How do you turn an administrative oversight at a refuge for unmarried mothers and their babies, into a genocide? Easily enough for the Times of London. On Saturday the dead nuns of Tuam were defamed yet again.
The piece was headlined, “The scandal of 796 dead Irish babies — and one woman’s fight. Thanks to Catherine Corless, the remains of almost 800 babies born to unmarried mothers at St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co Galway, will finally have a proper burial.”
It is another masterclass in turning the fact that there were no proper burial records for just under 800 babies at Tuam into the biggest fake news story I can remember.
Now if you say Tuam to the average Joe they will probably tell you that this was the mother and baby home where the nuns murdered a few hundred babies and dumped them in a mass grave.
That is not what happened. What happened was in fact an administrative oversight. Some facts again on top of the facts I wrote about here and here.
In fact, don’t mind me. In the words of the executive summary of the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes 2021(ordered by the Irish government) “Women who gave birth outside marriage were subject to particularly harsh treatment. Responsibility for that harsh treatment rests mainly with the fathers of their children and their own immediate families. It was supported by, contributed to, and condoned by, the institutions of the State and the Churches. However, it must be acknowledged that the institutions under investigation provided a refuge – a harsh refuge in some cases – when the families provided no refuge at all.” A refuge. Interesting.
The Tuam mother and baby home was run by the Sisters of Bon Secours, a nursing order of Catholic nuns, on behalf of Galway County Council. The nuns cared for the mother and babies when no one else would. The nuns begged Galway council to improve conditions in home but were stone walled.
The Times ignores all of this and the actual facts set out here. Instead we get a gothic horror show. “Below this ground lies evidence of a 20th-century atrocity, and the men and women slowly, carefully, respectfully revealing it are forensic archaeologists, DNA experts and specialists in the recovery of “co-mingled” bones. Many have worked around the world, locating unmarked graves and exhuming the victims of executions, massacres and war crimes. The man in charge is a veteran of conflict zones working for the International Committee of the Red Cross.”
An atrocity. There is absolutely no evidence for this. Then, for good measure you’ve got your DNA experts and Red Cross people so it must have been serious. People who have worked with executions and massacres and war crimes and conflict zones. God those monstrous nuns are nothing better than Hamas terrorists who break into family homes and murder women and children. It was Rwanda, is the message.
The Times puts in some stuff about mother and babies homes and pulls out the smoking gun:
“About 800 children from the home died. The infant mortality rate in the Thirties and Forties at the establishment was routinely above 30 per cent (as high as 39 per cent in 1933). By contrast, the national infant death rate in Ireland in the Thirties was 7.5 per cent.”
Well that’s that then. Such a discrepancy between the infant mortality rate is proof positive that the nuns must have been running around murdering these babies.
Only it is not, is it?
If you engage your brain you would understand that you are not comparing like for like. Mortality even in dirt poor Irish families homes one hundred years ago will still be less than a mother and baby home that housed many babies and mothers at any one time. You do not have to be an infectious disease expert to understand that. You just have to have read Jane Eyre. When Jane is ten or eleven, typhus runs rampant at Lowood and ‘forty-five of the eighty girls lay ill at one time.’ Also, those that died at the school are buried quickly, “the nature of the malady forbidding delay.” Interesting.
Obviously no one reads anymore but most people did live through the last lockdown. And wore face masks, outside. Isn’t that why we are all told to stay at home? Because disease spreads quickly? Well how quickly do you think disease will have spread in a mother and baby home with no heat or sanitation because Galway County Council just left the nuns to it?
Actually we can just read the Executive report into Tuam to find out. At 15.94: “The most comprehensive inspection of the Tuam home which the Commission has seen was carried out by Miss Litster in April 1947.”
Then we are told at 15.98, “Miss Litster said that it was time to enquire into possible causes of death before the rate became higher. She noted that there was a constant risk of infection because of admissions of entire families, ‘itinerants, destitutes, evicted persons etc. into the Children’s Home’. She remarked that Dr Dillon had previously drawn attention to this in 1945. There was no isolation unit, which meant that children newly-admitted were mingling with others in the home and there was no routine examination and testing for venereal diseases. Dr Costello was praised for his keen interest in the welfare of the children, their progress and diet. However, he was then 80 years old and Miss Litster commented: ‘I think we are entitled to ask that the advice and assistance of a younger doctor with more up-to-date knowledge and methods should be available’. This report (of 1947) stated that the infants ‘received good care in the Children’s Home. The Bon Secours Sisters being careful and attentive and excellent diets were available’. ‘It is not here that we must look for the cause of the death rate’. It is regrettable that the Commission has seen no further detailed reports on the children in the home after 1947.” The long quote is necessary to cut through all the lies.
This is how the Times reported on Tuam. “There are death certificates for all of them. (the 800 children previously mentioned). But for 796 babies and infants there are no burial records. It is the remains of those children, dumped by the nuns in a disused sewage system that lies beneath the housing estate playground, that the archaeologists aim to recover.”
So there are death certificates for all 800 children but not burial records for 796. Do you know who was in charge of burial records? Probably Galway County Council. The word ‘dumped’ is chosen carefully. It implies lack of respect. Finally, sewage system is a pile of filth.
That’s the defamation in one paragraph. The nuns (must have) killed these infants and just dumped them in a sewer of waste for good measure. If this is what happened it would be an atrocity at Tuam. That these nuns essentially murdered these babies, maybe with their own hands, went down to a pile of sewage and just dumped their bodies there.
No, I don’t believe that the nuns killed anyone or dumped their remains in filth. And to imply that they did, is evil. This kind of reporting is not just misleading, it is evil. They are defaming nuns, too dead to defend themselves, in the worst possible way.
We have no idea whatsoever how those infants were buried and what the attitude of the nuns were, because we were not there. Nor were the reporters at the Times or indeed Catherine Corless. Nor were these poor infants murdered nor was the sewage tank in use.
The Times goes on: “The detective work that led to the excavation of these macabre secrets is the result of the stubborn and diligent curiosity of Catherine Corless, a woman perhaps best described as a kitchen-table historian.”
Macabre secrets. You mean useless Galway County Council not providing burial records is more accurate. Or as the Times said: “The death records she had obtained added up to 798 child deaths between 1925 and 1961. Yet the burial register for Tuam cemetery (right across the road from the building) listed just two graves of children from the home.”
In fairness to Ms Corless she wrote an essay on her findings and the discrepancy and merely concluded, “Is it possible that a large number of those little children were buried in that little plot at the rear of the former home? And if so, why is it not acknowledged as a proper cemetery?” Fair enough.
It was the Irish Mail on Sunday who turned it into a ‘mass grave.’
The Times again, “Then in 2014, a journalist found her (Catherine Corless) having spoken with a woman in Dublin who was searching for two brothers who had been born in the home. In May 2014, the Irish edition of The Mail On Sunday broke the story under the front-page banner headline “A Mass Grave of 800 Babies”. That was that.
The evil defamation of the nuns of Tuam took off.
There was a partial excavation of the Tuam site, ordered by the Irish government. “That excavation focused on a set of deep chambers, thought to be part of a sewage treatment construction beside the old septic tank” that revealed significant quantities of juvenile remains, individuals with age-at-death ranges from approximately 35 foetal weeks to 2-3 years. Oh right, so now it is deep chamber, thought to be part of sewage treatment beside an old septic tank.
Today, there is a £12 million pound excavation to dig up all the remains of the infants and carry out DNA tests.
Not happy with the idea that the nuns are psychopathic serial baby killers the Times leaves themselves some wriggle room: “It is also possible that there are not 796 sets of remains and that some death records were falsified to cover up the widespread and illicit adoption of thousands of children of unmarried mothers, including a transatlantic trade that has been likened to child trafficking.” That’s pretty speculative.
Child trafficking, you mean adopting the children to families in the United States, where they were looked after and cared for.
You want to know what kind of damage this kind of misleading reporting does? Here were some of the comments below the line in the Times report.
These are the facts. The nuns took care of the mothers and their babies on behalf of Galway County Council. The nuns fought for better conditions for the home. Over a period of 36 years an average of 22 infants died per year. There were death certificates which recorded the causes of death as “as measles, bronchitis, debility, whooping cough, tuberculosis, epilepsy.” As you would expect in a mother and baby home in Ireland.
There were no burial certificates for 796 infants. The infants were buried inappropriately in a ‘deep chamber’ near a septic tank probably because they were ‘illegitimate.’ There should have been burial records and they should have been buried in proper consecrated ground.
By the power of the mainstream media, the narrative is now that this was a genocide, an atrocity, a war crime and that the nuns essentially murdered these infants and ‘buried them in a mass grave full of sewage.’
You do not hate the mainstream media enough. The lie against the nuns of Tuam is the atrocity.