Ireland's mother-and-baby homes are a stain on the Catholic church - but this latest refusal to atone is a new low
Disgusting Irish Church officials
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“ Nothing from the nuns, or the Catholic church, has really come close to expressing true remorse. ”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/13/ireland-mother-and-baby-scandal-tuam-catholic-church
Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes are a stain on the Catholic church - but this latest refusal to atone is a new low
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
The reluctance of religious organisations to offer recompense for the lives ruined fits a pattern of denial and evasion
Sun 13 Apr 2025 09.00 EDT
There are some stories so horrifying that their details embed themselves in your flesh and haunt you for the rest of your days. The suffering of the women and babies – an estimated 170,000 of them – who were incarcerated and abused in the Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes that housed “fallen women” is one such story. It is a scandal that is difficult to read about without experiencing an overwhelming feeling of disgust, from the testimonies of abuse and forced adoption, to the mass grave at the former St Mary’s mother-and-baby home near Tuam, County Galway, which contained 796 bodies of babies and children. The nuns put many of them in a septic tank. There were no burial records.
The efforts of survivors, campaigners and historians to bring these stories to light in the face of obstruction and indifference has been the work of decades. The Irish government made a formal apology in 2021 after a judicial commission report. Yet this story, and the human misery it has caused, is not over: the last home closed in 1996. There are living survivors, and people who are descended from the victims. The exhumation of the children’s remains, so that they can be identified if possible and given a proper burial, is continuing. And then there is the question of redress.
This week, it was reported that, of the eight religious organisations linked to Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes, only two have offered to contribute to a survivor redress scheme. The Sisters of Bon Secours – the order that presided over the septic tank mass grave – offered €12.97m (about £11m), while the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul has proposed contributing a building to the scheme. A third religious body – the Sisters of St John of God – declined to contribute, saying there was “no legal or moral” basis to do so as there was “no evidence that our sisters there acted in any untoward manner”, but offered a donation to survivors.
The other five – the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Legion of Mary and the (Anglican) Church of Ireland – made no offer. They gave various reasons – or excuses, depending on your viewpoint. Ireland’s children’s minister, Norma Foley, expressed her disappointment, saying that, while the state had admitted its role in the scandal, more should have been done by the church and the religious organisations.
While public expression by the state of its culpability has been explicit and categorical, the remorse expressed on the religious side has been less clear-cut. Past statements from the orders involved such as “with deep regret … we acknowledge that there are women who did not experience our refuge as a place of protection and care” and “it is regrettable that the Magdalene homes had to exist at all” lack a certain tone of regret, shall we say. The Good Shepherd Sisters, as they are now known, have made particularly impressive use of grammatical gymnastics over the years (“We sincerely regret that women could have experienced hurt and hardship”). Perhaps most shocking was this: “It was part of the system and the culture of the time.”
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