Posted on 03/04/2017 5:10:41 AM PST by FourtySeven
A mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children has been discovered at a former Catholic orphanage in Ireland, government-appointed investigators announced Friday in a finding that offered the first conclusive proof following a historian's efforts to trace the fates of nearly 800 children who perished there.
The judge-led Mother and Baby Homes Commission said excavations since November at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, had found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing "significant quantities of human remains."
The commission said DNA analysis of selected remains confirmed the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks to 3 years old and were buried chiefly in the 1950s, when the overcrowded facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unwed mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.
...
A decommissioned septic tank had been "filled with rubble and debris and then covered with top soil" and did not appear to contain remains, the report said. But excavators found children's remains inside a neighboring connected structure that may have been used to contain sewage or waste water.
The commission's finding that most of the remains date to the 1950s corroborates Corless' collection of death certificates. It also dispels a popular argument that bones seen at the site might predate the orphanage's opening, when the building was a workhouse for the adult poor, or even be from people who died in the mid-19th century Great Famine.
...
The Bon Secours Sisters order of nuns, which ran the home until its closure, said in a statement that all its records, including of potential burials, had been handed to state authorities in 1961. It pledged to cooperate with the continuing investigation.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Surely this is ancient news!
I was born around the time the orphanage closed and I certainly do NOT consider myself to be “ancient”!
This is a new development in the case confirming the remains discovered were human baby remains that date from the 1950’s and also that they weren’t from before the orphanage was built.
I don’t understand the fuss. It seems that the government has bones and through DNA the bones are matched to death certificates. Seeming mass burials are not uncommon at state run asylums as graves tend to intrude upon one another over time.
“The government’s commissioner for children, Katherine Zappone, said Friday’s findings were “sad and disturbing.” She pledged that the children’s descendants would be consulted on providing proper burials and other memorials.”
These children have no descendants.
It is a common monastic practice to exume graves after a couple of decades and place the bones in a special chamber called an ossuary. Nothing irreverent about that--just making the best use of finite resources.
How many kids delivered to orphanages are malnourished, or have severe medical problems beyond the parents means to address, or have been horribly abused? Or are babies with birth defects?
And how many kids in the orphanages are violent and attack others?
Yes, the bodies were not in interred respectfully, but the institution probably struggled just to feed and clothe their charges.
The presence of the remains doesn’t (in and of itself) correlate to causality on the part of the orphanage.
Not that there couldn’t be foul play, certainly the sexual abuse scandals have proven that.
Once again something nuns were doing has to be made into something sinister. The simple fact is that any family that wanted to publicly bury their unmarried daughter’s stillborn child could have done so. Families chose to keep it quiet precisely for the same reason why their unmarried daughters were there rather than at home in their own village or neighborhood in the first place.
To me these places were too much of a buy-in of the Victorian era puritanism. Two centuries before the unmarried girl would have simply given birth at home, with her family. There would have been a stigma attached to her, but her child would have been largely be free of it. After the mid-nineteenth century, however, that was all but impossible anywhere in the British Isles.
Some 800 children die mainly in the course of a decade?
And nobody notices, there is no investigation?
Ireland wasn’t central Africa; there was no famine.
????
Thank goodness today’s unwed mothers are celebrated and some even got their own reality show! The strange fact that the number one indicator of poverty is a single mother is just an anomaly. It’s better that an immature girl raise her children under the care of our benevolent government than have her child adopted by a traditional family who might force the child into some semblance of moral behavior or, even worse, independence.
That presupposes,of course, the mother doesn’t take the preferred option of having her child butchered and sold for parts by Planned Parenthood. Thank goodness we destroyed all that Victorian Puritanical nonsense—we are so much more enlightened these days!
It isn’t the case that nobody noticed. There were death certificates, though this being Ireland it’s anybody’s guess whether they were digitized and preserved.
800 is not an untoward number, if you consider the mortality rate of children arriving in the state I mentioned.
My daughter had a chromosome dissorder, and I allowed my sister to adopt her because my brother in law could afford the finest available treatments. She outlived her friends with the same condition and lasted until age 20. Were she born in the fifties or even the seventies nothing in medical science existed to prolong her life past age two. Period.
You are entirely ignoring why many of these kids wind up in institutions.
You arent just minimising the state they often arrive in, you are trying to pretend that doesn’t happen and then becoming indignant at people who won’t pretend along with you.
“My daughter had a chromosome dissorder, and I allowed my sister to adopt her because my brother in law could afford the finest available treatments. She outlived her friends with the same condition and lasted until age 20.”
That brought tears to my eyes...I cannot imagine the pain that caused. Your handling of the situation was brave and admirable.
This stupid, stupid story AGAIN? Hey, people...infant mortality, child mortality used to be really high.
Isn’t this “news” at least ten or more years old? I remember reading of it a long time ago.
Might as well bring up other old “news of the day”.
NEWS FLASH! UNMARKED GRAVES FOUND AT ARKANSAS PRISON!
The DC “intelligence” pedophile ring?
RE: calous soul dismissive: “Surely this is ancient news!
Do you care about truth?
You do know that the Roman Catholic Crime syndicate ran a very profitable child selling racket in Ireland, Spain and Poland.
International Constitutional Law lawyers and scholars report 300,000 children were trafficked.
Domino go stick’em up, Domino go frisk’em.
God have mercy on all associated, ignorantly supporting ungodly institutional atrocities.
The Cases of ‘Stolen Children’ in Spain and Ireland - ICL-Journal
https://www.icl-journal.com/download/9a1d4e9cee94aae4... Proxy Highlight
Nov 7, 2013 ... In the last fifty decades, Spanish and Irish cases of `Stolen Children´ for the ultimate .... and then processed through false paperwork into “orphans” and then .... sells the child for profit to an organization that will place the child for adoption ..... prisons and institutions under the mandate of the Catholic Church, ...
BBC documentary exposes 50-year scandal of baby trafficking by ...
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049647/BBC-document... Proxy Highlight
Oct 16, 2011 ... 300,000 babies stolen from their parents - and sold for adoption: Haunting ... 50- year scandal of baby trafficking by the Catholic church in Spain.
PS - not to mention atrocity of modern day indentured slavery...
Ireland says sorry to the 10,000 ‘women slaves’ of its Catholic ...
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2273961/Ireland-says... Proxy Highlight
Feb 5, 2013 ... Ireland finally says sorry to the 10,000 ‘Magdalene Sister slaves’ of its Catholic laundry workhouses who were locked up and brutalised by nuns ...
Why do they all come to me????!
Yes. But it’s bringing out the nuts again.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.