tank.
It seems they care more for the unborn, than the living and even less for those that perished in their care.
Hi jarleth. Smells from a septic tank? Is that unusual?
Ms Corliss says in today’s IrishTimes that she never said the bones were in a septic tank, and does not believe they were. It’s a newspaper makeyuppy.
I’m not trivialising the deaths, but the fact is that in all care homes in Ireland and abroad at the time the death rate was much higher than the general pop.
And unmarked graves were v common. 1000s in the country.
That’s all im saying.
ah that must be, forget it everyone nothing to see here! Lets head to mass.
Tuam Children’s Home – emotional minefield of rights
Saturday, 7 June 2014 19:22 Written by: Our Reporter
Tuam Babies
Former Connacht Tribune Editor, the late John Cunningham was raised in the Children;’s Home in Tuam.
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Our Reporter
This article was written by the late Connacht Tribune Group Editor, John Cunningham, and first published in the newspaper on April 24, 1998.
“What were the young women to do? Many weren’t wanted at home, they were ostracised by society … in those days a young woman could not become pregnant and stay at home. It was as simple as that. I saw the devastation when they were parted from their children … they nursed the child and looked after it for a year and then they went one way and the child stayed to be adopted, or to be boarded-out a few years later. I don’t know if many of them ever recovered from the heart-breaking parting.” John Cunningham writes on undoing the heartbreak of forty years ago.
The Chairperson of the Irish Birth Mothers’ Association, Mary Scully, has been quoted in the past week on the issue of trying to legislate for the potentially conflicting rights of adopted people in their search for their ‘birth mother’ and the right to privacy of the birth mother. She is quoted as saying “if I was a politician I would run a mile from it”.
Much of the discussion to date has tended to concentrate on the rights of the adopted people to gain access to the records, and potentially, to their birth mother. It is intended to clear up a difficult situation which has arisen through the increasing demand for adoptees to trace their true mothers.
For instance, the attempts to trace mothers have led to adoptees asking for access to Birth Certificates (to which they are entitled). Any person can look at the records for any day – the problem for adoptees is that they are not entitled to be told which are their particular records out of all those registered for the date of their birth.
So, people who were placed for adoption have been known to trawl through the details of births on the date of their birth, and begin trying to find out by process of elimination which was their birth mother.
It is into the middle of this controversy that Junior Minister Frank Fahey, TD, has been projected in trying to frame legislation and a system of coping with the potential minefield of emotional issues between the rights of mothers who gave up their children for adoption maybe forty years or more ago, and children place for adoption then who want their questions answered now.
To date, much of the publicity has surrounded the issue of children finding their mothers. The need for such an identity, for explanations, to find if mothers are still alive, the need to know why, has become an undeniable demand from children of this country who need to flesh out their identity. Above all, they are seeking explanations for what happened forty or fifty years ago.
But what of the mothers? For instance, they may have just such emotional need for the child placed for adoption so many years ago, but what of the impact of a son or daughter of decades previously walking into a life that has been built since – maybe a life with a husband and family who know nothing of what happened all those years ago.
It was one of the difficulties into which I ran personally some years ago when I began to research the Children’s Home in Tuam. My links to it were unusual. I spent the first seven years of life there and felt somewhat better qualified than most to, possibly, look at life there in the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties when Ireland was a very much different place.
My mother died shortly after I was born and because of the close proximity of The Children’s Home to my family home, and because rearing a sickly infant would be well nigh impossible for a widower who already had four young children, I was reared at The Home, though regularly spending some time at home as well. Perhaps the best explanation may be that I found a ‘mother’ there in The Home and ended up with two homes – my natural one where my family lived and my father worked, my mother figure lives, and I had dozens of sisters and brothers, the other children who were in The Home at the time.
It is important to understand the ‘culture’ of the time. The children there were in most cases orphans to all intents and purposes – perhaps the family had been struck by tragedy, but in the vast majority of cases they were the children of unmarried mothers who had become pregnant and had come into The Home for about a year.
At the end of that year, the mother usually left and the child was either put up for adoption or possibly for ‘boarding out’ a few years later to families who acted as guardians. Children could be lucky in either – but many of them would say today that they had to be extraordinarily lucky in boarding out not to become, essentially, unpaid slaves to families.
One has to be careful of any impressions gained in childhood, though memories of The Children’s Home can be extraordinarily vivid – long passageways dominated by the smell and shine of ‘Cardinal’ red polish on the floors, long lines of potties, of the inexplicably large numbers of young women, and of the mysterious business of the arrival and departure of the same young women, and apparently endless numbers of babies and toddlers.
Some of the women, like my surrogate mother (Mary) stayed on for life – possibly because they were brilliant nurses for newborn babies that were in lines in cots. They had to be brilliant nurses, for the infants were then potential victims for diseases which we now regard as just a nuisance, likes measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, the mumps. Today, that wonderful woman would probably be described as ‘institutionalised’. Probably she was.
There were searing and emotional partings. One of the people to whom I spoke is now a woman in her sixties and who was somewhat older than many of the youngsters in The home at the time.
She was better equipped to judge the devastation of parting a mother and child. I was a spoiled brat with a family down the road and an adoring ‘mother’ in The Home.
She put it this way: “What were the young women to do? Many weren’t wanted at home, they were ostracised by society … in those days a young woman could not become pregnant and stay at home. It was as simple as that. I saw the devastation when they were parted from their children … they nursed the child and looked after it for a year and then they went one way and the child stayed to be adopted, or to be boarded-out a few years later. I don’t know if many of them ever recovered from the heart-breaking parting. For instance, I was boarded-out myself. That was the way Ireland was at the time … but I will never forget the parting of some of the mothers and their children. It was heart-rending.”
From these remarks it is possible to gauge just some of the potential emotion which could be released forty or fifty years later for mother and child once involved in such a parting.
To understand the decision of the mother and the time, it is necessary to remember the particular conditions of the time – the mother was often a mere child herself of seventeen or eighteen; given the social conditions and the sexual taboos of the time, many of them would not even have understood the concept of pregnancy, not to mind motherhood. Such a pregnancy in the ‘thirties, ‘forties and ‘fifties involved a perceived shame for a family who very often wanted to hide away the ‘fallen daughter’; unmarried mothers were ostracised from a society which was Jansenistic in its approach to sexuality and ‘sins of the flesh’ were tailed against by the church. (Interestingly, those who paid for the ‘sins’ were the women).
This was the atmosphere against which the teenage mothers made their decision to ‘give up’ their babies – though some of those I have spoken to in research work in the past few years have, happily, been reunited with their birth mothers and mothers have found their children.
What may be forgotten is that at least some of these girls of the forties and fifties may have since built up a life for themselves where their families may know little or nothing of the history from that time.
The women involved can never forget – but time may at least have dulled the pain of the parking. In my research work – and remember some of the children of the era were mu ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’ from that unusual setting in The Home – it is quite clear that there is at least concern on the part of some on the opening up of old memories.
Concern now in drafting legislation and methods of children making contact with birth mothers and vice versa, has to be for the two distinct groupings.
A birth mother from the era might just dread the knock on the door and opening it to be greeted by “hello … I think you may be my mother”. In some cases, children also will not want a whole era reopened. Equally, it has to be said that parties on both sides may dearly wish to contact the other.
I felt it was important to write this piece so that the plight of the birth mothers might be taken note of. They too have undergone pain – the pain of parting from a child because they were unmarried mothers in an era when society saw them as sinners, and outcasts. It was a society that preferred to have them and their children inside the walls of institutions like The Children’s Home … fallen women and ‘Home Babies’.
Today, they are determined to have the rights once denied to them.
John Van de Par:
The public records show that 796 children died at the Tuam home over a period of 35 years. That does not include any deaths at a workhouse. That only includes children who died (largely of malnutrition and disease) at the Tuam home.
Do you bring up the workhouse to distract from the documented facts of the deaths at Tuam? The only problem with that is the records. The records showing 796 deats (one every 2.5 weeks for 35 years on average) are of deaths that happened in the Tuam facility between ’25 and ’61. Those records have nothing whatever to do with any “workhouse” and “adjacent grave”.
thank you Ruair, however what is needed is an investigation by a body outside the Republic. There’s too many guilty parties here for us to be investigating ourselves….
A team of foreign forensic pathologists is required not a superficial inquiry by a complicit Garda force.
I signed the Avaaz petition but then did some research. It’s a covertly agenda-driven organisation with links to George Soros and the US State Department.
Local crowd-funding campaign for Tuam Babies memorial: https://www.icrowdfund.ie/campaigns/tuammemorial/
I have asked this question before and I’ll ask it again:
What evidence is there that the children whose bodies were buried at Tuam were the victims of either murder or manslaughter?
The nuns who ran the mother-and-baby home have been subject to trial by media. They, like everyone else, have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The anti-Catholic vitriol of some posters on this forum is horrendous. Some nuns let women and children down but the main responsibility rests with the parents who disowned daughters who became pregnant outside marriage.
Yes Ciaran & the responsibility also lies with the church that enforced such backwards doctrine from the cradle to the grave.
The snobbery of the time is appalling. There was brainwashing, a type of caste system in place. The society male worshiped to the extent that the men were totally exonerated from any blame. Women had so little value and babies without a ‘father’ were worthless. Those unmarried mothers and children were believed to be deserving of guilt, blame and whatever treatment anyone wanted to hand out to them. It says a lot about people that so little kindness was shown. In one document from Galway Co. Co. during those awful times, I read that local people had given up the practice of donating old toys to these poor children enduring such a wretched existence. I can just imagine the not wonderful state and amounts of donated toys in impoverished Ireland. People born to ‘normal homes’ with 2 parents in the 40s can remember their disappointment getting an orange and penny toy. Those poor home babies were a lot further down the ladder of fortune than that. Then came the proposal that Council money be taken and spent on toys for the children, and when I read THAT I sincerely hoped those toys were bought and given to the children. And I hope all the toys found their way to the home, if they were bought.
So all these people who were being “respectable”, endorsing the fact that these women and their children were lower than second class citizens, what of them? Were they brainwashed? Were they fearful they may appear too sympathetic or encouraging if they showed kindness? Were they kept away by coldness in reception from the home, or discouraged actively? I see in Ireland to this day a reluctance for people in all walks of life to stick their neck out over issues which adversely affect them. Sometimes they will accept stupid explanations, like, That’s The Way It Was Always Done. The sayings like, It Won’t Make Any Difference No Matter What I Do. Very many don’t want to protest, to appear like trouble makers, or challenge authority, they worry how doing anything outside of acceptable pack behaviour will affect them, their livelihood or their children.
This lack of thinking for ones-self needs to be addressed. I believe it probably came from the many years of occupation of our country, the cruelty and hardship inflicted on us. Of course anyone sticking their neck out was treated brutally by Britain, from torture to shoot to kill policies. If you think of how many Irish freedom fighters or anyone challenging the system were shot over the years; thousands and thousands until even recent times. The men of strength of conviction and women able to adhere to a hunger strike but who died anyway. The mass emigration, over time a nation was created where the strong, outspoken challengers and free thinkers were weeded out. The ones who remained learned to get along whatever way they could, conform, sniff and scurry. So Irish, impoverished and discouraged, for financial, societal and religious reasons allowed this to happen, over many, many years. It was endorsed by all of Ireland at the time. If it was the societal norm now, or someone might lose their job/respectability challenging it, it would remain unchallenged. When everyone went to Mass, that was the way, then the Mass going eased off and people can speak out. But the ones who spoke out before were shunned.
We have taken a lot of guilt on over the years, for things we had no responsibility. This guilt serves no purpose and is one of the most debilitating emotions. Instead of branding all of us as so wrong and putting all of Ireland down, let’s learn from this. Let’s support the ones who are brave, really brave NOW, like the Guarda whistle blower, Ming Flanagan, Mick Wallace, Roisin Shortall. Let us decry those who burden the poor, the bankers, the callous lying politicians. Those Senior Officials, those Directors with multiple huge salaries. Let us call out those who remove our rights, we should expect accountability, and let’s do it NOW. Let’s take to the streets to march, show our protest at austerity, social exclusion of the poor, at debt and taxes foisted upon us, because it’s RIGHT. We need to fight the emigration, the hopelessness that has resulted in a suicide rate of over 400 a year. These are the current issues, and people in 40 years will ask, how did society allow THAT.
Let’s get our spirit back, because if we don’t, the way is open for another power to brainwash us, for us to be silent while more abuse continues. The Tuam babies need our fighting spirit to defend those like them NOW, we cannot practically bury ourselves because our heads are bowed down in shame. This is where the shame ends for Irish people who don’t support cruel abuse of our people.
What remains astonishing about this is the utter lack of action by those in authority, now, today – whatever about who did what and why 80 years ago.
The same lack of dignified and appropiate action, which seems not to have happened in 1975, when the first skeletal remains were discovered in the sceptic tank.
We appear to have a Garda force unwilling to launch an *active* investigation because they report no proper alegation or crime has taken place.
We have our government officals shuffling paperwork around the table in front of them, as usual, forming enquiries and bureaucratic committees over weeks while they figure out how to manage this as another PR exercise.
It isn’t rocket science what needs to be done.
The Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, needs to immediately order the Garda to close off and secure the site in Tuam and begin a forensic examination of the area. She needs to request all or any Garda documents in relation to events at the Bon Secours home over the period 1920 to 1975 be presented immediately to her office.
If the forensic examination at the Tuam site reveals no human remains from the sceptic tank (whether we are dealing with 20, 200 or 800 bodies), then uestions need to be asked as to why the remains were removed in 1975, and what became of them.
Either way, an extensive and wider search needs to be carried out in the old grounds of this home.
796 children, from infancy to age 11, don’t just vanish into thin air with death certificates.
Hugh O’Rourke says: Each of these children had a father – no mention of any of them and no effort on the part of society even now to condemn their behaviour. No attempt to condemn the support those cynical males received from the silence of society, the State and religious hierarchy then and now? All the little live babies currently disposed in the incinerators of abortion clinics are similarly ignored by us – what progress has there been? (If you argue that they are not live when disposed of then: Who killed them?)Hugh O’Rourke
Why do people keep trying to compare this to abortion? Are you that desperate to deflect?
These children were definitely alive. They were capable of feeling pain, capable of feeling fear, and sadness.
At the stage that 90% of abortions take place, the foetus is nowhere near capable of feeling anything – heck, they barely even have lungs yet.
For you to try and compare the two is intellectually dishonest, and it has become a frequent cry of anti choicers in the past 48/72 hours – so who said it for you? Iona or YD?
I was wondering what the zombie hordes of Iona bots were going to come up with to justify this tale. Now I know.
Can’y Belive it, have been sick since I heard about this Terrible Shame, BUT just goes to Prove me Right Again ,As to What thoes Bloody Feckin Nuns were like .. Don’t get me started on so called Bloody Priests….
No, I can’t believe it for the good and simple reason that apart from the fact that 796 children died between 1926 and 1961 — a figure which if you know anything about epidemiology, or even simple sociology/political history, is hardly surprising — none of what has so far so hysterically been reported as fact, and then so enthusiastically commented upon, is true. We don’t even as yet know if in fact the structure apparently opened up by the two boys in 1975 is a septic tank. Nor is there any real evidence of a mass grave. The site has not as yet been excavated. And for that same reason we don’t know, firstly, how many skeletal remains are in there and, secondly, we don’t know if these remains are adults, children or a mixture. Nor do we don’t know when the remains date from. Local belief in 1975 seemed to have been that this was either a famine grave or bodies dating from pre-Mother and Baby Home days when it was a workhouse. In addition,one of the boys has stated that there was no evidence of coffins. However, in 1932 in the Connacht Tribune newspaper the Bon Secours nuns placed an advertisement seeking tenders for the supply of coffins for the Home. Why do that if you are just going to dump the bodies either naked or in a shroud and in a septic tank, a mass grave or in unmarked normal graves? The only thing we know with an absolute certainty is that there is no way there are 796 children’s bodies in the septic tank, or whatever it is. Between 1925, when the home opened, and 1937 when the public water supply and sewage system reached Tuam the tank remained in use. During that period 204 children died at the home and could not have been placed in the tank. By let facts get in theway of a good opportunity for bit of Church bashing?.
Jesus an infant mortality rate of over 60 percent in cork. That is haunting me. Poor poor babies
“suffer the little children”. I am pro-humanity, anti-barbaric and anti hypocrisy and this stinks!!! I am on no anti-catholic bandwagon. women can’t make decisions about their own fertility but if you do without permission then you and your children will be dumped and dumped on.Yes this is in the past but the stigmatising of wornen and children continues.
Nazis just done it on a bigger scale,same crime.
You state that Lindsey Earner-Byrne had she was surprised by the mass grave. Which Mass grave would that be. There has so far been no evidence adduced of one. We do not know what was in the septic tank in 1975; indeed, we do not know if it IS a septic tank. We do not know how many skeletal remains were found. We do not know whether they were of adults or children or both. Children aged 10 (Barry Sweeney) and a 12 years old (Francis Hopkins) could not be expected to know the difference and I have seen no reports that they were at that time examined by a police surgeon or forensic expert. In another interview in another newspaper (The Irish Times) Barry Sweeney made no mention of children. And because they have not been examined we do not know if they are children whether they might very well have come from the Home or whether they pre-date it. Local sentiment seemed to have been in 1975 that this was a famine grave or a grave related to the workhouse previously operated there; or, both.
Moreover, the death rates as reported for the 1920s and 1930s from, for example, measles are not in any way surprising. The figures in similar homes in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales would be equally horrifying to the modern-day mind — admittedly they would have not been at quite such a much higher rate than the community at large, but malnourishment was more serious in Ireland, and not just in such institutions — because in this modern day and age we have vaccines and have forgotten both that measles kills and how quickly it can spread in a closed community. Indeed, studies have been made into how it spread in army barracks never among well-fed, fit young men never mind children in care.
Your seeming amazement that the Ministry of Health approved the Home in 1957 is irrational as there is not simply no evidence that it was badly run but, rather evidence that it was well run. Societies woes re yet again being dumped on the nuns and the Church.
Looks like someone got a bit carried away . http://www.patheos.com/blogs/kathyschiffer/2014/06/associated-press-apologizes-for-its-coverage-of-the-irish-orphanage-story/
The whole truth
reading that letter back to her mother makes you wonder if the State attempted to create a cult out of everyone.
It is almost impossible nor difficult to investigate an entity like the Catholic Church during those years, when most people believed it to be an extension of the house of god.
The mindset at that time was such abhorrent and inhumane acts are highly reprehensible to imagine that the perpetrators were men and women of the cloth.
“By a religious order of nuns? NO!”
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