The home at Tuam was never called a Mother and Baby Home. Its official name was St. Mary’s Children’s Home and in all the historical sources it is referred to as Tuam Children’s Home or simply as the children’s home. It has been falsely renamed as a Mother and Baby Home to bolster the falsehood that children were abused and murdered because the women running the home “hated bastards”. It is an argument which is not based on historical evidence.
Category Archives: Tumulus Hystericus
The mound of hysterical articles on Irish Mother and Baby Homes/
The Unmarked Grave Site Lie
Almost every photo taken of the memorial garden where some children from the Tuam Children’s Home are buried show a gate with a Christian cross marking the site our as a cemetery. A second gate bears a cross also and in the corner is a Catholic Marian shrine. These were in place long before the scandal broke in 2014 and probably date to the 1970s when the home was knocked and a housing estate built in its place. It was not an unmarked grave site.
Paupers the world over, even today, or people whose families cannot afford a funeral cost, are buried in mass graves without an individual grave marker. There is nothing-disrespectful intended by the authorities, but it is by any definition burial on the cheap. There are very few if any local authorities or taxpayers in the world will pay for full funerals, burials, and individual grave markers because it is perceived to be an unfair burden on taxpayers. Like the Tuam Home, Barnardo’s children’s charity in London has been subjected to sensationalist reporting for burying 500 children in unmarked graves. Furthermore, the local authorities are required by law in most jurisdictions to carry out such burials for public health reasons.
At a time when money was tight in the 1930s and 40s, to the women in charge of the Tuam Children’s Home, it might have appeared to be a crime to spend money on the dead when it was needed for the living. Accordingly, I think someone decided to repurpose an empty concrete subterranean structure as burial crypts. 80 years later, the Irish’ imagination got the better of them and stories of holocausts, abuse and septic tanks. Accordingly, Ireland can claim another world first, as it is the first country in the world to have an organisational all-female inspired and executed holocaust in history.
A product of cultural prejudices and a failure of education.
The Starvation Lie
The chief lie upon which the mother and baby scandal relies upon is the claim that babies were starved to death. This relies on a small number of death certificates which record the cause of death as due to ‘marasmus‘. Marasmus is a type of malnutrition that is mostly caused by disease or birth defects. It is a barefaced lie to suggest that it is due to starvation.
The evidence to disprove the starvation claims is abundant and has occurred at all other Irish maternity hospitals, private homes and private institutions which provided care for infants.
Featured below are a sample of death certificates taken from the register of deaths for Dublin where the cause of death was certified as due to marasmus.
The first is of two entries are records of marasmus deaths at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Below that is a scan of one of the many deaths from marasmus which occurred at Temple St Children’s Hospital in Dublin. How is it that the scandal propagators and the conspiracy theorists were not accusing them of leaving babies to starve to death and of murder?
When the evidence is presented it is obvious to any sensible person that ‘marasmus‘ is not a record of starvation. The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes have also exposed these ‘commentators’ as dolts. Here is a relevant excerpt from the final report.
33.5 Some commentators have concluded that infant deaths which occurred in mother and baby homes due to marasmus indicates that infants were neglected, not appropriately cared for, and/or wilfully starved to death in these institutions.
However, marasmus was a frequently cited cause of infant deaths in institutional, hospital and community settings in early twentieth-century Ireland. The Commission considers it unlikely that deaths in hospitals and family homes were due to wilful neglect and so cannot conclude that the term marasmus denotes wilful neglect in mother and baby homes. The more likely explanation is that marasmus as a cause of death was cited when an infant failed to thrive due to malabsorption of essential nutrients due to an underlying, undiagnosed medical condition.
Every maternity hospital in Ireland has deaths due to marasmus but only the Christian institutions were singled out with false accusations of starving babies to death. They were the only institutions subjected to a commission for investigation and this is indicative of anti-Christian bias and of an attack on Christianity. Thus, the book title and a chapter dedicated to defending against these scurrilous accusations. Have a look at this article to see what kind of allegations Irish politicians have made and what if any medical knowledge they based their opinion on. Taken from the parliamentary record.
Why were these hospitals not investigated and accused of starving babies to death?
The Irish Attack on Christianity – The Case for the Defence
A new book takes an empirical look at the mother and baby homes scandal and others in what the author claims to be Ireland’s greatest history scandal. A scandal founded upon false allegations, bad history and incompetent statistical interpretation. It drew its oxygen from populism, cultural biases and the prospect of compensation, and it grew into a triumph for ignorance. Babies were not starved to death by religious women, women were not banned from sitting on juries, nor were they banned from doing work ‘unsuited to their sex’ nor did the state create a ‘brutal carceral’ system to confine wayward women. The underlying causes of the mother and baby homes scandal have been allowed to fester for decades due to a breakdown in the quality control systems in academic history. The aim of the book is to apply the quality control methods which should have been in use and seek to discover the reasons for their failure. Read more…
Getting rid of an Embarrassment to Catholic Ireland!
Soon after the Tuam story went global in 2014, University College Dublin’s Professor of Modern History, Diarmaid Ferriter, wrote ‘the State and Church colluded to get rid of an embarrassment to Catholic Ireland’. Irish Independent, 6 June 2014.
For Ferriter, it was only Catholic Ireland that was disposing of its embarrassment but for years before there were similar claims made about a Protestant Ireland. A year and a half before Ferriter’s article there were claims that babies were actually slaughtered there.
There was slaughter [at the Bethany Protestant Mother and Baby Home] from 1935 to 1944 during which years 132 babies met their deaths there.’ – Victoria White – Irish Examiner, January 03, 2013
Ferriter did not realise that it was the British who came up with the idea of mother and baby homes, and suggested that they be placed under the control of a religious communities to avoid the abuses which occur in secular institutions. The commission of investigation report states:
52. The first proposal for mother and baby homes in Ireland came in the 1907 Vice Regal Commission on the Irish Poor Law.
[…] These homes should be owned and run by religious organisations; alternatively they should be established by local authorities, who would place them under the control of a religious community.
