"Significant" numbers of babies remains actually found

smurgen wrote: »

I genuinely thing the church is a law unto itself in the country and the operate in a parralel society.take for example the refusal of some or the religious orders to contribute toward compensation for abuse victims. The state should seize the assets of these organisation until they pay the compensation due by them to survivors if their abuse.http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/shortfall-in-contribution-to-compensation-scheme-damages-catholic-church-s-authority-1.2813775

There were both legal and illegal adoptions. During the 1950s up to 15 per cent of all illegitimate Irish children born in mother-and-baby homes each year were taken to the United States with the full knowledge of the State. In total more than 2,000 illegitimate children were removed from the country in this way. Most were adopted by wealthy American Catholics.
But it seems that hundreds, if not thousands, more children were taken from the country without sanction or public record-keeping. Many were handed to foreigners. On October 8th, 1951, The Irish Times reported that in the previous year “almost 500 babies were flown from Shannon for adoption”, a number that the paper said “is believed to have been exceeded” during the first nine months of 1951. In the first week of October alone, it reported, 18 “parties” of children departed from the airport.
These figures far exceed the number of official “adoption passports” issued to let adoptive parents take children out of Ireland. In the whole of 1951 only 122 such passports were issued, a fraction of the number of children actually taken from the State.
Some children were handed over to men travelling alone, as when a US businessman left, after a brief visit to Ireland in 1949, with two toddlers from the Braemar home in Cork. The New York Times called it “a surprise for the wife”. The same year a US airman was given two children to take home by the Sacred Heart nuns at Manor House mother-and-baby home, in Castlepollard. This was reported in three US newspapers.
On February 2nd, 1955, one American newspaper, the New Haven Register, carried a startling story under the headline “50 American couples buy Irish babies through international adoption ring”. Claiming a senior garda as its source, the article said the Americans paid between $600 and $2,000 per child. The children had reportedly come from private nursing homes around Ireland, including five in Dublin.

“Could not truthfully be refuted”
When the Department of External Affairs asked the special detective unit to comment on the article, the only claim it disputed was that the paper’s source was a garda.

Higher up the legal pecking order, the secretary of the Department of Justice, Peter Berry, advised that the story “could not truthfully be refuted” because there was “some basis for the allegation in question”.
Three years earlier a German newspaper, 8 Uhr Blatt, had carried a somewhat similar exposé headlined “1,000 children disappear from Ireland”. Many of the children, it was suspected, were destined to be sold on the United States’ thriving baby “black market”, where the going price was $3,000 a child, according to the newspaper. On this occasion the Irish chargé d’affaires in Bonn, Aedan O’Beirne, wanted to insist that the paper “publish a rebuttal of the story”, but his superiors in Dublin noted that “no action is required, especially as the article is largely correct”.
With the authorities determined to keep the scandal under wraps, the traffickers were pursued without vigour, and the children, whose welfare seemed of little concern to the State, were abandoned to their fate.
The scandal continued into the 1960s when a Garda investigation into another illegal adoption racket – one police believed was run by a prominent Irishman – led to the prosecution of a Dublin midwife, Mary Keating, who had also been involved in the 1950s venture. Keating was interviewed as part of a special-branch operation in the 1950s, along with birth mothers. At that time, special branch also communicated with adoptive parents in the US.
Keating owned St Rita’s nursing home in Ranelagh, and in 1965 she was put on probation for falsifying a birth record. But behind this seemingly technical charge lay an enterprise involving private nursing homes that ran a sideline business providing “illegitimate” babies, born in their homes, to people who, for whatever reason, couldn’t or didn’t want to adopt legally. Their modus operandi was simple. Instead of registering the baby in the name of its unmarried mother, as the law required, they registered it in the name of the couple to whom the baby was given, a serious criminal offence.
The falsification process is outlined in a letter from St Rita’s to a prospective adoptive parent in the US. It is also logged in detail in the Irish special-branch report. The New Haven Register article from 1955 describes the situation for US military personnel, who accounted for many of the adoptions. “To adopt a baby the American soldier and his wife would travel to Dublin, where the wife checked in to the nursing home as an expectant mother. An Irish woman would actually bear the child, but the birth would be registered in the name of the American.”

....... wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

gctest50 wrote: »

Instead, how about ordering the timber to make crosses and nail every nun and every priest up

weirdspider wrote: »

Feeling ashamed to even be part of this country anymore. I know it's in the past but how did the RCC ever have such an influence on our people and how did such corruption go unquestioned?
The more I think about this the more disturbing it all seems.

chasm wrote: »

She got the Death Certificates from the registry office in Galway according to an article in the Journal:

"She finally began to get the information when she contacted the registry office in Galway to try to get death certificates for every child who had died at The Home. Speaking to IrishCentral in 2014, she described how it was the first time that it became clear that a large number of children had died there:

Corless paid €4 for each death certificate and, between 2011 and 2013, ended up with the total number: 796

At 796 deaths, this means that one child died approximately every fortnight at The Home – a mortality rate far higher than the rate for other children in Ireland at the time.

Catherine cross-referenced the list of 796 names to see if any of the children were buried in local cemeteries. A Galway County Council archivist told her that none of the names appeared in any nearby cemetery."

http://www.thejournal.ie/catherine-corless-tuam-mother-and-baby-home-3268501-Mar2017/

wil wrote: »

I am not sure if anybody realises most of these are probably now available online in the civil records. But only in the last few months.

Ireland's historical civil records were released online towards the end of 2016.
Births, deaths and marriages. I accidentally came across them while looking up some details for a family ancestor. They appear as scanned sheets of 10 names per sheet and are afaik the details off the death cert recorded in the local council office to register the death. The indexing is basic - name, year, age at death.

While searching I came across a person with a similar name who died in Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea at age 0.

What shocked me most was there were 4 other names of under one year old infants on the same page all died in Sean Ross Abbey, all listed as son or daughter of a house servant, all different causes, all from different parts of the country, all reported by the same name, an "occupier"
Looking at several other sheets, all the same story, 4/5/6 names per sheet.
A search shows over 1000 infant deaths under one in the small town of Roscrea between 1930 -1950
A search of Tuam shows exactly the same pattern.

What I can't comprehend, among many things, is that if I can look at a list of so many infant deaths on one sheet from a civil office, signed by I presume a local council official and go "what the holy f", then where was the same reaction from the human pen pusher in these council offices dotted around the country.

To put some context on it. Many of the other infant deaths, who died at their own home had coroner or inquest details, even back in those years. No such mention for these poor children under the so called care of nuns. I wonder did they even see a doctor before being allocated their many and various causes of death. Shocking and appalling.

The_Valeyard wrote: »

Did you really just compare the horrors of the Tuam homes and dead babies to that of a banned or closed account tag line????

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

My question is:

Have any of ye done this? Formally left the Catholic Church? If you have, did you join a different Christian denomination and which one? Do you have any fears or hangups regarding the church's (in hindsight, increasingly moronic) teaching that nobody other than Catholics can get in to heaven, etc?

Words cannot describe my raw fury right now. :mad: