LONDON (AP) – The Irish Prime Minister said on Tuesday that the country must “face the full truth of our past” as a long-awaited report recounted decades of harm caused by church-run houses to unmarried women and their babies, where thousands of the babies died.
Micheal Martin said young women and their children have paid a heavy price for Ireland’s “perverse moral religion” in recent decades.
“I had a completely distorted attitude towards sexuality and intimacy. The young mothers, their sons and their daughters paid a terrible price for this dysfunction, “he said.
Martin said he would apologize on behalf of the state in the Irish parliament on Wednesday.
The final report of a survey of mothers ‘and babies’ homes said that 9,000 children died in 18 different mothers ‘and babies’ homes in the 20th century. Fifteen percent of all home-born children have died, almost double the national infant mortality rate.
The report said that “very high mortality rates were known to local and national authorities at the time and were recorded in official publications.”
The investigation is part of an overwhelming process in Ireland of Roman Catholics, with a history of abuse in church-run institutions, including the avoidance and shame of unwanted mothers, many of whom have been forced to give up children for adoption.
Church-run homes in Ireland housed orphans, unmarried pregnant women, and their babies for most of the 20th century. Institutions have come under heavy public scrutiny since 2014 historian Catherine Corless traced death certificates to nearly 800 children who died at the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland – but were unable to find just a record funeral for a child.
Investigators later found a mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children in an underground sewer structure on the land of the house, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961.
The commission of inquiry said about 56,000 unmarried mothers and about 57,000 children had lived in the homes it investigated, with the highest number of admissions in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The last house was not closed until 1998.
“While nursing homes were not a specific Irish phenomenon, the proportion of unmarried Irish mothers who were admitted to nursing homes or county homes in the 20th century was probably the highest in the world.” it is said in the report.
The commission said women’s lives “were affected by the pregnancy out of wedlock and the responses of the father of their child, their immediate families and the wider community.
“The vast majority of children in institutions were ‘illegitimate’ and as a result suffered discrimination for most of their lives,” the report added.
The prime minister said the report “presents the whole of Irish society with profound questions”.
“What was described in this report was not imposed on us by any foreign power,” he said. “We did this for ourselves, as a society. “