“Stifling, oppressive and brutally misogynistic” is how the Government has described the regime that allowed Mother & Baby Homes to flourish in our State.
The shocking and harrowing 2,865 page report has just been published after survivors and victims support groups were first shown a copy earlier this lunchtime.
It makes for grim and horrifying reading as it details the sub-human conditions and slavery the women who were forced into the homes were made endure.
And it reveals the tragic reality for the first time of the thousands of deaths of babies in the institutions.
It is estimated that as many as 9,000 infants died in the 18 homes under the remit of the report between 1922 and 1998.
There were approximately 56,000 that went through the homes in this time so this reveals abrutal mortality rate of almost one in six children - far above the regular death rate outside.
Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman, is presenting the report this afternoon.
He said: “The publication of the Commission’s report is a landmark moment for the Irish State. The Commission’s investigation reveals the truth of what happened, within the walls of Mother and Baby Homes and beyond them, to many thousands of women and children. Importantly, it also inscribes for posterity, those journeys, those heartbreaks, those truths in the words of those who experienced them first-hand.
“The report makes clear that for decades, Ireland had a stifling, oppressive and brutally misogynistic culture, where a pervasive stigmatisation of unmarried mothers and their children robbed those individuals of their agency and sometimes their future.
“Publication of the Commission’s report is an expression of truth. For decades, Irish society was defined by its silence, and, in that, its complicity in what was done to some of our most vulnerable citizens. With its publication, we are affirming that their stories and their truth, will be heard, acknowledged and understood.”
