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The site of the former Mother and Baby home in Tuam, Co Galway. RollingNews.ie

Tuam: Ex-residents and families want further excavation and DNA analysis

Galway County Council received 799 written submissions on what to do with the Tuam site where a mass grave was found.

FORMER RESIDENTS AND their families of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam, Co Galway want a full forensic excavation of the site and DNA analysis, a report has said.

The public consultation with residents, families, locals and the public, follows on from an expert report that compiled five options about what could be done with the Tuam site.

Galway County Council had set up a site and a phone number to receive people’s suggestions on those five options – that consultation process gathered 799 written submissions and hosted a number of meetings.

78 submissions were made by relatives of former residents of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home and 19 of those who made written submissions were former residents of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. 131 submissions were from locals.

An analysis of the submissions found that there were two options that were clearly favoured, the Department of Children and Youth Affairs said:

  • Local residents largely advocated for memorialisation and non-disturbance of the remains (87% of local residents preferred this option)
  • Former residents of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, along with relatives of former residents, expressed a preference for full forensic excavation of the site along with DNA analysis
  • The general public were almost equally divided between memorialisation alone and some form of forensic excavation and DNA analysis, with the majority in the latter group favouring the most extensive intervention.

68% of former residents expressed a wish for forensic excavation and DNA analysis. 5%
preferenced exhumation and burial. 26% of former residents opted for memorialisation.

93% of relatives of former residents wished for forensic excavation and DNA analysis. 89% preferred the most extensive option of forensic analysis of the whole area.

Only 1% of relatives of former residents sought the option of memorialisation alone.

The largest number of written submissions were from the public (568). 50% of this group expressed preferences for forensic excavation of the Tuam Site with DNA analysis where possible, while 48% wanted memorialisation only.

This is a factual report based on submissions from locals, former residents and their families, and the general public – it doesn’t recommend a specific course of action.

File Photo CHILDREN’S MINISTER Katherine Zappone has apologised to survivors of the former mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway after “highly confidential information” about the site was leaked to the media. In a statement issued this morning, Za Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone. Leah Farrell Leah Farrell

Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone thanked the public for engaging in the process and said that she welcomed “the respect and concern expressed by all participants for the dignity of the deceased”.

The Inter-Departmental Group (IDG) has met to discuss the five options presented by the report and to co-ordinate the State’s response. A number of complex legal, technical and operational issues require further consideration before a proposal on what to do with the site is brought to the government by Zappone.

Background

In March 2017 the Commission into Mother and Baby Homes confirmed that a “significant” number of human remains were discovered at the site of the former Bon Secours home in Tuam. Scientific analysis put the age of death between 35 foetal weeks and two to three years.

The Commission said the remains were discovered in a structure which appears to be “related to the treatment/containment of sewerage and/or wastewater”.

Experts have previously said that the excavation of the site will be extremely complex, and that identification of the remains would be difficult, primarily because they would have “comingled”.

Between 1925 and 1960, 796 children died at the Tuam mother and baby home.

The work of Catherine Corless, an amateur historian, led to the discovery. In October, Corless was awarded the Bar of Ireland’s Human Rights Award for her work regarding the Tuam site.

File Photo The woman who uncovered the Tuam Mother and Baby scandal is to be honoured with a major human rights award today. Catherine Corless. RollingNews.ie RollingNews.ie

The government agreed to extend the deadline of a report into 14 former Mother and Baby homes, including Tuam, from February 2018 to February 2019.

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    Mute Gerard Smith
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    Jul 6th 2018, 3:56 PM

    A phone line set up with suggestions? Why is this not a criminal investigation with all records in the hands of the RCC with regard to Tuam taken by the police?

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    Mute Benny
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    Jul 6th 2018, 3:58 PM

    Pope should visit this site while he is in Ireland to beg forgiveness for the absolute suffering men, women and childen were put through in this country at the hands of religious orders

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    Mute Seamus G
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:35 PM

    @Benny: suggest you educate yoursefl Benny. In most cases young people ended up with religious orders because they had been shunned by their communities for whatever reason but commonly pregnant young women kicked oput of their homes. Also many of the babies bodies ended up being brought from acute hospitals to relious order’s cemetaries to be put in unmarked graves becuse they weren’t allowed into their local sacred burial ground. Societal cruelty at the time was just as much the fault of the ordinary person. Religious orders are handy fall guys now with no mention of the wider society. To paint the picure that these babies bodies was the result of murder by nuns is a falsehood.

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    Mute Benny
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:56 PM

    @Seamus G: so just to clarify, you think it’s ok that young kids were beaten and abused in the care of religious orders because society didn’t care about them either? Sorry I’m just asking because you told me to “educate yoursefl” so happy to hear your thoughts

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    Mute ℙ
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:57 PM

    @Seamus G: shunned by communities because of a shame instilled by the Catholic church over centuries, who had a firm grip on societal life and were powerful players locally and nationally. How are they “handy fall guys” when they cultivated this shame against young women? The church has never respected women and sees them as second class citizens. This was just a culmination of all of that

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    Mute Dingleberrycity
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:58 PM

    @Seamus G: the ‘shame’ was created by the Catholic Church dictating social policy in Ireland…
    They then exploited that shame and profited from it.
    If the Catholic Church were more Christian then there would have been no shame in unmarried pregnancy in the first place. The church created the shame.

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    Mute Benny
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:58 PM

    @ℙ: exactly!

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    Mute Sean Leonard
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    Jul 6th 2018, 5:47 PM

    @Benny: hate to tell you there’s not a hope of that happening….. Quite simply it would destroy all the fresh whitewash that’s been applied for the visit…… Remember this didn’t happen in the eyes of the hierarchy

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    Mute Fiona Fitzgerald
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    Jul 6th 2018, 9:05 PM

    @Seamus G: Are you under the delusion that those “religious” orders weren’t paid to take care of the babies? Not to keep the funds, starve them and secretly bury their bodies. For all we know, they might have been claiming state fees for their care for years. There were parents at the time who were trying their best to get their children back from these places.

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    Mute Brian Deane
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    Jul 6th 2018, 11:46 PM

    @Benny: The problem with the demise of history as a subject in schools is that it has produced a generation of social justice campaigners who, for all their affectations of being ‘progressive’ and ‘enlightened’ about the past, appear to know little and care less about about the bigger picture of what was happening outside the narrow sphere of anti-Catholicism in which they exist. If you think Catholicism was a particularly cruel and barbaric ideology perhaps you should educate yourself on the horrors of Lenin’s ideology as experienced first hand by Russian peasants http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5924819/Haunting-images-Russian-peasants-selling-human-heads-1920s-famine.html
    That wasn’t by any means the end of it – Stalin and a host of other dictators in numerous satellite states around Europe added their own bloody postscripts. No one can minimise what happened in Tuam but if Irish people were dealing with the aftermath of what a lot of Europeans experienced at the same time at the hands of other ideologues you’d wonder how Ireland’s self-absorbed snowflake generation would cope with that.

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    Mute Noel
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:04 PM

    It is disgusting that “Christian nuns” would treat the remains of young “Christian” babies with such disrespect. What were they hiding?

    I would have thought that human remains being buried illegally and without the deaths being properly registered is an offense in itself.

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    Mute Colette Kearns
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:26 PM

    The nuns were so full of hate for those poor babies mothers , so they just treated their babies like they were children of the devil himself! Disgusting people.

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    Mute Sean Leonard
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    Jul 6th 2018, 5:50 PM

    @Colette Kearns: my mam used to “freeze” even in her 80s when she saw a nun…..and that was just over been educated by them…. What they did to women was like the Irish Holocaust

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    Mute Brian Deane
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    Jul 6th 2018, 11:56 PM

    @Sean Leonard: No it was not like the holocaust. What happened in Tuam, bad and all as it was, pales in to insignificance with anything associated with the holocaust or much of 20th century European history. Are you seriously saying this was on a par with what happened in Tuam etc http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5924819/Haunting-images-Russian-peasants-selling-human-heads-1920s-famine.html

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    Mute Quentin Moriarty
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:14 PM

    The structure was a burial chamber that the commission didn’t know about and “appears related ” to sewage is very vague and not conclusive.
    There were no bones found in the septic tank which was filled in years ago .
    A full excavation of the site is long overdue to separate myth from facts .

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    Mute Colette Kearns
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    Jul 6th 2018, 5:20 PM

    @Quentin Moriarty: The “Facts” have already been proven!

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    Mute Quentin Moriarty
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    Jul 6th 2018, 6:05 PM

    @Colette Kearns: To date no bones have been found in the convent septic tank .Fact

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    Mute Change Everything
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    Jul 6th 2018, 6:42 PM

    @Quentin Moriarty: There were remains found n early 2017

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    Mute Quentin Moriarty
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    Jul 6th 2018, 7:36 PM

    @Change Everything: not in the septic tank
    The commission are stating that the burial chamber they knew nothing about is related to the septic/sewage tank
    It’s not .

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    Mute Carmel S Larkin
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    Jul 7th 2018, 2:53 AM

    @Quentin Moriarty: yes bones were found I spoke with the two people who did a dig and found baby’s bones so there are baby’s buried with no respect that I would like my love ones

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    Mute Carmel S Larkin
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    Jul 7th 2018, 2:57 AM

    @Quentin Moriarty: How can u say this we have proof

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    Mute Carmel S Larkin
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    Jul 7th 2018, 2:57 AM

    @Quentin Moriarty: we have profe

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    Mute Ricardo Shillyshally
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    Jul 6th 2018, 4:02 PM

    Ivor C needs to be assesed….methinks he’s a nutjob…

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    Mute Dermo Germ
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    Jul 6th 2018, 5:05 PM

    This says it all… https://youtu.be/kWBwjR6QPhI

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    Mute Jimmy Carroll
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    Jul 7th 2018, 12:42 AM

    God will pass judgement, be not distressed

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    Mute Jamie Roche
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    Aug 23rd 2018, 7:19 PM

    @Jimmy Carroll: ‘god’ giveth not a f#*k… let us prey

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    Mute Michael Maher
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    Jul 6th 2018, 11:05 PM

    The nun and priests behind this were monsters narrow minded evil people .
    What is the government trying to hide all those victims need to be given a proper burial
    at the least.

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