Irish church under fire over children’s mass grave

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DUBLIN (AP) — The Catholic Church in Ireland is facing
fresh accusations of child neglect after a researcher found records for
796 young children believed to be buried in a mass grave beside a former
orphanage for the children of unwed mothers.
The researcher,
Catherine Corless, says her discovery of child death records at the
Catholic nun-run home in Tuam, County Galway, suggests that a former
septic tank filled with bones is the final resting place for most, if
not all, of the children.
Church leaders in Galway, western
Ireland, said they had no idea so many children who died at the
orphanage had been buried there, and said they would support local
efforts to mark the spot with a plaque listing all 796 children.
County
Galway death records showed that the children, mostly babies and
toddlers, died often of sickness or disease in the orphanage during the
35 years it operated from 1926 to 1961. The building, which had
previously been a workhouse for homeless adults, was torn down decades
ago to make way for new houses.
A 1944 government inspection
recorded evidence of malnutrition among some of the 271 children then
living in the Tuam orphanage alongside 61 unwed mothers. The death
records cite sicknesses, diseases, deformities and premature births as
causes. This would reflect an Ireland that, in the first half of the
20th century, had one of the worst infant mortality rates in Europe,
with tuberculosis rife.
Elderly locals recalled that the children
attended a local school — but were segregated from other pupils — until
they were adopted or placed, around age 7 or 8, into church-run
industrial schools that featured unpaid labor and abuse. In keeping with
Catholic teaching, such out-of-wedlock children were denied baptism
and, if they died at such facilities, Christian burial.
It is well
documented that throughout Ireland in the first half of the 20th
century, church-run orphanages and workhouses often buried their dead in
unmarked graves and unconsecrated ground, reflecting how unmarried
mothers — derided as "fallen women" in the culture of the day —
typically were ostracized by society, even their own families.
Records
indicate that the former Tuam workhouse’s septic tank was converted
specifically to serve as the body disposal site for the orphanage.
Tuam
locals discovered the bone repository in 1975 as cement covering the
buried tank was broken away. Before Corless’ research this year, they
believed the remains were mostly victims of the mid-19th century famine
that decimated the population of western Ireland.
Respectful of
the unmarked grave in their midst, residents long have kept the grass
trimmed and built a small grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Archbishop
of Tuam Michael Neary said he would meet leaders of the religious order
that ran the orphanage, the Bon Secours Sisters, to organize
fund-raising for a plaque listing the 796 names and to hold a memorial
service there.
Corless and other Tuam activists have organized a
Children’s Home Graveyard Committee that wants not just a lasting
monument to the dead, but a state-funded investigation and excavation of
the site.
The government has declined to comment. Ireland already
has published four major investigations into child abuse and its
cover-up in Catholic parishes and a network of children’s industrial
schools, the last of which closed in the 1990s.

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