(CN) — Ireland's prime minister said on Tuesday he will issue a formal apology for the widespread abuse unwed mothers and their children suffered inside institutions run by the state and Catholic Church during much of the 20th century.
Prime Minister Micheál Martin's government on Tuesday released a 2,865-page report into the horrific and deadly conditions inside institutions where tens of thousands of unwed mothers and their children born out of wedlock were housed between 1922 and 1998. The report said about 9,000 children died in the institutions during that period, which accounts for about 15% of all the children born in the homes.
“The report describes a dark, difficult and shameful chapter of very recent Irish history,” Martin said during a news conference in Dublin. “It opens a window onto a deeply misogynistic culture in Ireland over several decades with serious and systematic discrimination against women, especially those who gave birth outside marriage.”
For much of the 20th century, unmarried Irish women who became pregnant were treated as deviants and became outcasts in a society dominated by an intolerant and cruel Catholic Church.
They were forced into so-called “mother and baby homes” run by Catholic nuns and state-run facilities called “county homes.” Many children also were sent into foster homes where they suffered further abuse and were illegally adopted, often by Americans. The report contains harrowing testimony from survivors of the institutions who suffered abuse, hunger and mistreatment.
The report examined 14 mother-and-baby homes and four county homes throughout Ireland that housed 56,000 women, some as young as 12, and 57,000 children between 1922 and 1998, when the last such home was closed. These homes saw the highest levels of admissions during the 1960s and 1970s.
Martin said his government will set up a compensation scheme for survivors and provide them with counseling and enhanced health care.
His government said it will ask church institutions to contribute payments to the scheme. But the prime minister declined to specify how much of the financial burden should be borne by the church.
“This system was supported by, contributed to and condoned by the institutions of the state and the churches,” the prime minister said.
The Irish government is also proposing to establish a national memorial to commemorate the victims and set up a central archive where information about the institutions can be viewed. It is further promising to help survivors of the homes and their families to find their biological relatives.
Ireland has been dealing with this new dark chapter of its history since an amateur historian revealed in 2014 that about 800 children were buried inside a home in Tuam run by nuns with the Sisters of Bon Secours. The nuns who ran the home allegedly treated children so badly that many died from disease, neglect and malnutrition.
Investigators believe about 800 children were buried on the home’s grounds without proper burial and that most of their bodies were put into an underground chamber that was part of a sewage system, according to a government report.
On Tuesday, the government said it will present legislation to pave the way for remains in Tuam to be properly dug up and identified.
Martin said Ireland needs to reckon with this past.
“It presents all of Irish society with profound questions,” he said. “We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy and young mothers and their sons and daughters were forced to pay a terrible price for that dysfunction … We must face up to the full truth of our past.”
But the report and government's proposals to compensate victims were met with some criticism.
Critics blasted the report for not taking a harsher stance toward the Catholic Church. The report said the church could not be held responsible for sending mothers into the homes and instead said Irish society as a whole shared the blame.