St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home was a home for unwed mothers and their newborn children in Tuam in the west of Ireland . It was operated from 1925 to 1961 by sisters of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours .

Finds of body parts

As early as 1975, the then twelve-year-old Barry Sweeney and his friend Francis Hopkins found numerous skeletons in a no longer used septic tank on the site of the former home. However, the case was initially not investigated by the police, so that neither the number of bodies nor their identity was known.

In 2012, historian Catherine Corless published an article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society , according to which a total of 796 children had died in the 36 years of the home's existence. Since there was only one case of a proper burial, she suspected that the other children were buried anonymously in a mass grave. As a result, The Children's Home Graveyard Committee was founded, a citizens' initiative that set itself the task of calling for the bones to be excavated and to preserve the memory of these children by building a memorial.

Mass grave with 800 children's bodies

In May 2014, the home hit the headlines because a mass grave with 800 children's bodies was discovered there. The Tuam Home was one of ten Catholic Church-run institutions that incarcerated tens of thousands of unmarried mothers. The children were denied baptism and were not allowed to go to normal schools. The children were born without help from doctors or midwives and were grossly neglected. Many died of malnutrition, measles, tuberculosis, or pneumonia. The bodies were stowed away by nuns in a nearby sewage tank.

Investigative commission

The Irish minister for children and youth, Charles Flanagan , promised to provide information in June 2014. A commission of inquiry into mother-and-child homes based in Dublin , which was then set up , announced the first results on March 3, 2017. The remains of the infants and toddlers lay on the grounds of the mother and child home that the Catholic Church had operated until 1961. The bone finds examined so far were fetuses from the 35th week of pregnancy up to three-year-old toddlers in underground chambers of a septic tank.

The commission thus confirmed the research of the historian Catherine Corless. Thoughts that the bones could have been from an earlier time when the home building was still used as a workhouse, or that they went back to the time of the Great Famine in Ireland , have been refuted. The Commission postponed the submission of its final report to 2019.

excavation

In October 2018 , Minister for Child and Adolescent Affairs Katherine Zappone announced that the babies' remains would be excavated, identified and dignified for the next year. The Congregation of the Bon Secours Sisters wants to contribute 2.5 million euros to the cost of the excavation. This is not a compensation, but a voluntary offer.

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Carsten Volkery: children's mass grave in Ireland: The Darkest Secret of the Sisters of Bon Secours , Der Spiegel , May 28, 2014
  2. ↑ a b c Rosita Boland: Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story. In: The Irish Times. June 7, 2014, accessed June 7, 2014 .
  3. ↑ Jochen Buchsteiner: The mass grave of the nuns. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. June 5, 2014, accessed June 7, 2014 .
  4. ↑ Mass grave discovered with 800 children's bodies. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. June 4, 2014, accessed June 7, 2014 .
  5. ^ A b Jochen Buchsteiner: Mass grave in Tuam, Ireland: Babies were garbage for the nuns , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 9, 2014
  6. ↑ Patsy McGarry: Mother and baby inquiry to go beyond Tuam - Flanagan , The Irish Times , June 5, 2014
  7. ↑ Irish investigators find mass graves of young children , Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 3, 2017
  8. ↑ https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/exhumierung-irische-regierung-sucht-ueberreste-von-heimkahrung-1.4183188
  9. ↑ Shawn Pogatchnik: Experts find mass grave at ex-Catholic orphanage in Ireland Experts find mass grave at ex-Catholic orphanage in Ireland , Associated Press , March 3, 2017
  10. ↑ The horror in the mother-child home in Tuam , Ireland , Bayerischer Rundfunk , August 22, 2018
  11. ↑ Pat Leahy: Tuam babies exhumation unlikely to start until next year , The Irish Times , October 23, 2018
  12. ↑ Patsy McGarry: Bon Secours sisters agree to contribute € 2.5 million to costs Tuam excavation , The Irish Times, October 23, 2018

Coordinates: 53 ° 30 ′ 27.6 "  N , 8 ° 50 ′ 34.4"  W.