Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers

Washington Post ^ | 6-3-14 | Terrence McCoy

[afraidfortherepublic]

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”

The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. “When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,” Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.”

[RegulatorCountry]

From the link provided:

Dr Diarmuid Martin, the second-highest ranking prelate in the country, said only an independent commission of investigation with judicial powers could address public concerns in the wake of the discovery of a mass grave of infants and children found in the grounds of a convent run by the Bon Secours order of nuns in Tuam, Co Galway last week.

[BlackVeil]

No, I don’t see the quote “more mass graves” in any of the interviews, or in the paragraph you have included there. In fact, that paragraph does not directly quote the Bishop at all.

I am aware that headlines have appeared saying “more mass graves” but that is like the headlines saying “800 bodies found in septic tank” - they are not supported by the actual story.

[RegulatorCountry]

OK, try the headline, then.