Dark Celtic history - the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

Ye Olde Scot - the Celtic culture channel.
Dark Celtic history - the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.
by Jeff Mcdonald

1970s Ireland, Catholic priests were still telling girls not to wear mini-skirts in public, as though they were a biblical harlot about to be cast out and stoned. You know the scene. Two school lads are out playing in a field in Ireland in the mid-1970s when they find a big stone, being mischievous boys they work harder than they ever have to lift the stone, only to discover it covered a hole that they were all too eager to climb in, despite the danger. Stephen King's stories start this way, with two innocents uncovering something horrifying. But this wasn't fiction, this wasn't some made-up story on the supermarket shelves, it was Tuam, County Galway in 1975, and the hundreds of little skeletons the two boys found in a disused sewage tank were all too real. The Catholic church held incredible influence over Ireland at this time, and the fact that 796 babies' remains were just found at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, ruun by the church had little impact. The clerical word was the last word and people fell into line, and the atrocities the church committed were lost to time.
That explains why you could uncover a grave of almost 800 dead infants in a disused sewage tank in the 1970s and yet a great silence would descend and cover it all up. The pope was infallible, then so were the Church and all of its agents. There was nothing to see here. You can go on about your business. Move along. So people moved along and they kept on moving, but time brings change, and change opens minds that are thought to be nailed shut, and thrown down a well. The Catholic church was not interested in having this discussion, and so a huge silence descended upon Ireland again. People often vanished into that huge silence I discovered, all kinds of people, people who didn't fit the story that the country was telling about itself. Unmarried mothers, their children born out of wedlock, the children of the poor and the addicted, the mentally ill, the disabled.