[DManA]

and the burial of bodies done quickly without individual caskets and graves

These babies weren't buried. They were literally flushed down the toilet.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Flushed? That's fool talk. They didn't have toilets in County Galway in 1926. They had chamber pots and outhouses which they emptied into pits on the property: what the article calls an "unused septic tank."

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:

• she’s under the delusion that Catholic doctrine forbids granting Christian burial to children born out of wedlock, which of course is absurd (plenty of canonized saints were born out of wedlock); and
• allegedly a few decades ago – some time AFTER the orphanage was torn down half a century ago and replaced by housing – some boys claimed they found skeletal remains somewhere in the general area (they can’t remember where).

  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.