Irish Catholic darkness… Abuse kills 9,000 children of single mothers

It was found that between 1920 and 2000 in Ireland 9,000 children died due to abuse, etc., due to a Catholic fundamentalist culture that regards single mothers and illegitimate children as sinful.

With an official apology, the Irish government agreed to compensate the affected.

According to Sky News and Reuters on the 12th (local time), the Irish Investigation Judiciary Committee released the results of a five-year investigation into infants and children who died in a single mother facility in Ireland from 1922 to 1998.

Earlier, Irish historian Catherine Collis discovered that 796 children were collectively buried without tombstones or coffins in the’House of Our Lady’, a single mother facility run by the Bon Secours convent in Tuam, Galway, in 2014. .

The facility was operated for single mothers and their children from 1925 to 1961.

According to the death records of the convent, by age, infants and children up to 8 years old were included, mainly due to malnutrition, measles, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.

The news shocked Ireland as well as the international community, and the Irish government began an investigation through the committee.

After five years of investigation, the committee released a report of 3,000 pages on that day.

According to this, 9,000 infants and children died in Catholic churches or single mothers’ facilities operated by pastors during the investigation period.

That’s a whopping 15% of children born here.

The report pointed out that this mortality rate was much higher than the average mortality rate at the time.

The report said that single mothers at the facility for decades “confronted a suffocating, repressive and cruel misogynistic culture.”

Of the illegitimate children born, 1,638 were sent for adoption to the United States and elsewhere without any legal regulations.

Many single mothers were forcibly separated from their children.

However, there were no suspicions that a considerable amount of money was given to the agency that arranged the adoption.

This abuse of single mothers and illegitimate children is linked to Catholic fundamentalism in Ireland.

In Ireland, which was a conservative Catholic country, single mothers were stigmatized as’depraved women’, and children who gave birth were forced to adopt.

In addition, the children of unwed mothers were treated as inferior children, and were denied baptism and burial of church cemeteries.

In an interview with Sky News, Collis criticized the deaths of many children at the time because of society’s attitude toward single mothers and illegitimate children.

“The Roman Catholic Church gave birth to a culture of sinning women who gave birth to children outside of marriage,” he said. “Everyone was forced to think this way at the time, but they were afraid to speak up against the church or local priests.”

He said, “If there were some hygiene measures and care, many children could have lived.”

“This is our Holocaust. As there was the Holocaust in Germany, there was the Holocaust in the single mothers facility here,” said Winiplered Camel Larkin, who was born in Tuam’s facility in 1949 and adopted five and a half years later.

“I’ve seen a picture of my mother, and I don’t even know where she was buried,” she recalled. “It was very shocking that humans can treat babies and mothers that way.”

Irish Prime Minister Mihol Martin plans to officially apologize to those affected for the report.

In addition, along with financial compensation for those identified in the report, it will push forward a bill to uncover the remains of those who are still buried.

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