With all due respect ...
Something is quite wrong with who ran that facility
They put the bodies in a septic tank for Gods sake.
That sure makes the whole place look evil...to put it mildly and brings into question all manner of what the Hell was going on there?
I’m from the poorest state in America where I recall unwed mothers homes quite well
I am unaware of any of those places regardless who ran them...dumping babies and child corpses in a sewer pit for burial
I mean really truly.
Sometimes folks just do bad.
As best as I can guess, going by info not yet much spoken of here on FR, the old septic structures were likely to have not been in use some years before the nuns ever arrived at that location.
All in all...the use of those structures (if those were indeed once septic tanks) I do not believe should be held against the nuns much at all, and certainly not them alone if at all...
It's not like they were getting rich.
However, regardless of mathematical extrapolations which averaged the death rate from the mid-1920's all the way to '61, there have been some recent articles which did point to a high death rate for one year in particular.
There could be some trouble with how that rate was arrived at, similar in ways to how the alleged "lower then the rest of the countryside" death rates were otherwise sought to be argued for, but for what potential snag or set of questions which should be asked for this context, presently slips my mind.
Figures from National Archives seen by TheJournal.ie show that 31.6% of babies under the age of one in Tuam died over the course of one year.
This compares to an overall death rate in other homes around the country of just over 17% among babies of the same age.
The return from Galway Local Authority shows that in the Tuam mother and baby home 49 babies were born in the institution in 1947. A further 30 children under the age of one were admitted to the institution, making there a total of 79 children under the age of one in the care of the maternity home.
In that year, 25 babies under the age of one died in the home.