After investigative journalism uncovered the “Tuam babies” – up to 800 babies secretly buried in a “mass unmarked grave” previously used as a sewage tank near the Mother and Baby Home run by the Bon Secours order of Catholic nuns in Tuam, County Galway from 1925 to 1961 – there was international outrage and Irish society and the authorities finally decided to examine this ugly chapter of their history.
A special team of people, called the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation (2015–2021), was appointed by the Irish Government with the purpose of investigating and reporting on practices in 14 Irish Mother and Baby Homes between 1922 and 1998. They published their Final Report at the beginning of 2021. It is 2,865 pages long and is available here.
The report describes the cruel treatment of unmarried woman and their babies. In total, 56,000 women, some of them as young as 12 years old, and 57,000 babies passed through those Homes. 9,000 children died in these institutions, which is about 15% of all children recorded there. Many of the mothers died from malnutrition and diseases too. In addition, children were subject to medical experiments in various vaccine trials (carried out by different laboratories today merged into the GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceutical company). Those who survived were taken by force from their birth mothers and given up for domestic or foreign adoption. The report also revealed that the majority of babies put up for illegal adoption from these religious institutions were sent (effectively, trafficked) to the United States, very often to wealthy families. Nuns would even arrange an “illegal registration of birth” – the adopted parents were listed on the baby’s birth certificate as birth parents.