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| Site of the Mother and Baby Home at Tuam (now demolished). |
20 years ago, the then minister Michael Woods, a Fiana Fáil TD, struck a €120 million deal with the Catholic Church in Ireland to pay compensation and reparations to the survivors of the Mother and Baby homes run by Catholic nuns.
Under their draconian, abusive and judgmental regimes, hundreds of babies, stigmatised as the illegitimate products of 'sin', died from diseases, neglect and malnutrition, their bodies then being disposed of like rubbish by being thrown in disused septic tanks or given to the gardener/handyman to dispose of in unmarked graves in the grounds. Some of the bodies were sold to Dublin medical schools to be used for dissection, for as little at 50 pence per body.
The €120 million was to be the Church's contribution to a government-run 'restorative justice' scheme. Most of the commitment has been reneged on.
It seems the Church in Ireland listened to the Pope's self-appointed pit bull, the odious Bill Donohue, President of the American Catholic League, who described reports of the abuses at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home run by nuns of the Bon Securs order, as a hoax, declaring that:
The nuns should pay nothing. Let the activists like [Catherine] Corless in Ireland, and the Church-bashing activists in the United States like Irish Central, pony up first, then rip the Irish taxpayers for the remainder.Catherine Corless is the local historian who exposed the scandal at Tuam when she discovered a big discrepancy between the number of deaths registered and the number of burials recorded in local records.
Donohoe later repeated the lie and dismissed Catherine Corless as a 'typist' not a historian, claiming the 'hoax' was part of a plot to smear the Catholic Church, with:
Just as in the United States, pro-abortion and pro-gay activists seek to discredit the Catholic Church, thus making it easier for them to succeed. To accomplish their agenda, they are prepared to lie about the Church’s past so as to marginalize its voice today.
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| Labour Party leader, Alan Kelly TD. |
We need to ensure this time round, that those religious institutions make their contribution. If they don’t make their contribution, we will pass legislation — I will draft it myself — to ensure that we can take their assets to ensure that they make that contribution. We cannot go through what happened in this country before, in relation to them not making their contribution this time around.Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman, told the Dáil that he had written to the religious orders involved, pointing out the need for their promised contribution to the 'restorative justice' scheme and asking for an early meeting to discuss payments so that the government could have the scheme in place by April. He added:
I hope and I believe that is essential that the religious congregations, charitable organisations and Catholic and Church of Ireland primates will also begin the work of rebuilding trust, both in terms of apologies to mothers and adoptees — but also in terms of concrete measures like contribution to the restorative recognition funds and making institutional papers available.There was no response from the Catholic institutions concerned, reported by the Irish Independent.
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