LONDON (AP) – The Prime Minister of Ireland said on Tuesday that the country must “ face the full truth of our past, ” as a long-awaited report recounted decades of damage done by church homes to unmarried women and their babies, where thousands of babies were born. died.
Micheal Martin said that in recent decades young women and their children had paid a heavy price for Ireland’s “perverse religious morality”.
“We had a totally distorted attitude to sexuality and intimacy. Young mothers and their sons and daughters paid a terrible price for that dysfunction, ”he said.
Martin said he would make a formal apology in the Irish Parliament on behalf of the state on Wednesday.
The final report of a study of the mother-and-baby homes stated that in the 20th century, 9,000 children died in 18 different mother and baby homes. Fifteen percent of all children born into families died, almost double the nationwide infant mortality.
The report stated that “the very high death rates at the time were known to local and national authorities and recorded in official publications.”
The investigation is part of a settlement process in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland with a history of abuse in church institutions, including shunning and shaming unmarried mothers, many of whom were pressured to give up babies for adoption. .
Church-run houses in Ireland housed orphans, unmarried pregnant women, and their babies for most of the 20th century. The institutions have been subject to intense public scrutiny since the historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates of nearly 800 children who died at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway in Western Ireland in 2014 – but was only able to find a burial. record for one child.
Investigators later found a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children in an underground sewerage structure in the grounds of the house, which was managed by an order from Catholic nuns and closed in 1961
The commission of inquiry said that about 56,000 unmarried mothers and about 57,000 children had lived in the homes it examined, with the highest number of admissions in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The last houses did not close until 1998.
“While mother and baby homes were not a particularly Irish phenomenon, the percentage of Irish unmarried mothers admitted to mother and baby homes or provincial homes in the 20th century was probably the highest in the world,” the report said.
The commission said the women’s lives “were devastated by pregnancy outside of marriage and the reactions of their child’s father, their close families and the wider community.
“The vast majority of the children in the institutions were ‘illegal’ and as a result suffered discrimination for most of their lives,” the report said.
The Prime Minister said the report “poses profound questions to all of Irish society.”
“What is described in this report has not been imposed on us by any foreign power,” he said. “We did this to ourselves as a society. “