Karim (Voice of Simon Fairchild) (35:20)

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Progressive Insurance Advertiser (36:13)

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Katy Charlwood (36:45)

These mother and baby homes was seen as the solution to a perceived problem by the Irish state, the Roman Catholic Church and Irish society as a whole. It was indeed the Republic of shame. I really cannot convey to you the chokehold that Catholicism had on this country. Like there is a reason that for a good chunk of the 20th century, 50% of the time when you met a nun in the wild, and I mean like anywhere in the world, right, they would be Irish priests too. Not as many monks, though. I do have a theory that continues in the vein of misogyny and pebble and Christianity, that because men by and large will aim for positions of power within the church, priest, bishop, deacon, blah, blah, and so are less likely to become monks. Granted, within Catholicism, the only option open to women is basically nunneries, right? Get thee to our nunnery. People talk about the Irish as being happy go lucky. But the thing is, the luck of the Irish, it's bad. It's bad luck. Colonialism, oppression, starvation, etc. Ireland is a country that was born with pain. Pain and trauma is part of the Irish experience, from the folklore to the history. Rarely do any of the tales have happy endings. It's one of the reasons that the Irish have a really, really good relationship with death. Like we've seen so much of it. So a culture that already exists with sorrow, shame, oppression and suffering really made it easy to fall in line with strict Catholic doctrines. And I'm not saying this as an excuse, I just need you to understand just how normal this was, how acceptable the shame that was attached to unwed mothers and their offspring. Yet no unwed fathers underwent the same fate. Granted again, sometimes shotgun weddings would come into play because it was seen as a better option than to be the mother of a bastard. Now, I know I am being about as subtle as hitting a swordfish with a hammer, but these institutions existed specifically for this problem. Because not only will society judge you, but so well got. There's even a quote in the Irish Times from 1924, before Mother Hortense gets all set up, but after other such homes are established. Dr. Webb, that's right, a medical professional, he wrote in and said that the illegitimate child being proof of the mother's shame, is in most cases sought to be hidden at all cost. The child becomes an encumbrance on the foster mother who has no interest in keeping it alive. See, here's the thing. Illegitimate children were seen as less human than other children. Like they were. That's not hyperbole. That is a direct quote from an ex nun. Home babies. Children from mother and baby homes who hadn't been adopted say they were somehow less deserving of life. Like some twisted religious eugenics, extra sinful. The mother was a beacon of shame and the apple does not fall far from the tree. Yes, I did use apple deliberately. Even if you compare legitimate children who were orphaned, they would have been treated better than a home baby. Like there was even a threat in these areas that if you didn't behave, you were going to be sent to the home and other children in the community. They were told that the home babies were the children of the devil. Like the home babies when they were old enough went to school, which was also heavily influenced by the church. The other children were told not to associate with the home babies because apparently illegitimacy is contagious. It's guilty by association. So These children were ostracized and segregated. They were sent to school to show that they were being sent and probably just to keep them out of the way. But many weren't properly educated. They were just there. They would march single file to the school and march back to the home. They would leave late in the morning, 10 minutes late, and they would leave 10 minutes early so that they wouldn't be able to associate with other children even if they were allowed to. Back at the home, the pregnant women and girls would get up and be ready for Mass at 8am they would have plain porridge for breakfast. And in some homes the babies would be nursed by their mothers and the homes in which the mothers stayed on, of course, to ensure that the babies were healthy before leaving. Not entuum in tuam, the babies had a bottle and then were put in the nursery and then they were left there. They were there while the women and girls performed chores for the rest of the day. The pregnant people would scrub floors, work in the garden, wash walls and all manner of tedious jobs because remember, this was penance and repentance for your sins. So, yeah, pregnant young women and girls, you do vigorous labor with hazardous chemicals, that's fine. Oh, and when I say girls, I mean girls, you would be shocked, or maybe you wouldn't, but the amount of 13, 12, 11 year olds that went through these homes, like, it's astounding that these children are being blamed. In Bessborough home in Cork, there was a pregnant 13 year old girl who would scream out every night in terror, begging for her mother. So I think we can put two and two together and figure out what was happening to her. And yet she was the one who was punished. Another thing about these homes is that once they were inside, the inmates were all given new names. This was another way of adding to the secrecy, but also to remove autonomy and personal identity. It also meant that they couldn't seek each other out on the outside and report, retaliate in some way. They would be sent to the home, work there throughout their pregnancy, give birth unmedicated and under supervision. Like sometimes they would be demoralized and beaten and abused during birth, like as they were in active labour. Now, some nuns, they would have been nurses. It was common. However, nuns weren't allowed to become midwives until like, I think it's the mid to late 1930s and even there was a whole thing about nuns weren't allowed to be present at births. So how this establishment got up and running in the first place is kind of you know, wild to me, these women are not allowed to be near the birth. And yet let's set up an institution which forces them to do that. Like, okay, so sometimes there would be a visiting doctor or a medical officer, like, coming to these homes. A lot of the time they wouldn't be present for births. Now, these doctors, some of them, like, there was a doctor that closed down Bespora because of the high infant mortality rate, and he got absolutely torn apart. And there was a doctor who reported on Chum and said that it would be kinder to strangle the babies at birth than to let them live there. Now, I'm paraphrasing, but that's the equivalent of what he said. In Chuam, mothers were taken from the home after the birth, sometimes a day, sometimes three. Some were collected by their families and others, repeat offenders were sent to the laundries, all without their babies. Others from the home. Oh, others never left. But we'll get back to that later. Something I want to add here that I think is very important is that the nuns did not do this for free. Galway County Council paid one punt per week for every mother and every child that was in the home. I mean, we will delve into, like, money making later, too. More of that. But they were paid for each person in their care, adult and child alike. The nuns also ran the local hospital, so Grove Hospital. And so you had the home run by the Bon Sucours nuns and Grove Hospital run by the Bon Sucours nuns. Like I said, it wasn't uncommon for nuns to also be nurses. So when the home did close down in 1961, the remaining nuns were easily dispersed and relocated. The home itself was still standing until 1972, when it was demolished and a housing estate was built on the land. Now, this wasn't straight away. It takes a long time for anything to happen in Ireland. So it was still being built, but it was partially constructed, I should say. Right. It just didn't suddenly, oh, now here's a house and estate and a children's playground. No. So although the area above ground was demolished, the area below was not. Some parts were not built over. And kids being kids, especially kids being kids in rural Ireland, well, they often went out to play in the fields and the ruins with the old walls. Right. There was also an orchard there. So, you know, of course there was. And this brings me back to the two boys from the beginning of our story. Franny Hopkins and Barry Sweeney are somewhere between, like, 7 years old and 12 years old, depending on which report you Read. So they're out scrumping for apples and messing about when they jump on a concrete slab and it echoes, right? This is a field, right? So they're curious. They push open the slab, and lo and behold, what they see are loads and loads of bones. Like, skulls and bones. And Franny, he actually pushes Barry, who's the younger of the two, into this hole, right? This hole in the ground that he can clearly see skulls in. Being a child who has been thrown into a pit full of bones. Barry starts crying, okay, so Franny's like, okay, let's. Everything's fine. Out you get. We're best friends. Let's go and tell everybody about the big pile of bones they found. And so they go back. They go back to the community, and they're like, hey, look at these bones. So they tell everyone in town that they found a big hole filled with. To the brim with bones. Now, remember, this used to be a workhouse? So the community comes to the very reasonable conclusion that these must be famine victims. So the local priest, he comes over, he says a prayer, and the community puts up this, like, little memorial, right? Because it's Ireland. Very big respect on the dead. And it's. I say memorial. It's a grotto. Skinny statue of Mary, Mother of God, also very popular here. Try and drive through a town that doesn't have one. And so there's a couple from the town, and they, like, tend to the memorial and, like, look after it up until, like, they pass away. That same year, 1975, Mary Moriarty is told that a child is running around with a skull on a stick. And Mary. Mary is just like, right, and goes looking for Martin, who does, in fact, have a skull on a stick. The Martin tries to tell her that this skull is plastic and how great it's gonna be for Halloween. And Mary, she looks at the skull and she sees that it has nearly a full set of teeth. It's small. And she's like, martin, that's not plastic. That's a human skull you've got there, Martin. So she tells Martin to put the skull back where he found it. And so he does. And so she and a few other of the neighbors, they follow him onto the site of the old home. And. And so when they start looking for other bones in this sort of undergrowth, because, again, no fear, we're used to corpses, right? They look, they can't find any. You know, there's nothing there. She's like, weird that there's just this one tiny skull. And then as they realize they're not finding any. The ground comes away from underneath Mary's feet. And Mary Moriarty falls into a dark pit. She would say that this looked like a tunnel of some sort. And when her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw these little bundles stacked on top of each other like steps. And all of these bundles were wrapped in a cloth. This, like, very specific wrapped way. The cloth had gone black from rot and damp. And most of these bundles were about the size of a bottle. And they were packed all the way up from the ground to the ceiling. And there were hundreds of them. It wasn't long before the neighbors pulled her out of the pit. And she was very confused by what she saw. That was until she gave birth to her second son in the Grove Hospital run by the Bon Secourle sisters. And she is handed her baby by the nuns who had moved there from the home. And her son, her baby boy, was swaddled in a cloth, wrapped up just like those bundles in the hole. She decided that she needed to talk to someone, someone who had been in the home, someone who would know something, anything. So she reached out to Julia Devaney. So the home, it would also take children in orphans like Julia. She was nine when she was sent to St. Mary's mother and Baby Home, where she worked as a domestic servant. She worked there for the nuns up until the home closed down in 1961. And she didn't really know any other life for 36 years. Mary goes to her and she tells her what she saw in that tunnel. And without skipping a beat, Julia very nonchalantly says, that's where the little babies is. Many a little one I carried down in the night. Remember that. This is the life that Julia knew for 36 years. A life in service of the Bon Secours nuns. She described the home as an awful lonely place where women were just waiting to be separated from their babies. To quote, like Our lady, waiting for the crucifixion. She said that the children in the home were kept like chicken in a coop. And the nuns, they mistreated the children in their care. Suffering and punishment was normal, typical, expected. And according to them, these children deserved more punishment because they were the products of sin. Even if you look into the reports of the industrial schools, the laundries, the homes actual physical beatings were so normalized, it was very much accepted. And more than that, it was seen as the right thing to do. So Sidebar. I once grabbed a leather belt, like, because I was getting, or I was getting clothes together to get ready for the day because I get everyone's clothes ready in the morning. And so I like grabbed a leather belt, doubled it up in my hands and just like pulled it twice to make that cracking noise. And my son was like, that's loud, right? If I did that near my left handed aunt over in Scotland, right, she would flinch from the other side of the room. Which just kind of shows you the difference of that kind of act. Like I was only messing to make the noise. But for someone like my aunt who had being beaten because she was left handed, that's a very real threat, that noise. And to my son, he's like, well, you didn't. What you didn't like. It just shows you how we've moved on from that sort of barbaric way. But this, this was more than just a slap on the wrist. This was pure unadulterated abuse. So back to Mary. She's shocked about this, like what she's hearing from Julia. And being a woman raised in Ireland as a Catholic, she then comes to the conclusion that these must be stillborn babies. Right Again, Ireland, very good relationship with death. We have death notices on the radio. We have a website specifically for announcing deaths in the country. Like we have RIP ie. That's a very real thing. We have wakes at home. Our, our death to burial is like a very quick, quick timeline. Unless there's like a post mortem and other such delays, like it's a couple of days, enough time for the wake and then you're on the ground. Consecrated ground. That is if you're Catholic. Now I know I've said this before, I've brought it up, but Irish people do not put shoes on the table because the only time shoes should be on the table is when there's death in the house. And that means, yes, a dead body on your kitchen table, right? Dead body on the table, somebody making some really decent sandwiches that are cut into triangles. Very, very typical situation. And so in Roman Catholicism, every christened baptized person would be buried in consecrated ground unless that person had committed suicide, which is a mortal sin. So in the eyes of the church, you can't repent from that. You can't do three Hail Marys and Our Father and an act of contrition if you're dead out with that. Burying a Catholic in unconsecrated ground is a big no, no. It's also illegal to just inter people and not have a burial like record. Like it's that. That's not legally a thing you can do. So it made Sense to Mary Moriarty that these babies in the tunnel in Tuam must have been stillborn because obviously the nuns wouldn't bury children of God who had been christened here. Like, like you would be christened quite sharpish as well, especially if they thought the baby was ill or sickly. Okay, I'm gonna do another sidebar. I was christened in a hospital. Like, my godmother was a nun who used to send me a call every year up until, like, she died. Now I was baptized or christened because I was premature and they thought I was gonna die. Right. So they were like, bless her. Quick, we need the numbers. Now. That being said, Tad Said's Jewish. So they were like, let's get in there before he gets there. It just kind of shows you how bad it was. Like, my older siblings, they were all premature as well, but. But like my older brother, he was baptized in France, so he was taken to France and got christened there. Like, that's what happened. And that's like, great, super for you. I got emergency baptism in a hospital. So in a home run by nuns. Right. One would assume that the same situation would be going on here, that you would baptize the children in your care, especially if there was a risk of them dying and they would be buried on consecrated ground. Yeah. So the community assumed that there must have been a little cemetery on the home's grounds, but it, like, got lost and like the undergrowth and the rubble, which is a consideration, unfortunately, this theory falls flat when you realize there's nothing marked. There's no markings, there's no burial records, there's no tombstones or markers or epitaphs. Nothing. There's nothing. So Mary, she rationalises that and so forgets about this for almost 40 years until someone comes asking questions about CHUM and St. Mary's mother and baby home. An absolutely astounding woman, Catherine Corless. Now, Catherine Corless, she's not a historian or an archivist. She's a soft spoken, rather unassuming woman with anxiety and balls so big you think she'd had elephantitis, right? Catherine was from Galway. She had a typical, unassuming life, right? She did a short spell in art college. She did secretarial work. She got married in 1978 and had four kids. She's a mother, she's a grandmother. And at this point, right, she's been through all this and she was very involved in her children's life because she wanted to give them a sort of happiness and love that she didn't get now, that's not to say her mother was cruel, but she felt that her mother had a sadness about her, like this melancholy they just seemed to emit from her all the time. Like there was something that she couldn't pinpoint and couldn't connect to or communicate about. And Catherine thought there had to be a reason for this. And she felt like something was hidden. And it wasn't until her mother, Kathleen, died in 1992 and Catherine started digging that she found out the reason for her mother's sorrow. When she got her hands on her mother's birth certificate, there was a blank space where the father's name would be. Her mother was illegitimate. In a country that saw illegitimate children as half human, degraded them, told them they were worthless their whole childhoods, and even into adulthood, it's no wonder her mother was so low. Now, we don't know exactly where Kathleen was born, but we do know it was in Galway and that she was fostered growing up. But Catherine wondered, what if her mother was connected to the home? So Catherine tells a story after discovering this. Like, she thinks back to her own childhood when she was at school with home babies, and she played a prank on one. Like, one of the other kids, you know, says, do this, and she's like, okay, it's gonna be super funny. And this is like national school. So elementary, primary school age, she wraps up a stone in a sweet wrapper and gives it to a home baby. She and her friends laughed as the child excitedly unwrapped it and put it in her mouth before spitting it out onto the ground. And Catherine was a kid. She didn't know any better. She didn't understand. But looking back, she realized that this child probably never had a sweet in her life. And this idea would have been the most exciting and maybe kindest thing to happen to them. Catherine's actually tried to find out who this person was because she feels such shame for what she did. And she is a product of the system that created this, created this idea. And, like, for that child, that prank may have been one of the better instances to happen to them. Catherine, she's on a mission to learn about the home babies and the home. Like, there really wasn't a lot of info about this because she started looking and she was met with blank responses like, there was no documentation. There was no open information about any of this. And so even when she was requesting it, there was nothing coming to her. And she thought, that's weird, right? There just isn't any info on the homes and she wants to do something right. She can't make it right. You know, there's no making things right when it comes to this, but she wants to try. And you can't change the past, but you can give some sort of justice. And so she starts writing for the Journal of Old Chum Society, right? And so she's writing about local history, so she's asking around about the home and no one wanted to talk to her. She's following paper trails of women sent there. And quite often those paper trails would end up with a death certificate and a burial. In England, women would leave Ireland to start new lives. Some weren't welcomed back to their communities. And Catherine, she just keeps trying. So she even reaches out to known survivors and most of them, she says they remind her of her mother. There is a melancholy that emanates from them. They have low self esteem. And yeah, of course, you've grown up in a society that reinforces the idea that you are nothing, worthless, less than human, all because of the circumstances of your birth, which feels, I don't know, ridiculous. Catherine is looking and it's clear to her that there are a lot of deaths at this home and it's an inordinate amount. And she is looking. And one day in 2011, Mary Moriarty is in the hairdressers and she overhears two women complaining about Catherine poking around and dredging up the past. They're of the opinion of it's in the past, can't change it, no point upsetting the apple cart. And Mary, she's like, fuck this for a game of soldiers. These children deserve justice. And so she talks to Catherine. Now, between 2011 and 2013, Catherine purchased every single death certificate on public record, on public record for the children that died in the home. So a death cert costs something like, was it €4 each? And so all in all, she spent €3184 of her own money right out of her own pocket. And you might be thinking, that's expensive. And yes, yes, it is. But for Catherine, she's like, if she's not going to do it, she thinks, who will? It's been 50 years since the home closed and no one has touched on the matter. Catherine uncovers 798 recorded deaths in the home. She went looking for burial records. She searched cemetery records in Galway and even in Mayo, right? Which is comparatively. Comparatively, I understand they're much bigger. But to give you an idea, it's kind of like for my US listeners, it's kind of like looking for Burial records in Missouri and also Louisiana. Like you're going across the border. Right. She managed to find a grand total of two. Two death records, Right. Or two burial records, I should say. But these records were specifically for two orphans, two legitimate children who were orphaned. The other 796 infants, all illegitimate children. Catherine could not find one single infant burial record. Catherine at this point had been told the stories of Franny and Barry and Martin with his skull on a stick and Mary falling into the tunnel. And so she thinks she's curious, what could these be? And so she looks up, like the archives and the old schematics and she is affronted, she's shocked and she can't quite believe what she's looking at because the locations that she has marked out, where these people have been. When she's looking at this, I don't know, blueprint schematic as a proper term for it, she's looking at the locations of the old septic system and she literally says, no, that can't be a septic tank. Going over the info, it's clear that part of these are like the disconnected cesspit and part is an old septic tank. And she did not want to believe that babies bodies were being unceremoniously dumped in an old septic tank by nuns. Right? But with the lack of burial records, she just didn't have any other resolution. Here's the thing, no one associated with the Bonsicles wanted to talk to her. I mean, like, if there was a mistake, surely they'd want to clear this up. Like, one of the main things she gets back is that, oh, those children must have been reclaimed by their families. Like shit they were. You do not want the baby when it's alive, but you want that baby's corpse. Is that, is that what you're telling me? Oh, yeah, sure, jan, yeah. In December 2012, Catherine pulls up her big girl socks and publishes all her findings in the Historical Journal of Tuam. And at the end of her essay asks this. 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? It wouldn't be that if someone saw how many tiny graves while being dug that they would start asking questions. It wouldn't be that you had to pay for a burial and it wouldn't hurt their profits. Right. It wouldn't be so that they could fake a death and sell a child across the ocean. Catherine Collis asks the question she Asks if it's a cemetery, why isn't it marked? It's very like. It's a very gentle way of asking the question, unlike me there. But she's aware that accusing the Bon Secours nuns of burying Catholic babies on unconsecrated ground was a big deal. And so she awaited the flurry of abuse and hate and all the furore that she was gonna get, but nothing happened. And so this strikes a match under her. She puts together a spreadsheet with all 796 names of the infants and the babies, right? She lists their ages, three days to eight years, and she listed the cause of death as per their death certificates for each and every one. The most common cause of death was gastroenteritis, often caused by what? What's that? Oh, yeah, poor sanitation. Then, of course, you had meningitis, measles, influenza, tuberculosis. Now, there were other causes of death, like malnutrition, starvation, and I shit you not, congenital idiot. On the 25th of May, 2014, Alison O'Reilly publishes Catherine's List in the Irish Mail on Sunday. And this, this explodes. It's big, massive. It's international news. It's on cnn, it's on Al Jazeera. It's everywhere. And so the Bon Secours nuns, they're ready for it now. And so they hire a PR person. Now, I'm sorry, but this, this specific thing, it just reminds me of Jay and Silent Bob Strikeback, when James Van Der Beek and Jason Biggs are, like, tied up in a dressing room in this movie. In this movie set. And so the security guard is outside and he's like, is anything wrong? Would you like me to call your publicist? Mr. Biggs? Mr. Van Der Beek, would you like me to call your publicist? That is what this specifically reminds me of. And it's very hard to take the nun seriously. But, yeah, they have a PR person. Not a lawyer, but a PR person. And this PR guy is like, there's no mass baby grave here. Like, they even write to, like, documentary makers and news agencies. Like, nothing to see here. No grave, no swaddled children's corpses. None of that. Like, he even says this, and this is a quote, and it's such bollocks. And I'm gonna do it in a silly voice. Ireland in the first half of the 20th century was a moralistic, inward looking, anti feminist country of exaggerated religiosity. Which is just a big bloody, like, word salad, isn't it? It's just nonsense. It's like, oh, yeah, we're shit back in the day, wasn't it? But no dead babies here, right? A representative of the nuns actually meets Catherine Corless in a hotel in Galway and they just keep throwing excuses. They're like, oh, it must be this, it must be that, it must be the famine victims. And Catherine Corless is like, nope, the famine victims are actually buried very respectfully over here in this plot, right? She's got her ordered and survey maps out like she's got everything. And they go, oh, it must have been disturbed by the construction of the housing estate. And Katherine is like, nope, because here is this map and here are these photos of the construction of the housing estate and here is the plot of land completely unaffected by it, right? She's like, nope, nope, nope. So in the end they say to her that what she's doing is very upsetting to the nuns, right? Is it? Is it? So are the members of the religious order who habitually abused women and children, then dumped the bodies of those children in the sewage upset? Oh, what a shame. Wee shame. Anyhow, the PR doesn't work and the news of nuns putting babies bodies in the latrine pit under the COVID of darkness is everywhere. In Tuum, the community is split. Some think that it should all be laid to rest and others think that the children actually deserve some justice. Everyone deserves to be connected.

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Katy Charlwood (76:23)

Here's a fun little twist that nobody Talks about before Catherine's essay is published in December 2012. Earlier that year, in October, Dr. Declan McKeown, a senior member of the HSE, that is the health service Executive, think the NHS of Ireland, but America, I don't have a comparison for you. Anyway, he has notes of a teleconference, Dr. McKeown, so he is part of the HSC investigation unit. Right. So pretty important, fella. And at this time, like the country is in shock, it's 2012, there's a lot of stuff coming out about the industrial schools, about the laundries, Like a lot of things have come to light, like the industrial schools especially had come out a few years earlier and like the amount of boys who were compensated for the abuse they suffered in the industrial schools. I mean, they deserve the compensation. I know some of them, which is. I mean, they're men now, but like I met them, I know them in my real life. This, like everybody knows somebody at this point. It's so far reaching. So there was all this stuff happening and it was all sort of. And the public, in the public sort of sphere, and the country was learning more about the Magdalene Laundries specifically at this point, and there was a national inquiry into them. And so because of this, there was a social worker in Galway looking into any information that could help with this, and she comes across this archive that concerns her and she speaks to a manager who then contacts Dr. McEwen. This archive was a large archive of photographs, documentation and correspondence relating to children sent for adoption in the usa. There were also letters in the archive requesting payments from mothers for the upkeep of children that had been discharged or were dead. This note finishes with, and I quote, this may prove to be a scandal that dwarfs other more recent issues with Church and state because of the very emotive sensitivities about the adoption of babies with or without the will of the mother. A concern is that there is evidence of trafficking babies, that it must have been facilitated by doctors, social workers and a number of these health professionals may still be working in the system. So Dr. McKeown, he writes that a minister must be told as soon as possible, right? So that there should be a fully fledged, fully resourced forensic investigation and state inquiry. Right? There are more notes by the doctor with briefings about Chuam and the Bessborough home in Cork. These archives and briefings are lost. It seems the HSE says that Tuzla has them and Tuzla is like, we have no clue where these are. So this means that people did know this was happening. And this is way before Catherine Corless's list blows up, but people are finally paying attention. And the Mother and Babies Homes Commission of Investigation was formed by the Irish government in 2015. Now, considering that this briefing was sent to government ministers, to the TDs, right, the fact that this was sent to someone and was conveniently ignored as telling. So the excavation, there's like a preliminary investigation. It started in 2016, right. Then the two. This commission, it, like, it actually covers all the homes, not just Chuam, for the record, but a sort of preliminary investigation begins, like to find these septic tanks. And what they want to do is just confirm, like, are these famine bodies, are they not? Like, they want to see what the situation is. Now they examine four out of the 16 tanks, a sample size, right? And in every single one, they find the disarticulated bones of children. They carbon date the bones, so there is no confusion. And yeah, they're all from the 20th century, so definitely not famine victims. The age range of the bones was between 35 gestational weeks to 3 years old. Most of what they found were dated from the 50s, right. Which is interesting when you think that they started listing deaths in 1925. So you've got this going on. So this is during a time that the home was very much like being run by the nuns. And it's interesting that this is the 50s and the home is closed in 1961. Like it's. It's interesting because many homes, like homes were still running until 98. So the fact that this is shut in 61, I don't know, I just, I have questions. So as they're doing this research, they also discover that there are six women whose remains are also missing, which is something we also don't bring up very often when we talk about this story. But there are six women, we. We don't know where their bodies are. So the remains in the tank, like, they were spread because of like flooding and such over the years. And so there's no, there's no knowing how many are there and how many are in there. And here's the thing as well, like, this wasn't just against the rules of the Church, it was against the law. You cannot just inter remains wherever you see fit. That is a body dump. The issue, like with the commission. Here's the thing, the commission doesn't really tell us anything new. It's not a full investigation. It's as if it's afraid to turn over those stones. And due to other issues like the information regarding industrial schools and the abuse that happened there. There's a genuine suggestion that these records should be sealed for like 80, 90 years. Like what? So y' all don't have to deal with the consequences of your actions. Like. And the thing is, if they'll do it for one institution, they'll do it for the other and like it. How do I put this? It's not like anyone is accusing the Bonsicle Sisters of being straight up child murderers, right? They were, however, responsible for the children in their care, and they did illegally inter the remains, or at least some of them, because they could all be 796. All 796 could be there. But there are another few scenarios which. Well, one of which being adoption, basically, as per that briefing to Dr. McEwen. Now, there's a theory that some of the children in Tuam, like, what happened in other homes, is that some of those children were sold to wealthy Catholic families in America, sometimes Australia, sometimes England, but mainly the U.S. now, adoption policies only really go, like, stringent in Ireland in the 1930s. So maybe faking a death was the easiest option for these nuns. Right? So there's a survivor of the home, John Pascal Rogers, right? He said that whenever he made a friend, they would vanish, right? Especially if they were a boy. Like, healthy boys were on the top of the wanted list. And of course, there's Deirdre, a survivor from the Bessborough home in Cork, who said that when she was giving birth in 1980, she was being slapped while in active labour. And that the nun said that they had people waiting on a boy and if she had a girl, she's in trouble. She had her boy and he was taken from her three days later. So to say this wasn't part of some trafficking racket. Well, hymns to say. Here's the thing, legal adoption, it was happening, but this was underhand stuff. Like in illegal adoption, there were hoops to jump through and it was a free process. Illegal ones are where you purchase a child, okay? You pay for a baby and. And as well, right? There's another survivor of Chuum whose mother would show up at the home and try to get him back for five years, right? And eventually the nuns forced him out to a family because they don't want the mother getting her hands on him, right? And children were fostered out as free label. Like, that's what their purpose was. They fostered them out as free label. That was something they did, right? And in that report from Dr. Webb, he's like, yeah, the foster parents don't really care if they'll ever die. Like, you do your thing and then you're done, right? It's so horrible because they're seen as less than human, you know, and if it wasn't this, it could be an industrial school or, you know, it was very much of, well, if they died in the industrial school or in the fields or somewhere else, then it wasn't the nuns problem anymore, was it? Another horrific, horrible scenario, because there are confirmed cases of the bodies of infants who died in mother and baby homes being used for anatomical studies in medical schools. In Dublin alone, according to their own records, the medical schools and universities received more than 950 bodies of children aged between 10 minutes and five years between January 1920 and October 1977. 27 of these were wet samples. A wet sample is a stillborn baby. Eighteen children were legitimate, the rest were not. But the medical schools paid for this privilege. Some homes were given 10 shillings per dead child's body that they sent to the schools. Now, it's not too much of a stretch to think that, hey, they're getting paid to have this child, right? So when you have a mother and baby in a home, so the state is paying you money for the mother and that child, as long as that child is still there. So if that child is going up for adoption, then that mother can stay there, which is why sometimes they would keep the mother on for nursing. Now, otherwise the mother would go and the child would stay there and they would get money for the child. They would also ask for money off of parents, off of mothers who, you know, the ones who actually wanted to support their children. They would ask them for funding and sometimes they'd be asking for funding for children who were already dead or that had been adopted. Like, what, on top of this, like, considering they've got these dead bodies, do they pay to bury them or do they make money off them, considering they don't really see them as human anyway. And another thing I want to bring up actually is children from mother and baby homes, like the children that were there when they were older. Like they used to do double blind testing on them. So, like medical experiments, they would test, you know, vaccines, inoculations, like, whatever. They would test it on these children because, yeah, why not test it on the vulnerable children? Like, of course. So, yeah, scientific experimentation on children. And of course the nuns were paid for this privilege. Now, the excavation in Chum is still ongoing and the report by the commission is out. And it is, it is. Wow. It's a lot of hot air and regurgitation of the facts that we already know. The infant mortality rate was high. It was double that of other mother and baby homes. And 9,000 children had died in the 18 institutions covered by the commission's terms of reference between 1922 and 1998. The Churm home Survivors Network says that it's not finished till it's finished, until every cause of death is accounted for, and that the horrors, the full horrors of what's happened at Tuam has yet to come to light. We only have the snippets. And it could be that some people are still not telling the whole truth and some people will have their secrets die with them. After the report came out, the Bonsicle sisters offered a 2.5 million voluntary contribution towards the cost of excavation and forensic excavation, like at the Chuam site, which. Right. The cost of this excavation is somewhere between 6 and 13 million, right? And the bonds of girl sisters are like, here's 2.5 million we just happen to have kicking about. And it's voluntary. Now. The Minister for Children, she contacted Pope Francis, right? And he's like, oh, I'll pray for you and whatever. And it's kind of a shitty response considering the reason that the head of the church was contacted was because, you know, it's regarding reparations for the victims from what the Church had done to them specifically. And he's like, thoughts and prayers. Following the release of the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, the Bontecor Sisters released an apology. It states, the commission's report presents a history of our country in which many women and children were rejected, silenced and excluded, in which they were subjected to hardship and which their inherent human dignity was disrespected in life and in death. Our Sisters of Bonsacours were part of this sorrowful history. Our sisters of St Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Chuam from 1925 to 1961. We did not live up to our Christianity when running the home. We failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children who came into the home. We failed to offer them the compassion that they so badly needed. We were part of the system in which they suffered hardship, loneliness and terrible hurt. We acknowledge in particular that infants and children who died at the home were buried in a disrespectful and unacceptable way. For all that, we are deeply sorry. We offer our profound apologies to all the women and children on St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home, to their families and to the people of this country. Healing is not possible until what happened is acknowledged. We hope and pray that healing will come to all those affected, those who are living, and those who have died. We hope that we, our church and our community can learn from this history. Yeah, it's easy to do an apology. And after all of the physical forensic evidence points to you, like, oh, I'm sorry. I did the thing that we denied doing. Like, you literally spent years lying about it. And then you were like, oh, you're upsetting the people who abused women and children. Like, I don't give a fuck. So the excavation is still ongoing. It was properly started in July 2025, and it is a laborious process, and they're using what DNA they can to find the family and give each of these children their name and a respectful burial. Initially, they uncovered 11 remains, and as of February 2026, they have found another 22 bodies. So this is a total of 33 thus far. But because the Bon Secours also ran the Grove Hospital, there are calls to excavate those grounds too, but it's still ongoing. They need to get an archaeologist in. Like, this ground, like, it is being watched, right? Like, the excavation is happening and the area is being monitored because they need to keep an eye on it to make sure nobody tries to mess with it. Like, it's such. It's so hard because they're trying to keep whatever, like, forensic stuff they need, they're trying to keep on top of that right now. But the excavation is ongoing. You know, we don't have answers. I hope one day we will, because those who suffered, they deserve better. And these children did not get a voice. Those women didn't. Many died with a shame that they did not earn or deserve. And for every dudebro out there harking on about traditional values, I hope you choke on your protein shake. Traditional values rely on the oppression and abuse of women. Now, I will be delving more into Ireland's hidden history at some point because those children did not get to live in peace. So I'm not gonna let the debt, like, this dark history committed by the church in Ireland and abroad. Like, I'll be going into it, I'll be sharing it, but it's time. It's research and we will get there. And they don't get to hide anymore. And I don't want to say here ends the story of the Chuam 796, because it's not the end, because it's still ongoing. We still don't have the answers. It is part of a history that we still need to unravel and understand. Because I hate, I hate this covering up bullshit. I mean, I spend like, that's my focus, isn't it? It's like bullshit in history and I'm uncovering it. Like that's oh, such a thing. And I, I hate it. I hate it so much. And I also, I grew up in a society where it's like, don't air your dirty linen in public. And it's like, I'm not the one with filthy sheets here. Like, I'm not airing anything. Like, I'll name and shame. I don't give a damn. But I think we hold accountable not only, you know, the people, many of whom are now gone, but the institutions which still exist. We can hold the institutions accountable, right? And that's all we have left. So if you liked or didn't like this episode, feel free to share. Feel free to share with everybody everywhere because it's Irish Heritage Month. Guess you should know Irish history now. Of course, sharing is caring. Cheer us, Follow on the socials, interact. Interaction is great. Interaction is what keeps the lights on. And yeah, I, I will give you another deep dive into something. Next week's episode is not going to be as long as this. I need you all to know that. Dear goodness, I'm Lizzima voice. So without further ado, I am going to give you recommendations for reading. I am going to recommend My Name is bridget by Alison O'Reilly, for listening, anything by Sinead O' Connor and for watching. You know what? You deserve something light. So running point, it's got Kate Hudson. It's kind of fun. Like it's not incredibly depressing. So go to town on that one. And with that, I'm going to bid you goodbye. Adios. Au revoir. Au revoirs, my friends. Bye bye.

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