Posted on 06/03/2014 10:14:36 AM PDT by 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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Most I know are pre trib, but to be honest, I always thought it was too easy, and haven’t been reading on that subject. Either way I know where I stand. I hope all here stand with me. I do think real hard times are headed our way though.
Yes, County Antrim, and it is more than the change in accent, the quicker speech.
I have a whole series of questions about this story.
Note that the grave is not “discovered”, rather people say that back in the 1970s two boys lifted a slab of an old septic tank, when they were playing on the convent grounds. They saw numerous little skeletons.
This is an unverified story - we are not even given the boy’s names. A local historian, Catherine Corless, says that she “knows” that these would have been the bodies of children who died during the years of the operation of that children’s home. But we need some evidence - does anyone even know exactly where this grave might be? And are we sure it contains 800 bodies? And are we sure this is not just a vague folk memory of discovering a mass pauper’s grave from the 19th century?
Half the lies they tell about Irish Priests and Nuns aren't true.
So the other half of the lies are, what? true?
Don’t explain the joke
Interesting, sobering story.
But did you notice that it was a Washington Post story very, very unfavorable towards earlier attitudes and abilities and Catholics in particular?
What is the truth, how long was the burial site used? How many bodies were actually found? Do I trust ANYTHING from the Washington Post, or the NY Times, or the ABCNNBCBS TV readers? No.
But, sometimes, they are partially right.
What is unverified? It seems to be a widely and long time reported story, here is one from the Tuam Herald.
“Committee and Sisters meet over unmarked mass grave”
Wednesday, 4th June, 2014 10:20am
Story by Siobhan Holliman
A MEETING was to take place last evening (Tuesday) between the Bon Secours Sisters and members of the Children’s Home Graveyard Committee regarding a planned memorial at the unmarked children’s graveyard in Tuam.
Up to 800 children and babies are buried in the mass grave on Dublin Road close to the site of the former mothers’ and babies’ home which was run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam between 1925 and 1961.
As frequently reported in The Tuam Herald, for the past two years a local committee has been researching the plot and historian Catherine Corless from Brownsgrove found that death records show that at least 796 children died and were buried at the home.
Galway East TD Ciaran Cannon has called for a Dáil inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the unmarked burial site.
Chairperson of the memorial committee Teresa Killeen Kelly says while the story has caught the attention of the national media and politicians have spoken of their shock, the committee’s priority remains to have dignity restored to the dead babies by having a plaque with their names erected at the site.
“We have commissioned a bronze plaque with the names and this will cost at least €6,500. There is other work that has to be done to improve access to the site. The minimum we need is €15,000 but we’re nowhere close to that at the moment,” she said.
I am waiting for a proper exhumation of the site.
The story of a septic tank filled with corpses of babies is indeed horrific, but if you look through the sources, it is based on hearsay. A burial ground with numerous, unmarked internments is somewhat different - that is what is known as a “pauper’s grave”, and is found in every major city in European countries.
Until they can get a formal investigation, much of it is speculation, but is one historians’ 2 years of investigation that indicates what we have learned so far.
From the BBC: “The Irish government is considering an inquiry after the remains of nearly 800 children were discovered in an unmarked grave at a former home for unmarried mothers run by the Catholic Church.
The remains were interred in a concrete septic tank in the grounds of the home in Tuam, County Galway.
The children, aged between two days and nine years, died between 1925 and 1961.
The grave was found nearly 40 years ago, but the remains were initially believed to be from the 1850s famine.
However, local historian Catherine Corless found that the register of deaths and burials in the town did not match.
“I went to the births, deaths, marriages registration office in Galway and I asked them would they have records of the children who died at the home,” she told the BBC.
“When she came back to me, she said, ‘We have the records... but there’s quite a number.’”
“I was staggered and I was shocked because there’s a total number of 796 babies, children and toddlers buried in one mass grave there on that site.”
Funds are now being raised to erect a permanent memorial to the dead children.”
It wasn’t until after WWII that the BCG vaccine against TB first became available in the most advanced medical centers—-- and it was years later in impoverished western Ireland.
In this era, even for privileged TB patients who got the best of food in the most pristine and costly alpine TB sanatoria, 50% of patients were dead within five years.
Antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin, Aureomycin, and tetracycline were not available for prescription until the 1950′s. Before this time, 60-80% of the people infected with pneumonia died, usually within a week-10 days. (It was only with the introduction of penicillin that the mortality rate for pneumonia dropped to 1 -5%).
American Medicine Volume 2, p. 290, estimates that in the pre-antibiotic era, one seventh (1/7) of all deaths worldwide were caused by tuberculosis. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ran many articles on the serious requirement that TB sufferers be kept apart from the uninfected population, and that their bodies be disposed of as soon as possible after death in order to prevent recurring epidemics.
Church-run charitable facilities were precisely the places to which these unfortunate sick children were being consigned. Is it any wonder that the death rate was high, and the burial of bodies done quickly without individual caskets and graves?
Thousands of babies and children passed through institutions like the Bon Secours Home. Indeed many were brought there because their parents knew that was the only place they could receive even basic palliative care without infecting everyone in their family households.
So people in Ireland whose little children were desperately ill — and who had no means of treating them — left them at churches, convents and orphanages, thus continuously re-introducing infectious diseases into Homes caring for orphaned/abandoned children.
Many such institutions attempted to protect the healthy babies born in the Homes, by arranging for their adoption as quickly as they could. Thus the next “scandal” charged against Catholic charitable organizations: the awful, heartless adoption of Irish babies by American families (Philomena!) .
Evidence suggests the conclusion that Bon Secours and similar Homes were not barbaric negligent pest-houses, but baby-saving missions, doing heart-breaking but heroic work in a time of desperation.
In any case, the causes of death listed in the story are taken from the files of a "local health board," and yet there is no indication whatsoever that the orphanage was cited for any kind of violations. That should tell any reasonable reader that the children likely entered the facility in a state of “neglect and malnourishment.” That some of them were not saved in a cramped institution wherein many of the children suffered with communicable diseases is no surprise.
The surprise is that so many thousands survived.
These babies weren't buried. They were literally flushed down the toilet.
If you look at Catherine Corless’ statements, her claims are based entirely on speculation that there “MIGHT” be human remains in a septic tank where the orphanage used to be, but the septic tank hasn’t even been excavated to see if there’s anything down there. She has also admitted that it isn’t large enough to hold the “800 skeletons’ which she has speculated might be in there.
The only reason she thinks there are any skeletons in there at all is because:
These remains (if they existed at all) were apparently never exhumed nor examined to determine whether they are human or animal, or what historical time period they date from (a century ago? Two centuries? A thousand years…? You’d need to carbon date them).
They haven’t been able to find these bones that were supposedly there, somewhere. Hence there is absolutely no credible basis for the claim of a “mass grave” which the media keeps on repeating.
And it gets even smellier. If you follow the stated sources in these media articles, you can trace the information back to a tabloid called the “Irish Mail”, which looks and reads like the “National Enquirer” and is seemingly no more credible. Worse, many of these news articles have been running the grossly misleading headline “800 babies found in a mass grave” while usually admitting (near the end of the same articles) that the septic tank hasn’t been excavated yet.
A few articles admit that many of the locals thought the bones dated from the time of the great famines in Ireland, in which case they would have nothing to do with the orphanage; some articles also admit that the recorded deaths at the orphanage were in the same proportion as overall childhood deaths in the general population at that time, due to diseases that couldn’t be cured yet.
Even Corless hasn’t accused the nuns of deliberately starving children to death, despite all the lurid, sensational headlines. In short, the media’s own articles often contradict their own headlines and scandal mongering; and the actual quotes from Corless and other people involved indicate that there is virtually nothing behind these claims at all. This is the definition of a smear campaign, helped along by people who have little interest in evidence as long as there are Long-dead charitable Christian women who need a good bashing.
In direct contravention of allegations of ‘dying rooms’ and deliberate starvation, a Tuam Herald report in 1949 on the Inspection of the home, says that “they found everything in very good order and congratulated the sisters on the excellent conditions in their Institution”. An earlier Board of Health report in 1935, says that “Tuam is one of the best managed institutions in the country”. In 1944, the Matron requested that all occupants were immunised against Diphtheria.It was also recommended that vaccines for whooping cough were supplied... In 1950 a programme of improvements to the building was proposed to the Committee however these were never carried out due to costs. The home finally closed due to dilapidation in 1961 after the £90,000 proposed extension was instead used to carry out improvements on the nursing home run by the sisters."
The paragraph immediately following your cite is far less flattering as is the article as a whole, and some of the reader comments at the end are absolutely eye-popping. There are no records of burial or interment of any kind for the almost 800 children in question. This leaves one to speculate, just how were the bodies of these unfortunate children disposed of, who died at a rate four to five times higher than in Ireland as a whole? Where did they go, if not into that septic tank?
You church has wonderful teachings about the value and dignity of all humans. These teachings were clearly not applied in the administration of this institution.
So why are you defending these women?
You talk about "the 800" when the bones have not even been exhumed (the number "796" comes from death records, not bones). And we don't even know if they are children's bones: the building had been used decades before as a workhouse during the famine, when the death rate in West Ireland was staggering.
You ignore evidence that after the Bon Secours sisters acquired the property, coffins were sought for children who died (e.g. "according to an advert placed in a local paper, the Connacht Tribune in 1932, the Home was tendering for coffins.") You ignore paragraphs like these:
"The Connacht Tribune records that Tuam Sewerage Scheme was to be extended to the Children’s Home in 1928. Is it possible that during this period existing graves were exhumed and the bodies reinterred. The boys’ description of a pit with a brimful of bones suggest that the bones could at least have been adult, it is unlikely that babies’ bones buried in shrouds would have been visible 20, 30, or 40 years later. The grave was explained as belonging to famine victims – presumably this belief would have had some basis? Prior to being a home for unmarried mothers, the building was a workhouse for famine victims."What we do know is that often bodies were exhumed during the road building process in Ireland and not reinterred in a respectful fashion, even being dumped in drains in some instances. It is feasible that the children were buried correctly, even on consecrated ground and then later moved during a redevelopment of the site. This is why decent forensics is vital."
In other words, without any real investigation being done, it is presumptively trumpeted in the press that the hundreds of children died during epidemic years were tossed in a sewer.
When the bones were first found, in 1975 --- 40 years ago, OK? --- the Home had already been closed for 15 years, roads and sewers built, and the property extensively remodeled. In Ireland, as in many other places (e.g. here in Tennessee) when construction uncovers unmarked graves, the bones are all reinterred in one place.
We are pondering the heartbreaking deaths of children with infectious diseases (the records say TB, measles, gastroenteritis and pneumonia) at a time when there were no antibiotics, and when people abandoned sick children at convents and orphanages. Who could be surprised at a high death rate? It's like being surprised that a hospice and palliative care unit had a higher death rate than the surrounding county.
Let me go on and say that the same media and political powers which are heavily promoting abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia in Ireland, have found another way to inflict severe --- they hope, fatal --- moral damage to Church institutions. When they finally extirpate Christianity from the hearts of the Irish people, they'll have many here who will applaud their success.
Again, just how were the bodies of these almost 800 unfortunate children at that home disposed of, who died at a rate four to five times higher than in Ireland as a whole?
Where did they go, if not into that septic tank?
“This leaves one to speculate, ...”
Why? And where is you similar speculation concerning the proddy poorhouses?
“...just how were the bodies of these unfortunate children disposed of, ...”
For all you know they were “properly” buried, right?
“...who died at a rate four to five times higher than in Ireland as a whole?”
Well, no. The death rates were extraordinarily high from today’s standards throughout Ireland. But 20 - 30 per year based on the population reported fits the published infant mortality rates of that period.
“...Where did they go, if not into that septic tank?”
Tell us, sine you appear to be so knowledgeable?
Narses, just the other night you were excusing the whole thing because, in your opinion, Irish were poor and that’s just what they did, just plopped dead naked bodies in septic tanks, nope, nothing unusual about that, move on, nothing to see here, those Irish are just like that.
The death rate at that Catholic home for “fallen women” and their illegitimate children was four to five times higher than Ireland as a whole in that era.
There is no record of burial for these almost 800 unfortunate children to be found. So, where did their bodies go, if not into that septic tank?
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