Ireland's Children of Shame (Church Scandal Documentary) | Real Stories

[Music] that they will beat these women Marie who do just fallen women in the work to be punished and that's even the poor little illegitimate chick from the call of the spawn of the devil which is absolutely terrible in the Twilight children were sleeping all I kept saying over and over and over again in my head was Bob's a four month what the hell was it for you're gone and I haven't got my son the darkness gets darker without a fall I was so ashamed of being born out of bedrock at wedlock for starters it was all to do with shame and then my mother was ashamed and her family would have been ashamed because I came on the scene so everything to do with my life was shame so singing his son John Rogers is one of these children of shame a child born in sin guilty of having been born outside the sacred bond of matrimony he is one of the tens of thousands of ill-fated children born in ultra Catholic 20th century Ireland hidden in turned cast away by society I'm a child of fear because of somebody taking advantage of her she paid for that's they now that crime or whatever you want to call it for the best part of a life it's like the whole life was spent paying the price but having given birth to me and that's something that's I used to deal with that I hope they have to absorb and it hasn't been easy over the years john was stormed from the arms of his mother Bridey when he was just one year old fate ultimately brought them back together and since her death in 2001 he has constantly sought to retrace the course of their respective lives and I remember asking my mother many many years David I said what was it life when you were going up I never forgot the answer she said John I didn't have a childhood and now I think I know why John was born in a home for single mothers in to him a town that hit their headlines in the spring of 2014 a hell on earth who are hundreds of children are said to have died from ill treatment bastards fatherless babes whose very existence was denied until and beyond their deaths shamefully buried in secret and then forgotten the to a mother and baby home no longer exists but resembled this abandoned building in Connemara it was there that his mother grew up it is here that he can confront the demons of his past I didn't believe proceeded seeing is believing the two children when they came here like my mother if you didn't wash yourself at the wash basin when her name was you got leveled you got beaten how stupid is that I just can't believe it it's like turning the clock back it's like being a little infant now running around here but I'm running around and sure but this is what it was like I'm just one of those lovely children to have survived that to him a tranquil town in western Ireland to him a name that has traumatized the whole country since an unimaginable story was first revealed the existence of a mass grave with the remains of some 800 children are said to be buried beneath the grass on the edge of a playing field there are no images of the bodies there has been no investigation and no excavations the bodies were hidden on the grounds of the - a mother and baby girl one of the prison like maternity units run by nuns when pregnant single mothers were locked up before having their babies taken from them definitively [Music] in the consciousness of the town everybody knew that the home had existed and without thinking very much about it nobody was particularly surprised that there would have been babies buried there it wasn't something that that was part of our consciousness the locals at first believed only a handful of stillborn babies were involved one neighbor had a small memorial built in their honor but without knowing the numbers or the identities of the deceased there is a tendency in Ireland not to talk about things in public the likelihood is that there was a lot of discussion in families and I suppose sometimes it takes a light shine from outside to bring it to the surface again this light from outside came via the National Press who bestowed a whole other dimension on the affair they spoke of 800 deaths children aged between one and nine who died from malnutrition or the lack of treatment hurriedly buried with no religious service because they were illegitimate thrown into a mass grave like unwanted trash to be disposed of in secret a new scandal for the Irish clergy already reeling from 15 years of Revelations involving pedophile priests and the internment of women in convents there's been numerous Church scandals and I think this was the last major well I hope the last major scandal from the church the whole story had exploded we were talking about you know an 800 baby mass grave over in June but there was no identity for any of these children and we just felt that it was very important now to give them a name to give them some recognition and you know they went from being children in the ground to to angels and to people and they deserve some sort of dignity on May 25th 2014 Alice no Riley dropped a bombshell with an article in the Irish mail on Sunday publishing a list of the babies allegedly thrown into the mass grave by the Bon Secour nuns who ran the - a mother and babies home 795 names a macabre list that horrified Irish nation and beyond to the scandal immediately became international UTP alongside yet nothing's done neither the local authorities nor the police decided to heat up the audience's confront a shameful truth of events societal apparently unsigned and disease cartoonish Western and danila católica in sf4 sending contra de ros kilometers of used to shelters it really is a disgusting story heartbreaking more painful than anything that something like this went on in Ireland I feel that no matter what we have to bring it out into the open we have to deal with us for the mothers for the families but most of all for those children who have died in such horrific circumstances so yeah it's not far off for Holocaust the Holocaust the word worth shocks and raises questions what exactly have added to all did so chill the parts of a whole country to understand the origins of affair we have to talk to Katherine Corliss it was due to the determination of this farmer's daughter and amateur historian and genealogies that the story behind one of Ireland's most sordid secrets first broke like many inhabitants of tuam Katherine remembers the old grave Fortas like building the mother and baby's home destroyed in the 1970s a model of which she built herself and which now stands in her kitchen I remember these little children coming in later than waiters they were put at the back of the classroom and the nonsti didn't really involve themselves with them they were treated differently for the mothers that went in there I found out that mothers who went in there were sent in by their families first of all it goes back to the church they were condemned from the altar by priests it was almost a criminal offence to get pregnant to put them into this form behind those eight-foot high walls that surrounded the mother and baby home first of all when I started out it was mainly to be just a history of the home and the mother and baby home and the children and the mothers and to try and find a little bit out about them but while I was talking to people in the area I started asking them questions and just by the way someone said to me you do know there's a little graveyard there in the coroner now I had never heard of that [Music] Catherine Corliss at first thought about the town cemetery on the other side of the road but certain older locals she talked to mentioned graves on the homes own grounds at the galway registry office she finally obtained a list of the children who had died at the home exactly 795 deaths between 1925 and the homes closure in 1961 she compared the list with the tuam cemetery archives she was stunned there's no record at all whatsoever of these children where they are buried I didn't cross checked the local cemeteries around the area every town land has its own cemetery and they're neither are they and in those books so we have 795 children who died we have their deserts we have not burying records for them a staggering number which casts a black cloud over the dozens of mother and baby homes that operated throughout Ireland tens of thousands of children were born in such places before being taken for their mother's arms a deeply troubling story which began in the middle of the nineteenth century originally the workers were actually very much about offering minimum assistance to people who are financially vulnerable but unmarried mothers obviously gravitated there and it's only when you see the rise of the Catholic Church in the 1850s and 1860s when it becomes a really powerful institution in Ireland that there's this push to code these places morally and the Catholic Church is very much the forefront of saying if unmarried mothers are being accommodated in the work houses then they need to be separated from all the other people because they are morally contagious she is the one that has to be hidden now because her existence belies the idea of Ireland as morally pure when Ireland became independent in 1922 the Catholic faith became Ireland's standard bearer and the embodiment of national identity virginity was idealized in pregnancy out of wedlock seriously stigmatized women who transgressed were taken in considerable numbers to the notorious Magdalene laundries where they were sentenced to hard free labor under the strict authority of nuns in order to expiate their sins and there was a huge emphasis on on building a secure nation distinct from Britain we were very poor country and there was a an enormous kind of emphasis on our moral purity we may be poor but we were more pure than dirty Britain and so this kind of idea of a purity of our nation and the purity of the character of the people became a very kind of excitement idea and of course all of this purity was fought out on the bodies of girls and women such beliefs were widely shared by the religious orders which regimented Irish Society the sisters of the Good Shepherd the bon secours sisters the sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary of Our Lady of Charity the state entrusted the church with implementing the young nation's social policy and it imposed a moral straightjacket often with the active complicity of Irish citizens if you look at the way in which contemporaries talked about on married mothers they used legal terminology so they referred to first-time offenders and repeat offenders that was referring to the first pregnancy in any subsequent pregnancy so that's legal terminology for something that is not a legal crime and that's the extraordinary thing is that this system perpetuated right up until the 1980s where people were working for nothing in these institutions and that was accepted by everybody involved including the families of these women where they never questioned that system and I think it's because for some people the church was too low to an and it's mass grave may ultimately be only one of the cogs in an iniquitous system which persisted throughout the 20th century the story is incomprehensible unless one studies the origins of the Irish Republic a political regime where the church was nominally separate from the state or written constitution the accepted wisdom of the written constitution is that it was largely drafted under the beady eyes of the lady Eamon de Valera perhaps the most prominent Irish politician of the 20th century but the Archbishop of Dublin scrutinized every word of the era's Constitution before it was put to the people in a referendum his name was John Charles McQuaid he is a remarkable figure he died I think in 1972 he had been Archbishop for the greater part of 40 years and in that time he was probably the most dominant figure in Ireland and so church and state would hand-in-glove to establish an implacable organization a system of internment and mandatory labor for all pregnant unmarried women like Bridey john's mother who experienced all manner of institutions a juvenile detention center the - a mother and baby home and after a baby was taken reclusion once more for 15 years she was incarcerated in a mandoline laundry from which he escaped at the age of 34 a lifetime of servitude and grieving of endless thoughts for a son John to whom she wrote every month in vain and it's painful to admit what's that I was running away from her you know because I was ashamed of her it was a terrible stigma it was a horrendous thing it was horrendous going to school because I was always called a bastard child I was told so many times that nobody wanted me the bastard child John sees himself as a survivor he did not die in the to him home he stayed there until he was five and a half much longer than the average inmate and of course the big high wars that Wars like the prison type Wars there was completely surrounded in the ground and the hundreds of children too was there it seemed like to me like there was a couple hundred children there all different ages and those toilets those opening our toilets over against the be high wall I mean they were just nearly opened a line of toilet balls so that's why memory and so above all John remembers the children who disappeared from the home into him after a few weeks or months only rarely after several years adopted like himself into a foster family it was a supermarket where people from all over the country particularly County Galway all around film they went in and they picked out a child and then on the bottom on a tour of the grounds and two or three children might have been shown in several which of those are we going to go for I think maybe we'll go for the little fella there is five or six no I think I'd like somebody bit older or a [ __ ] oh dear mr. and mrs. Brennan we had a very nice letter from your priest and we are pleased that you persevered in your application so I think we will be able to give you a baby kindly let me know by return post if possible what age baby you would be interested in at the moment we have two lovely boys don't delay in writing as we have a very great demand for children at the moment God and Mary be with you it was no doubt with a letter of this kind that John's fate was sealed handed over to a new family by the bond circle sisters the O'Briens provided a home in exchange for a modest state allowance the system was somewhat less benevolent with regard to the mothers who were forced to abandon their children my mother was forced to stay for a year and a month yes and then when she left that picture in the morning and she had nothing winter she had nothing just you could bring she was no point to bringing in the jumper or a little glove or a little sock or a shoe or anything like that so what she did was she could off a lock of my hair as keepsake and to hoard that was a symbol that she'd never were parted from her son and she noticed she'd keep that and she did it and she kept it for 30 odd years until it will reunite it and then she handed it back to me in this house lock of hair of 1948 which hard to believe it has survived all this time John started writing when he was in his 60s he devoted his first book to his mother's life story a form of catharsis for John a lesson in perseverance and hope via the story of a woman who never admitted defeat have to be made to give up a son as a survivor if to him used today in shock he could have died there like the 795 others but what did they die off John would like to know [Music] there is a woman who would like to know - she wishes to remain anonymous so we shall call her Helen a collateral victim of the infernal machine on the death of her mother two years ago she learnt that she had two half-brothers one of them is among the 795 who died it too and the other may have been adopted or is also dead you know it's to find you have two brothers then to find the conditions they were treated under then to find that this had happened and here we judge and then to find that there's one missing I mean it's an absolute murder I don't even III I'm in shock at the moment that's I mean emotion it again I'm Jade at the moment I just I'm waiting for the explosion I'm an only child I have no siblings it's been quite traumatic to realize that my whole life can was a base and a light and so my mother's making shame guilt forced into live in a life helen has found the admission form for her mother at the two on home there is no doubt to the matron or other officer in charge of the children's home to him I hereby certify that to the best of my belief bridgett Dolan aged 28 years is a person in the county eligible for relief who is an expectant unmarried mother 26 March 1950 Helen looked further in the homes registry she discovered proof of the ill treatment the babies were victims of despite the allowance paid by the state for each child living there came across the report and to say that he was listed in this reporters report on the home and the conditions in the home but he was emaciated with a voracious appetite towards you don't joke suppose to each other Maisie ADA means you're starved voracious appetite means you're starving somebody's not feeding 13 months old Helen asked the Bon Secour sisters for more information and received a letter from sister Mary Ryan who runs the orders Irish branch a letter in which it is clearly admitted that the remains of Helens brother were probably buried in the small makeshift cemetery on the old Holmes own grounds I have requested to my solicitor on thought of the report I made to the guarantee that I believed it was criminality involved the Attorney General to open this grave and to identify exactly where my brother is in relation to and I also want them disinterred and Riaan chaired with his mother in a proper graveyard a proper consecrated graveyard and give her some peace and him some peace at least if the rains good night good night be nice in death but the official authorities still refuse to exhume the bodies for them there is no question of unearthing a secret that so many have tried to stifle for decades perhaps because this would involve facing a barrage of questions concerning the whole mother and baby home operation but in the name of who in the name of what could such atrocities have been committed why was the mortality rate so horrific more than likely they died of infectious disease called gastroenteritis and it was a highly infectious disease that killed most babies in Ireland before the 1940s and one way of preventing gastroenteritis was breastfeeding and of course if these mothers were being separated from their babies then what were their chances of breastfeeding that the death rate was five and six times higher than babies born within marriage the state's response was this is shocking this is terrible but it doesn't fall within our remit these babies were illegitimate they were quite literally illegal and unless there were families who were willing to adopt them and unless the nuns could make in some ways some kind of either financial or political social capital in being the people who provided these babies for adoption there was very little interest in them there were a problem but we do or shouldn't UPS father want us Derek was one of those unwanted problem children his childhood was nothing with humiliation and mistreatment that is she was born in a mother and baby home in Dublin this time run by the Protestant with you but the administration was equally on charitable for bastards although I was affected in ways that I didn't even know that could have stemmed to being about me home if if you weren't aware of those factors where my wife will confirm that I was always OTT when it came to the dealing with children's nappies I couldn't if a child a young child nappy as stage star was crying I would always have to say karachays his nappy it was his nappy changed and finding out years later through our research that children was left with virtually with nappies on rotting before there was changed [Music] Dericks childhood reveals the insidious and Machiavellian aspect of the history of the children of shame he symbolizes the almost industrial and illegal nature of the adoption trade in Ireland at the time snubbing every law and with tacit government complicity religious orders became improvised adoption agencies literally selling children the business provided significant income be it impossible to calculate the secret is well guarded by the church I was born Derek Leinster Leinster I then became dairy trainer I then became dairy car way and I then became Derek lynnster even Derek is lost it's not easily construct a new identity when you're constantly switched from one family to the next changing name each time his adoptive parents lured by the allowances paid by the state and others so I'm as little more than a malleable source of free labor 17 years ago Derek found the man he calls his brother the son of his first adoptive parents Tom was nine years old when Derrick was placed in his family in the early 40s or one of the only living people on earth that would have remembered me when I was seven and a half months old yeah sure very norcia you remember the state the limousine will arrive I have to get that a position to do your hair because there's a lot of cabinets do you remember that yeah well I don't but you tow it I remember you saying about I gotta pull sense comes overhead yeah and the hands used to be full of Lord between you and Sam I used to have to take off the scab off your heads talked about nearly a year to those [Music] Dericks photo album is a mosaic of a chaotic existence he revisits the main events with Tom the Dublin home with its glacial dormitories the matrons it would make life more than tough the various families where he sometimes settled for a while [Music] the only mother that you that you had in our are your mother which we sure absolutely what a special age yeah it was your mother yeah all the time so when you think that that's an age where a child needs its mother well it was your mother where you go someone had to do it right but mommy usually busy and the firemen are and with the other children are someone had to the last thing you want you're only carrying out your job course told to do jewelry yeah a child without a real family Derick finally found happiness thanks to Carole his wife for 50 years and mother of their four children but today seeing Tom again the conversation inevitably returns to the burning issue of the day the ghosts of Tula you see that a whole lot of babies know that the long to pee go for seven want that something you know that oh yes yes and some of these quite always yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's sad okay well shut with the way it was into him Katherine call us it's continued our investigation she now knows the identities and the number of missing children but the bodies have not been found she wants to know where the 795 children of shame are buried glad to have another silver leather she has found a key wit walk the earth he takes us to the crime scene Franny Hopkins is 15 angel he's been a United Nations blueberry in Lebanon and Sudan and a scene but the memory of what he saw the child one afternoon in 1975 he has never faded after shoes where gender play area and in the early seventies it was like a derelict building calm building site or in the process of building this I was in a state and one day my friend and I Barry were in here and over that wall used to be an orchard and we're in get Napa's and I'm coming out the arching jump from the wall and landed on the ground here I mean London the realm was had to hollow the respected the overgrown weeds from who discovered that the slab of concrete so prized alt in the slab of concrete and I discovered to her harder jumble of bones massive bones and even neighbor hotel that over that of children and possibly babies it was like a crypt at home I'm the richest actor and there's bits of rags and you know but this leaves just bones and doctor and rags and as I said you're not surprised and probably this shocked [Music] further vital testimony supports the retired soldiers account that same year 1975 the home was razed to the ground by bulldozers but before the site was covered over with a playing field and a small housing estate someone saw something a neighbor came into my house one day and she said there's one of the young buyers out the back had em stick with a school in it so I examined it and I asked him where did you get and he said there was more in a hole up there finding up to the rice when I went over there with the other two women and we were looking to see what we could see and I kind of want to look in kind of to see what it was but the ground won't from into my feast was very waste it was after heavy rain and I ended up down in the hole and the women grabbed me by the shoulders here told me and I said we're Swiss I remember saying that I both maybe could be six or eight feet in front of me I noticed something and it was it was ever forever like a stare has gone away from me like the steps were born like that that's what my thinking effort was because there was all little bundles lead on each step and they were rolled up like a leisure bottle and that you rolled it up in something and it was like cloth that had gone black or agree and I knew it was something rolled in that and they were all over the place in there and I said pull me out now and I was pretty shook up and mucky Mary returned some time later accompanied by a local woman who had worked at the home several years previously she kind of bent over like this and had a look into the hall and oh yes she said that they're all in there now them little babies I often brush one out there and she said there's a tunnel come back in there too over to the hospital and she pointed over her left shoulder over there she said that's the babies were born and I would have many time rush one down there live them their little infants marry cast this lugubrious image for her mind until she herself gave birth 18 months later in a maternity unit run by bomb secured sisters my baby was brought in and when I want to lift it out of the little cart I a kind of got an awful fright because it was rolled up very tightly in cloth and it was just his faith out and I stripped everything off the child pulled all this stuff after us all tied up it kept bothering me because that's when I realized that that's how the birth the babies up there and then the other people told me that's what they used to keep their babies in when they were in there the nuns just show that [Music] an aerial view from the 1970s presents a clear view of the area's topography we can see houses being built on the site of the old home there's an area with piles of rubble and a stand of trees along the perimeter it was here that Mary fell and saw the bundled up babies and here that there seven hundred and ninety-five children may have lain piled up and buried for so many years the key testimony of Franny Hopkins and Mary Moriarty has guided Katherine Corliss in her research after studying plans of the home from various times in the 20th century she is convinced that the nuns used a disused cesspool to bury the children those drawings in particular are from the tomb Oracle's and it indicates exactly where all the cesspools are we have what was the underground cesspools may look like to fully understand this we need to imagine a place as it was 50 years ago a network of tunnels spread out from the home towards former cesspit systems on the outer edges of the property it was no doubt in this maze that the bodies of the children were transported and buried now these festivities and tolerance were talking about there are seven foot high there could be walked through the or fourth was white they would have been done in a red brick so the would resemble a burial chamber so again I have marked out all these cesspools in red here so we know exactly where today where the children where I where I figure the may be buried where the cesspools are we need to know that secret hit me suspicions seemed well-founded Iijima first division scientific support it came through Tony McGuire an expert and estimate Rays who had made a reputation with the discovery of a concealed mass grave in the sternness if you dealt with exhuming around a hundred bodies their secret child does not breathe the chim case reflects what I've already been doing for a number of years in the north of Ireland we have been working for a long time now to give recognition to these areas of marginalized infant burial within Irish culture they're called Collini now Killeen is any area of unblessed or unhallowed grind which is used for the burial of particular individuals including children especially children who died before baptism as soon as the tomah scandal was revealed Toni went to the scene but she wasn't dealing with typical Collini here with merely a few isolated secluded graves this involved almost 800 children Toni Maguire scanned the area believed to contain the bodies the initial results corroborated the clues and visual testimony indicating that the babies were buried here right beneath her feet but actually it adds great weight to the evidence that we've already collected allow me to show you if you imagine the back of this section is where we're standing now there's one single anomaly that runs right along the anomaly Toni mentions concerns these small red spots which appear on the scan in the tunnel and cesspit area with Franny and Marius or the bones and the bodies scientific analysis is therefore confirmed that something has been buried there [Music] Joanie knows from experience that it will require only quite basic excavation work to uncover bodies or small coffins if you had all the green taken off here and you let the surface of the ground dry out and you could see the footprint of each grave that would potentially be here then you would very quickly and very easily see a grouping of small little individual graves you would know that that section of burial is definitely children our parents told us not to come back to own air it again BB you shouldn't be here and numbers the rotten right and you know the priest was coming and the priest would bless the site and you know that whoever was buried there be children or adults or whoever that will oppress rest in peace so as I said we came back a few days later and the place was completely overhauled it was labeled and you know more or less plane and backfill this was the word to use to describe it in 1975 a few shovelfuls of Earth rapidly covered over Franny's sinister discovery but an official document released several years later reveals that the secret was not so secret after all it's a local council permit for construction on the site and the document clearly identifies the area as the old children's burial ground this is my church we expect our priests and our nuns to be just as accountable as anyone else in a position of power and we will get it it will happen because I will not stop until it does [Music] many questions have risen as the shockwave stirred up by the to him home revelations have spread for example was the prevailing moral outrage against unmarried mothers so overwhelming that they abandoned all hope as well as their babies did they do sorry except to hand over their babies to the nuns so they could be adopted Terry lives in a suburb of Dublin her testimony and her anger forcefully contradict the notion that the mother's meekly submitted to the forces of authoritative morality Terry became pregnant in 1972 at the age of 18 she fled from Ireland and her parents to take refuge with her aunt in England but after only a few weeks she realized she would have to move again when they went back to my aunt's all my clothes was in manse everything belong to me members of the clergy were in the kitchen and I was informed then that I was going back to Ireland but never said where just thought I was going to an airport on March 20th 1973 Terry was taken by force back to Ireland and interned in the best for a mother and baby home near Cork they put me in the car King Kok Airport and I was driven then to very isolated place were all trees and I just seemed in the middle of nowhere I could see this massive massive building with steps up to a big huge door and I was just you know in shock like where it where was I what was this place it was no more nor less than a kidnapping orchestrated by the crusade of rescue an Irish Catholic organization which with the blessing of local authorities tracked down and brought back fallen women to their native soil generally acting on a denunciation this document indicates that Terry's kidnapping resulted from our amps betrayal and she has no doubt her own mother was in on it I had never had any evidence but deep down I've always known it my mother and wanted to save face and her face and her fear of my father was far away to her need or one to her love for a ransom because he wasn't real he was never real to her he's never realized anybody in my family when they put me behind that wall in birdsburg even to this day this very day 41 years later not one single person my family has ever asked me what was it like Thierry eventually escaped from Despero but it was once more denounced by her mother caught by the sisters and interned in another home this time in Dublin she gave birth to a baby boy six days later the nuns forced to to Sian adoption papers and she was forever deprived of a son Niall 35,000 children met the same fate in the 20th century sold to Irish or American families a profitable business for the religious orders and an Irish specialty we could say honored by a Hollywood star like Jane Russell who came to the island to buy a family my son and I our lives were stolen and you never ever gave her back ever where did they think all these beautiful babies were coming from oh they gave them away they gave them away why would any girl in her right mind give her baby away the practice was even openly endorsed by the religious orders as this film shot in 1968 reveals the report features sister Paul the same nun who a few years later would organize the adoption of Tara's bathing we take in the background of the parents and what they really are looking for in a child but in fact most of the children that reductio would be illegitimate children wouldn't they they're all in adjustment because with most adopting parents if you brought them into a nursery show them three or four babies well they might want to take the whole out of them and they chose one baby but then be so sorry for the ones they left behind you wanna go home I would prosecute the Irish state and hold them accountable for the reason being without them this private religious group would have to have had no power whatsoever that sister Paul lest John Omani Franco holohan sister Patricia sister Elizabeth let them all stand in the room beside me and tell me who gave them the right to take my child despite the litany of scandals that has affected the clergy over the past 15 years Ireland is still disinclined to face up to its past in an attempt to shed light on the tuam affair the government has announced an official investigation but for the moment no action has been taken divorce has been legal for just 20 years and abortion is still forbidden with the social and political shackles of our society are still very much in place the Catholic Church in Ireland has a huge influence in the hearts and minds of people in Ireland still I think primarily because they're still in control of the national school system to a large part over 90 percent of the schools are Catholic run even other state funded at a primary level and then well over 60 percent of the second level schools are still run according to a strong religious ethos there has never been a political will in this country to address these awful circumstances by which people were treated so badly I believe that some of the most prominent members of the Irish clergy to the very highest levels of the Irish Catholic clergy and I mean the very highest I mean you can go no higher that they are among the people who protected for many years decades some of the worst abusers of children and they did so knowingly and I believe that even today some of them now [ __ ] from their high office but living should be pursued at the very least for the criminal conspiracy to protect abusers of children thousands of pedophile crimes a government inquiry Commission more than 800 guilty indisputable evidence and yet there has not been a single trial not one conviction such a flagrant denial of justice demonstrates the absolute impunity the church enjoys even today victims of sexual abuse women locked in laundry converse bested children in a country where one child in every fall is born out of wedlock is it not time for justice to be done I think the state feels a debt of honor so I think that's the reluctance it would be kind of literally eating itself to to attack the church and it's just not going to do it now if you ask me about Irish justice I would also say to you Irish justice I think that would also be a good idea despite repeated requests no member of government no magistrate no religious order has agreed to talk about the two am affair we've received just one unequivocal letter sent by the Bon Secour sisters communications service [Music] when the oh my god mass grave in West of Ireland broke in an English on paper it surprised the hell out of everybody not least the sisters of Bon Secours in Ireland if you come here you'll find no mass grave no evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force saying yeah a few bones were found but this was an area where famine victims were buried so several international TV stations have aborted their plans to make documentaries because essentially all that can be said is Ireland was a moralistic inward-looking anti-feminist country of exaggerated religiosity which most of us knew already [Applause] [Music] the story of Tim as yet has no epilogue it is bogged down for the moment in a distant corner of the county of mayo in the Far West of Ireland it began with a project for a memorial for 795 human beings 795 children who lie beneath the patch of ground in the town to him it has now been completed engraved thanks to money gathered by Katherine Corliss from various charitable souls even the sisters have Bon Secour of made a contribution the sculptor can now reveal his work to Katherine accompanied by Helen the half-sister of Desmond whose name is written on the bronze plaque [Music] it's a bit ironic actually but this this to me now is closure I brought flowers I didn't know whether I should leave them at the grave is the grave the grave here it's actually something concrete I can see his name yes the ironic thing is that heaven has nowhere else apart from this anonymous white house to pay her respects as long as a theoretical investigative Commission is not submitted its report no tombstone can be erected on the site of the former mother and baby home Atul will the unwanted problem children who lived here one day be entitled to a worthy resting place people don't like facing into into things like this they want to leave it in the past but we can't do this we have to remember those children with dignity we have to keep pressure on the inquiry group that's coming up and we hope demand answers before this year's ocean the investigation has to be done established sir today what's happening proper dedication given to the site and then the plaques can be put up and then people can come and then people can grieve breve the children who died in Oblivion mourn for generations of mothers whose lives were destroyed in the name of a purity obsessed morality claiming to serve righteous and rightful then the true masters of this story and yet the most noticeably absent there's no shame and being born there's no shame and not being married this was imposed by a regime a Catholic a catholic regime but I mean what about all the men like I don't see any homes from married father's secret child hidden in the crater beneath the sheets [Music] secret child born a flesh-and-blood in the stillness of night [Music] secret child [Music] does not breathe side of mothers [Music] outside were springtime bluebells blue [Music]

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 2,313,606

Rating: 4.7526445 out of 5

Keywords: Real Stories, tlc, Full length Documentaries, 2018 documentaries, timeline, crime, Channel 4 documentary, Documentaries, 2017 documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, BBC documentary, Full Documentary, only human, 2018, Extraordinary people, Amazing Stories, ireland, Amazing Documentaries

Id: kWBwjR6QPhI

Length: 53min 22sec (3202 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/lickdabean1]

Cant watch it im too angry. They are irish citizens, they all need a proper burial.