12 January 2021 - Leaked report reveals 9,000 babies died in Mother and Baby Homes across Ireland
Irish mother and baby homes report to be published
Shane Harrison (BBC News, 12/01/2021)
A meeting of the Republic of Ireland's cabinet is expected to authorise the publication of a final report by a commission into mother and baby homes on Tuesday.
The institutions were used to house women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage.
The final report is expected to find that 9,000 children died in the 18 institutions investigated.
Report to reveal scale of abuse at Ireland's mother and baby homes
Rory Carroll (The Guardian, 12/01/2021)
The grim history of a network of religious institutions in Ireland that abused and shamed unmarried mothers and their children for much of the 20th century is to be laid bare.
A judicial commission of investigation into Ireland’s mother and baby homes has documented shocking death rates and callousness in institutions that doubled as orphanages and adoption agencies.
The mother and baby homes commission is to share a 3,000-page report with survivors of the system on Tuesday. Its five-year investigation was prompted by the discovery of a mass grave of babies and children in Tuam, County Galway.
Survivors fear Mother and Baby Home report will trivialise forced adoption trauma
Neil Michael (Irish Examiner, 11/01/2021)
Institutional survivors fear the forthcoming Mother and Baby Homes Commission Report will “trivialize” the “trauma” of forced and illegal adoptions.
They say they are "angry and dismayed" over yesterday's leak of details of the report including that it includes a finding that around 9,000 of the 60,000 children born in the homes died.
It also appears to have found that neither the Catholic Church nor the State forced women into the homes and that allegations institutions were paid to arrange foreign adoptions are impossible to prove or disprove.
Mother and Baby Homes final report will be a day of reckoning
Jody Corcoran (Independent, 10/01/2021)
Ireland will face another profound reckoning on its shameful past this week when the final report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation is published.
The commission was established by the government in 2015 in the wake of claims that the bodies of up to 800 babies and children may have been interred in an unmarked mass grave in the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, located in Tuam, Co Galway.
In 2014, a local amateur historian, Catherine Corless, published an article documenting the deaths of 796 babies and toddlers at the home during its decades of operation.