With no health service and deep poverty, the number of children working class parents had to watch die was horrendous. Infant mortality soared. In 1926 in Ireland 120 of every 1,000 babies under the age of one died compared to six of every 1,000 today.36 As late as 1949 over 50 of every 1,000 babies died before the age of one. One child in 16 born in 1949 did not live to see her or his fifth birthday. Diarrhoea and enteritis were the biggest killers of babies. Tuberculosis and other preventable and treatable diseases swept through the slums, killing older children. All these children died of poverty.37
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj91/horgan.htm
Ireland was a nasty place. The Church worked hard made it more cruel. All the excuses in the world can’t explain why they dumped those innocent wretches out into, at best, a converted septic tank.
They should have has a burial in a church cemetery. But they were bigots and cruel, and so they refused.