CRIME 'serious concern' that mother and baby home (unwed mother homes) records will be sealed for 30 years-Ireland

[Melodi]

Remember the horribly ugly Irish "Baby and Mother Homes"[Homes for unwed Mothers] in Ireland horror stories a few years ago, you know the one where the only "home" excavated so far found the bodies of dozens, maybe hundreds of dead babies and small children thrown in the sewer? The laundries attached to them where "unwed" Mothers were kept as slaves (per the courts) sometimes for decades doing laundry as "penance." You know the ones that the State of Ireland is liable for because they used these homes (run by the Catholic Church) as their official social services?

Well, the commission set on about these horrors has done its investigative work, the results I gather are horrifying in the extreme, and being Ireland a "legal excuse" is being found to just "lock up these records for 30 years" - basically until everyone that it personally matters to is DEAD or too elderly to keep searching for lost babies and kids, for "legal reasons" of "confidentiality" and it is "the law to always seal blah, blah"..

I felt like I had been "slimed" after just reading this and it is obvious even the journalist (and a good part of the appointed Senators) are sensing that "something is rotten in the State of Ireland" because it is.

And most of these homes, including one a few miles from our house, haven't even been excavated yet...let that sink in

[Note in Ireland incarceration in these homes was seldom voluntary and "inmates" who escaped could and were returned by the Irish Guards, police force, back into custody - this is why so many unwed Mothers fled to England from the 1930s until recently}
...Melodi

Senators express 'serious concern' that mother and baby home records will be sealed for 30 years

The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes is due to submit its final report later this month.

www.thejournal.ie

Senators express 'serious concern' that mother and baby home records will be sealed for 30 years
The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes is due to submit its final report later this month.
5 hours ago 22,011 Views 36 Comments
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Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children, Disability, Equality and Integration (file photo).
Image: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie
Updated 2 hours ago
CAMPAIGNERS AND ACADEMICS have called for the government to prevent records compiled by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes being sealed for 30 years.
Senators also expressed “serious concerns” over proposed legislation related to the commission’s records in a debate in the upper house today.
The Clann Project, Justice for Magdalenes (JFMR) and the Adoption Rights Alliance are against the records being sealed.
They say it will result in people being unable to access information “about their disappeared relatives or babies who are buried in unmarked graves”.
“All of the administrative files, which show how the abusive system of forced family separation was run, will also be withheld.
“It will not be possible to question the conclusions of the Commission of Investigation, to do further research, or to hold wrongdoers to account,” the groups said in a statement.
Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has denied the commission’s records will be put “beyond reach”.
The commission is due to submit its final report to O’Gorman by 30 October.
Under the 2004 Commissions of Investigation Act once it submits its final report, the commission will be dissolved and, prior to its dissolution, it must deposit all records with the minister to be sealed for a period of 30 years.
Last week the government approved the text of a Bill which it said will safeguard the records after the dissolution of the commission. The Bill was debated in the Seanad today.
A number of senators called for more time to examine the draft legislation, saying it is being rushed through.



The proposed legislation will see the transfer of certain documents from O’Gorman to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency.
Several people have raised concerns about the records being sealed, and have called for clarity on what evidence will be handed over to Tusla.
In a statement, O’Gorman said he understands concern around the issue “given Ireland’s history”. He said the new legislation is “needed to preserve access to invaluable information now and into the future, and not to put it beyond reach as has been reported”.
The commission was set up under the 2004 Commissions of Investigation Act. O’Gorman said the entire premise of the 2004 Act “is that investigations are held in private” – however, this has been disputed by academics.
“That confidentiality applies to the evidence and records gathered by the inquiry. It is central to allow testimony be given freely,” O’Gorman stated.
He added that the 2004 Act also requires that such records are sealed for a period of 30 years, pending their transfer to the National Archives, adding that this provision was already in place prior to the establishment of the commission.
O’Gorman also noted that earlier this year, the commission informed his department that it had created a database tracking who was in the main mother and baby homes, but “did not feel it had a legal basis to transfer that database and would be compelled by law to redact … valuable information”.
The minister said the bill being brought forward will preserve this information and allows the database to be transferred to Tusla, “with whom most of the original records are already held”.
O’Gorman said the new legislation will prevent the information “from effectively being destroyed” and will allow access to it under existing laws.
“The draft bill is focused on protecting a valuable resource which will assist in accessing personal information under existing law and be hugely beneficial in any future information and tracing legislation.”

Right to information
Speaking in the Seanad today, Labour Senator Ivana Bacik acknowledged the “important” work of the commission but said she and colleagues are “deeply disappointed” at the rushed nature of the legislation and cannot support it because of their “serious concerns”.
Bacik asked O’Gorman to ensure that data access requests to the archive of records will be facilitated.
“There’s a clear need for information. So many survivors, so many family members have expressed to us their urgent desire for information,” she said.






Bacik said “a huge amount of information” compiled by the commission “does not relate to statements given by witnesses”. She said survivors and their families should be granted access to the records kept by the religious orders in question.
She also called on O’Gorman to assure that an “appropriately anonymised index to the archive will be published” so that debate and consultation can be facilitated on the 30-year rule on sealing documents.
Bacik said an archive of historical abuse records needs to be set up, adding that Ireland owes this to the people affected by “our legacy of shame” over the treatment of women and children.
Speaking about privacy concerns, Bacik noted that senators failed to agree on elements of the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill 2016 when it was being debated last year because a compromise couldn’t be reached on privacy rights versus the right to information.
“In that bill as in this bill, there’s undue regard to privacy rights at the expense of the right to information and identity for those persons most directly affected, women and children and their own descendants,” she said.



O’Gorman told the Seanad the draft legislation must be passed before the commission dissolves upon the submission of its final report.
He said he wanted to reassure people who have “very legitimate anxieties” about access to birth information and tracing that future legislation will allow greater access to records.
“I am absolutely committed to addressing the long-running matter of birth information tracing legislation. This is not what this Bill today is going to address, but I’m absolutely committed to doing so.”
O’Gorman said “no future opportunity for access to this information will be lost, by virtue of this bill coming into effect”. He said the Bill’s purpose “is to preserve information … including the critically valuable database for future use to the maximum extent possible under the law”.
Senators and campaigners have raised concerns about records being given to Tusla, citing what they view as “discriminatory practices, including defining adopted people’s birth name as third party data”.
O’Gorman said the Bill is “not an expansion of Tusla’s role”, noting the body already holds many of the records in question.
When asked by TheJournal.ie about people’s concerns over Tusla’s involvement, a spokesperson said: “Tusla as a statutory body recognises the imperative for government to make a plan in relation to these records.”
They advised us to direct any other queries to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs.
‘Stopping families accessing infomation’
Speaking today, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said she had huge concerns about the fast-tracking of the Bill.
“There are huge concerns over the lack of consultation regarding this Bill, and there are serious questions as to why Minister O’Gorman is proceeding with this approach.
“The main concern here is the intention of the minister to transfer part of the Commission of Investigation’s archive to to Tusla without keeping a copy, and a plan to seal the remainder of the archive for a period of 30 years.
“This will prevent people from accessing their records from the minister’s archive, and it will stop families from accessing information about disappeared family members or babies buried in unmarked graves. I’m sure you will agree, Taoiseach, that this is very wrong,” she said, addressing Micheál Martin in the Dáil.
Responding, Martin said the reason the legislation has been put forward is to “provide urgent and critical legal clarity surrounding the future use” of the database.

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“It has been brought forward, genuinely being brought forward, to preserve invaluable information, not to put it beyond reach, as has been reported. So that’s not the intention.”
Martin said “the urgent issue in front of us is to ensure that we preserve the invaluable cache of information and not lose it forever”.
He said the database of the mothers and children who are resident in the main mother and baby homes “would be of considerable assistance to those involved in providing information tracing services to individuals who were residents in these institutions”.
Martin added that the legislation has been advanced to address current concerns raised by the commission about the need to redact personal information.
“The commission has concerns about the redaction of the information and wants to transfer the database in its entirety,” he said.
‘Not bound by the 2004 Act’
Dr Maeve O’Rourke, the director of the Human Rights Law Clinic and a barrister who has campaigned on behalf of survivors, said the Oireachtas is not bound by the provisions of the 2004 Act.
“It can legislate – as it is intending to do regarding the database & records it wants to send to Tusla – to ‘un-seal’ material gathered or created by the Commission,” she said.
O’Rourke said the 2004 Act “was never the appropriate legislation on which to base an inquiry into grave and systematic human rights abuse, including enforced disappearance, because of its provisions around confidentiality”, saying she and others argued this at the time.
She said the Act did not require the commission to proceed in private.
“The Commission had discretion under the 2004 Act to conduct some of its inquiry in public. It chose not to do so,” she said.
O’Rourke said people affected by the abuse under investigation should, under European human rights law, “have been enabled to participate properly in the inquiry and to see the evidence coming in from the State and other institutions responsible for the family separation system”.
“They should now have the option of receiving a copy of all of their personal data and information about disappeared family members that the Commission gathered, and they should be entitled to their own transcript of evidence.
“Crucially, the Minister must inform the public of what kinds of records he intends to seal for 30 years. They likely include innumerable state and institutional administrative records, which are crucial to piecing together how the system of forced family separation operated.”
Confidentiality
When asked by about people’s concerns, O’Gorman said in a statement yesterday: “Contrary to what has been reported, the intention of the legislation is not to put the information beyond reach.
“Rather, it is to ensure that information is not destroyed and that relevant information can be made available for information and tracing purposes in line with current and future law.”
O’Gorman said the effect of the “confidentiality provisions woven into the 2004 Act” is that the commission’s archive of records must be deposited with the minister in question in a sealed form and must remain so for three decades.
“While the records must transfer in their complete and unredacted form, the anonymity of those who provided testimony is maintained by virtue of this requirement for the records to remain sealed.
“While anonymity may be fundamentally important to some of those who provided testimony to the Commission, equally, I recognise that others may be anxious to have sight of their testimony and to know that it is recorded for posterity.”
O’Gorman said the commission’s final report will reproduce the anonymised testimony of each individual who appeared before it.
“While the testimony will be anonymous and slightly summarised, people will nonetheless be able to see and recognise their own story told in their own words.”
O’Gorman added that the proposed Bill “preserves the constitutional rights of those witnesses who wanted their identities to be recorded for posterity and relied on the existing law to achieve this”.
With reporting by Christina Finn

 

[Dennis Olson]

Most of us don’t know what “mother and baby homes” are. That is not a US term.

 

[hunybee]

Most of us don’t know what “mother and baby homes” are. That is not a US term.

home for unwed pregnant girls and women and sometimes, their children.

we had one in town here a few years ago, but i don't know if they still have it or not.

 

[Melodi]

Most of us don’t know what “mother and baby homes” are. That is not a US term.

Good point, I added Homes for Unwed Mothers, usually (and often) placed there involuntarily by families or the local authorities and returned by police if they escaped.

Many of these women were transferred to "Magadalyn Laundries" (for "fallen women") to "protect" them, sometimes for life - as they washed other people's clothing without pay, slept in cold unheated rooms, and were not allowed to leave the property sometimes for years.

A lot of these women are still alive, the courts have ruled the Irish State and the Catholic Church are liable and they should have a settlement but the checks are dragged out, kind of hoping they die off before they can be cashed.

One of the few changes De Valara made to the Modern Irish Constitution that is different from the Constitution of his Homeland (the United States) was to not including separation of Church and State - and by default, the State allowed the Catholic Church pretty much cart blanch when it came to providing social services.

The Church, with 1500 years of "smarts" behind them "settled" with Ireland nearly 20 years ago for some relatively tiny amount before anyone had any idea how bad things really were from serious abuse in orphanages, schools, detention centers, and the now-infamous Baby Selling and alleged "murder by neglect" that was done in the Homes for Unwed Mothers who were NEVER allowed to keep their children unless they saw them in the orphanage next door.

There are also total horror stores from the kids that managed to survive, on how they had to go to school via "the back gate," were used for forced labor (we are not talking normal chores here) sent to school in rags and so thin they often died in the unheated dorms.

The really tiny ones, tended to end up in (at least one home) a sewer rather than a consecrated Catholic Grave.

 

[Melodi]

One more brief cultural point - some of the laundries operated until the late 1990s and when we moved here I couldn't understand why there were NO self-service laundry mats, and the best you could do was pay (then) about 7 dollars for the local laundry/dry cleaner to do a tiny wash of clothing (about 6 shirts and a pair of trousers worth). This was true even in places like Dublin.

The reason was that most of the population had grown up dropping their laundry off at "The Magdalenes" if they could afford to have it washed, if they were really wealthy the used the dry cleaners/washing services and everyone else washed out their clothing at home, by hand or older washing machines (including the wringer types that were still pretty common then).

It took until about 8 years ago for coin-operated laundry machines started showing up and most of them are outside of gas stations or in super-market parking lots and were started by the Polish immigrants who were used to them. Some of them made a flourishing small business out of them (and we've used them when the machines or the power was out).

 

[Kathy in FL]

Not to be crass, but if someone isn't living in the US (expats, etc) don't expect US cultural norms. The "involuntarily committed" issues were here in the US but only for mental health reasons and they went into asylums and not homes for unwed mothers.

The US had our own problems with congregate living "homes" for orphans, unwanted children, and unwed mothers but it wasn't because of involuntary commitments by family and each state handles those records, not at the national level. And not all of them were horror stories. My own great great grandfather and a sister grew up in an orphanage because their father died in the civil war. The community made sure such children were fed, clothed, educated, and treated well.

If those homes in Ireland were such horrors, rather than trying to blame the government I would place the blame squared on the community that allowed them to exist. The government and church are not without some responsibility, but the far greater share of that is the village people that lived cheek-by-jowl of them and allowed it to happen.

 

[Cardinal]

but the far greater share of that is the village people that lived cheek-by-jowl of them and allowed it to happen.

And profited from them. I have been trying to figure that part out, these things only exist because someone found a way to make money or realize some sort of gain from them.

 

[Melodi]

Not to be crass, but if someone isn't living in the US (expats, etc) don't expect US cultural norms. The "involuntarily committed" issues were here in the US but only for mental health reasons and they went into asylums and not homes for unwed mothers.

The US had our own problems with congregate living "homes" for orphans, unwanted children, and unwed mothers but it wasn't because of involuntary commitments by family and each state handles those records, not at the national level. And not all of them were horror stories. My own great great grandfather and a sister grew up in an orphanage because their father died in the civil war. The community made sure such children were fed, clothed, educated, and treated well.

If those homes in Ireland were such horrors, rather than trying to blame the government I would place the blame squared on the community that allowed them to exist. The government and church are not without some responsibility, but the far greater share of that is the village people that lived cheek-by-jowl of them and allowed it to happen.

Except - the government officially gave them moral, physical, and legal support - the police took people "BACK" to them by force.

And you do realize how many of those babies that lived were "sold" often without The American Family being aware of it to The American Adoption Market?

There are Americans that have mothers that were placed in their homes and themselves stole from their arms (with the blessings of the State) alive today and they don't know it because "records are sealed."

Sadly by making the Catholic Church the official, legal, and enforced provided of social services, the Irish Tax-payer is in fact legally liable for all costs and payouts.

The Catholic Church WOULD BE (and MIGHT YET BE) except they saw the handwriting on the wall, knew from their own records how bad it would be, and made what seemed like a large "offer" of money at the time (a few million) and it is now where near the billions of dollars still living people and those affected are still owed.

That and we are probably talking MURDER here, as well as illegal slavery, in some cases kidnapping and the direct Selling of Babies to THE UNITED STATES and Canada.

Oh and when one police offer (who I saw weep on air) tried to investigate some of this stuff (the child abuse, different Catholic provided orphanage) His BISHOP told him that if he "looked into these charges he would be excommunicated and go to hell, because 'priests didn't do things like that."

That poor man was given the "choice" to do his legally defined job against the wishes of his superiors and the official word of the Catholic Church that he would be sent the HELL if he did.

This did not happen a 100 years ago, this was like maybe 30....

 

[Melodi]

And profited from them. I have been trying to figure that part out, these things only exist because someone found a way to make money or realize some sort of gain from them.

See the adoption scam, it was all about the money - babies that could be "sold" were pampered, properly fed and allowed sometimes to be "fed" by their Mothers (it was cheaper that way) babies that were judged "unsellable" or older children (sometimes siblings) were sent to the orphanages to be used as slave labor (12 hours a day making rosaries, working in the laundries, going to school via the backdoor etc) hundreds, possibly thousands died of neglect.

 

[Dennis Olson]

I don't think there are any of those left in the US. (I know, it doesn't apply to your OP, but I don't remember hearing about them after the early 80's or so.)

 

[Melodi]

I don't think there are any of those left in the US. (I know, it doesn't apply to your OP, but I don't remember hearing about them after the early 80's or so.)

I believe the outright adoption sales from Ireland were ended for the most part in the United States around the early 1990s or just before, that is correct.

They continued on unofficial bases (private adoptions) for a little while (there's another whole big cover-up and lawsuit about the laws "protecting" the information that would give people their records from this period, many of whom are Americans coming over trying to find their birth families).

Many people alive today are affected, some managed to find their Lost bio-moms and grandparents, almost always to find out they were not given up voluntarily, and that sometimes their bio-Moms were even turned into slaves if they couldn't get out of the system fast enough.

It is also THE AMERICANS that have spearheaded some of the drives towards opening the records, this story does have serious trans-Atlantic connections.

Also, interesting how the homes finally shut down just after the Baby Market started to fall apart because of new checks and regulations and the Church Orders and individuals couldn't make any more money at it - in fact, they would actually have to PROVIDE the so-called CHARITY they had promised in the first place.

 

[TidesofTruth]

I don't think there are any of those left in the US. (I know, it doesn't apply to your OP, but I don't remember hearing about them after the early 80's or so.)

There are still some operating.

 

[Kathy in FL]

Except - the government officially gave them moral, physical, and legal support - the police took people "BACK" to them by force.

And you do realize how many of those babies that lived were "sold" often without The American Family being aware of it to The American Adoption Market?

There are Americans that have mothers that were placed in their homes and themselves stole from their arms (with the blessings of the State) alive today and they don't know it because "records are sealed."

Sadly by making the Catholic Church the official, legal, and enforced provided of social services, the Irish Tax-payer is in fact legally liable for all costs and payouts.

The Catholic Church WOULD BE (and MIGHT YET BE) except they saw the handwriting on the wall, knew from their own records how bad it would be, and made what seemed like a large "offer" of money at the time (a few million) and it is now where near the billions of dollars still living people and those affected are still owed.

That and we are probably talking MURDER here, as well as illegal slavery, in some cases kidnapping and the direct Selling of Babies to THE UNITED STATES and Canada.

Oh and when one police offer (who I saw weep on air) tried to investigate some of this stuff (the child abuse, different Catholic provided orphanage) His BISHOP told him that if he "looked into these charges he would be excommunicated and go to hell, because 'priests didn't do things like that."

That poor man was given the "choice" to do his legally defined job against the wishes of his superiors and the official word of the Catholic Church that he would be sent the HELL if he did.

This did not happen a 100 years ago, this was like maybe 30....

Not buying the excuses. Those people knew right from wrong. They allowed it to happen. They stood by and used the system to their own advantage. If they were Christian and Catholic (they are not mutually exclusive) they know there is a Judgment Day. And they know there is individual accountability. The timing doesn't matter. It happened. Period. Ignorance does not an excuse make for choosing wrong over right.

 

[hunybee]

I don't think there are any of those left in the US. (I know, it doesn't apply to your OP, but I don't remember hearing about them after the early 80's or so.)

they are actually still around. the one in my town was there until just a few years ago. i don't THINK it is still operating, but i'm not sure. there are quite a few still operating in mn currently.

 

[Faroe]

My suspicion: The Irish/UK? .gov probably doesn't want any way to trace the child trafficking.

 

[Sentinel]

In the mean time, we have self-righteous, red socialist sitting in the Vatican, passing judgment on us, when he refuses to clear up his own organizations problems.

 

[Dozdoats]

Bless the beasts and the children ...

 

[SageRock]

The civil authorities and the ecclesiastical authorities colluded in committing horrific evils.

The full strength of both the civil law and the ecclesiastical law were wielded against those who tried to intervene.

An incalculable atrocity, and they are still colluding in the cover-up to this day, as the evil lives on through their lies.

The Irish government and the Catholic Church have a great deal to answer for. Perhaps some day the ordinary people of Ireland will have had enough, and a great settling of accounts will occur.

 

[Melodi]

And this story has the Irish so upset the Senate website crashed last week due to the flood of e-mails from the public enraged and concerned that the information will be "locked away" for 30 years...in the past stuff like this was just buried, sometimes pretty much forever.

Calls in Seanad for more time to debate mother-and-baby homes bill amendments
Updated / Friday, 16 Oct 2020 11:45

Concerns raised by former residents and their families over access to records
By Ailbhe Conneely
Social Affairs & Religion Correspondent

There have been calls in the Seanad to provide extra time to consider legislation concerning the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.

The legislation, put forward by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Roderic O'Gorman, will see a database of information gathered by the Commission to be sent to Tusla.

The remaining records will be sealed for 30 years under a 2004 Act.

There are 38 amendments to a bill which is being fast-tracked through the Oireachtas before the Commission publishes its final report at the end of the month.

Independent Senator Michael McDowell proposed an amendment to the Order of Business to give extra time to consider the legislation.

He suggested that the Committee stage be taken today which would mean that report and final stages of the Bill would be delayed.

Senator McDowell said it was "bogus to say there is a hurry in passing this legislation".

Sinn Féin Senator Fintan Warfield seconded Senator McDowell's proposal to solely take Committee stage of the bill today.

He pointed out that today is the first opportunity to put amendments to the Minister, and he stressed the importance of concentrating on all the critical information.

Labour Senator Marie Sherlock also supported the proposal.

She said rushing through the legislation today would be "unnecessary and unjust".

"These are people's lives", she said, "we need time to listen and consider the 38 amendments put down".

Independent Senator Victor Boyan welcomed the gesture of cross part support in the Seanad which he said made sense.

He said time was needed to debate the legislation.

Senator Paul Gavan of Sinn Féin called for a pause after Committee stage.

He said the Bill is not an emergency and today's proceedings are being done "in the face of huge concern of thousands".

Debate on the Committee stage of the bill is due to begin at 12.30pm.



In September, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes suggested that bespoke legislation would be required to safeguard and transfer a database of the mothers and children who were resident in the main mother-and-baby homes.

The legislation before the Seanad this week provides for the database to be sent to the Tusla - this has raised concerns among former residents of the homes and their families over their ability to access the information held by the Child and Family Agency.

Of greater concern to survivors and their families is that the remaining records will be sealed for 30 years under the 2004 Commissions of Investigation Act.

Minister O'Gorman has said the information created by the commission should be protected because he is committed to introducing birth information and tracing legislation in the future.

But given that his predecessor, Katherine Zappone, was unable to get the adoption and tracing bill over the line, there is scepticism in that regard.

Such is the level of concern over the legislation that is before the Seanad, the Oireachtas email system crashed this week due to the thousands of correspondences to TDs and Senators from concerned members of the public.

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

This was all part of the scandals that unfolded in decades past that killed off the orphanage industry due to endemic and deeply seated corruption at all levels. The foster parent system replaced this. The family court system is also a part of this and they are very, very secretive as a result of this and they were formed under old English common law to over see matters related to marriages/divorce and children and orphans.

The corruption has been slightly lessened but it is still there and good luck finding it.

 

[homecanner1]

I've written and rewritten a reply to this thread in my head and still not able to articulate. Something seriously snapped in me with those 800 infants buried in the septic tank by the nuns at Tuam. My gut says Dublin is frantic to protect "other" mass graves because maltreatment of unwanted bastard children was rife by the nuns island wide, not just up the country in Tuam.
Maybe not as many as Tuam where it was harder in the west country, more influenza deaths, less food, but still grim truths.

You can go yourself to Bishop Accountability and read newslinks and court docs on case after case here in the states with growing databases of overseas misconduct with children.

Tuam Babies: “Kinder to strangle these children at birth” | IrishCentral.com

“A mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children has been discovered at a former Catholic orphanage in Ireland." How do you like euthanasia Irish Catholic style?

www.irishcentral.com

What more is there to say that hasn't already been said, thru clenched teeth and cursewords that we won't post here?

The infamous Dozier Boys state reformatory in Florida, complete with mass grave of boys that 'failed to thrive' is our counterpart and Colson Whitehead's new novel fictionalizing its horrors just won him his 2nd pulitzer after Underground Railroad.

“The Outrage Was So Large and So Secret”: Colson Whitehead Talks Hope, Despair, and Fighting the Power in The Nickel Boys

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author's new novel, inspired by the atrocities committed at Florida's Dozier School for Boys, lays bare America’s history of state-sanctioned violence.

www.vanityfair.com

Dozier was where the shed was with the bare box springs and a bloody ceiling with belt buckle marks where flesh was ripped and stained the paint. It was also where black boys were stuffed into & tumbled to death in the laundry commercial dryers.

I have not read it yet, but will. I just hope it does not turn into a diatribe solely on white adult crime on black kids, because they were horrific monsters to the white 'delinquent' youth there too. I looked up the 1940 census on the town and everyone had a hand in it (cooks, tutors, nurses, janitorial, groundskeepers, merchants and vendor suppliers in town, coroner, docs)

You can't run houses of horror without extensive complicity. The butcher knows the bill and whether its enough food for all.

We had an extremely nasty one here, a tribe of Montreal trained French convent nuns who ran their version of hell in Burlington VT

Atrocities that curl your toes, who needs horror films, this is all true

"...Sally Dale was the institution's longest resident, growing up at St. Joseph's from ages 2 to 23.
In 1996, Dale gave a searing 19-hour deposition recounting the alleged abuse,
including that she saw a nun throw a boy to his death from a window..."

Horror claims about torture, abuse and MURDER in Catholic orphanage

Public documents and witness interviews corroborate many details of the claims made by former residents of St. Joseph's Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, according to a new report.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Horror claims of child torture & sex abuse by nuns at orphanage

HORROR stories of torture and murder have resurfaced following a lengthy investigation into historic abuse at a Catholic orphanage in the States. St Joseph’s in Burlington, Vermont, shut its …

www.thesun.co.uk

You know there's much more still to come both in Ireland and here too. At some point it may ignite Rome in the same manner Notre Dame went up in flames, forfeited to arson. I say this not with pleasure as a Catholic with 'abuse fatigue' of having endured reading more than I can stomach.

These women were criminally insane and it shows, take heed bullies of our modern day dyke "techno covens" doing similar

you'll be as infamous as them someday...

 

[Melodi]

Thankyou Homecanner, you are absolutely spot on, I would also like to point out that when people ask me how Ireland went from a mostly Catholic Country with probably the majority of people at least being confirmed and going to Christmas Mass to a secular country where some people actively went through the legal system to become "non-Catholics) in LESS THAN TEN YEARS, I point to the babies in the sewers.

Even my Father in Law a deeply good and spiritual man said: "That could make anyone into an atheist."

And it is a lot more (almost certainly) that just one Home for Unwed Mothers, I am deeply concerned about what will happen when they finally excavate the place near where we live, the one that was in the award-winning movie where the adult son comes home to Ireland from the US (I think it was the US I couldn't bring myself to watch it) to try and find his lost Mother.

And as Homecanner mentioned, there was horrific abuse in other places, in fact nearly every type of social care from orphanages to senior citizen homes (and mental health facilities, boys schools, reform schools, etc) pretty much ALL of which THE IRISH STATE helped fund and farmed out to the Catholic Church (and a few to the Church of Ireland aka Church of England/Anglicans).

But in general, only Protestant Mothers and babies, or orphans went to the "better" COI place, my OWN HOM£ was a COI orphanage for at least a generation and I wasn't here but an American friend housesitting for us reported one elderly gentleman coming by to ask if he could see the "Home I grew up in as a child, it was the one place I was very happy."

You don't tend to hear that kind of feedback from the folks in Catholic orphanages but then they didn't tend to be in old repurposes Church Rectories built for the parson and his family either.

Not to get too woo, but the first time we saw our house for viewing I could almost hear "laughing children going up and down the staircase" and I had no idea the place was used as an orphanage at the time.

Now I can assure the "feel" of anywhere near those "Mother and Baby Homes," "Mental Health Centers," "orphanages" or worst the "Work Houses" do not "feel" that way.

And many hold secret graves all the more horrifying for real Catholic Believers who now know their children not only died but were tossed in unmarked and unconsecrated SEWERS, not even bothering with a grave.

Similar things happened in the US and Canada too, especially on Native Reservations and the like, but I don't think either nation totally turned over all their social programs to just one religious body with no oversight permitted at all, with the full force of the police and even often the courts behind them at the time.

Ireland will cease to exist as a nation if they are actually required to pay the full costs and reparations, this isn't something that happened 150 years ago, this happened as little as 25 years ago and many-many people who survived these "systems" are still alive.

I'm going to stop now, it drags up every time I have to order a new emergency washing machine because our current one just died, which happened last night and I'm making that call tomorrow morning.

Still better than knowing my laundry was done by actual slaves...

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

Tennessee was a center of these abuses in Memphis:

For 20 years, a Tennessee baby thief kidnapped more than 5,000 children from the streets, hospitals, and shanty towns of Memphis. Now, 70 years later, survivors of her 'house of horrors' are confronting the past.

Tennessee Children's Home Society director Georgia Tann got rich by stealing babies and adopting them out to unsuspecting families. Hundreds died under her watch.

www.insider.com

For 20 years, a Tennessee baby thief kidnapped more than 5,000 children from the streets, hospitals, and shanty towns of Memphis. Now, 70 years later, survivors of her 'house of horrors' are confronting the past.
Erika Celeste Dec 4, 2019, 8:44 AM

While serving as the director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, Georgia Tann stole over 5,000 babies and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds more. Benjamin Hooks Library Archives

For more than two decades, Georgia Tann ran a lucrative child-kidnapping and -adoption ring.
As the executive director of the Tennessee Children's Home Society, Tann got rich by stealing babies from their parents and adopting them out to unsuspecting families.

More than 5,000 children were snatched by Tann, and at least 500 children are believed to have died while under her care.
Surviving adoptees from the Children's Home Society spoke with Insider about what they endured and how they found out who they really were.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
No one knows or perhaps cares to remember the exact day the Tennessee Children's Home Society in Memphis closed. What is known is that 69 years ago, in late November or early December, the place workers later called "a house of horrors" closed its doors for good.

Shutting the Children's Home Society down may have cast it into obscurity, but by then the home had already permanently changed the lives of more than 5,000 children. The unimaginable horror of the place still reverberates today not because many of the children were orphaned or abused but because they were stolen.

The little-known story caught the attention of fiction author Lisa Wingate when she saw a late-night episode of "Deadly Women" on the Discovery Channel about the children's home matriarch, Georgia Tann.

"I wondered if it was all true or was sensationalized for TV," Wingate told Insider. "So I started digging. I had to know more." The result was "Before We Were Yours," a fictional account of the orphanage told through the eyes of 12-year-old Rill Foss. Released in 2017, the book stayed on top of best-seller lists for over a year.

"People would write or email and say, 'This book is about my mother' or 'I think I might be one of the stolen babies,'" Wingate said.

For more than 20 years, Tann ran the Tennessee Children's Home Society, where she and an elaborate network of coconspirators kidnapped and abused children to sell them off to wealthy adoptive parents at a steep profit.
Her favorite scheme was to drive through impoverished neighborhoods, picking out the prettiest children, then offer them rides in her shiny black luxury car. Once the children were in, they usually never saw their families again.
Tann took advantage of the lack of regulation around adoption to perpetuate her scheme, relying on the desperation of would-be parents to keep them quiet. According to reports done after the home was closed, many children died while under Tann's care. Those who managed to survive TCHS are still grappling with Tann's unchecked cruelty and greed.
In 2018, spurred by interest in her book, Wingate organized a Children's Home Society adoptee reunion with help from fellow author Judy Christie. This fall, many of the adoptees from the first event, along with several newly found adoptees, attended a second reunion.

To tell the story of the Tennessee Children's Home Society and Georgia Tann, Insider spoke with several survivors of Tann's baby-trafficking business, many of whom have spent a lifetime trying to figure out who they are. We also examined the Memphis Library's extensive archives on the Home Society and read contemporaneous reports from investigators who uncovered and documented the horrors there.

The receiving home at the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Benjamin Hooks Library Archives
Tann first tried her child-stealing scam at a Mississippi children's home, but she was run out of town
Beulah George "Georgia" Tann was born in 1891 in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Named for her father, a powerful judge, she hoped to follow in his footsteps and practice law. Instead, her domineering father forbade it, and she instead pursued a career in social work — one of the few socially acceptable positions for a woman of her means.

She first went to work in Mississippi, but she was soon fired for inappropriately removing children from impoverished homes without cause. She made her way to Texas, where it's believed she adopted her daughter, June, in 1922. Later, in 1943, she adopted Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, a woman believed to be Tann's longtime same-sex partner. It was common at the time for same-sex couples to use adult adoption as a means of transferring property or inheritances.
Tann then moved on to Memphis, where her father used his political connections to secure a new job for her as executive secretary at the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children's Home Society in 1922.

By 1929, she had staged a takeover and named herself executive director.

Sallie Brandon's new mother had a professional photographer take this photo of her the day she was adopted. She was 3 years old. Benjamin Hooks Library Archives

Sallie Brandon is one of the few Children's Home Society adoptees who still remember Tann.
"She was a rounded lady who wore glasses and carried a little purse," Brandon told Insider. "I remember her being a stern, severe woman." Brandon and her two brothers were separated and sold by Tann. With their blond hair and blue eyes, the trio was perfect prey for Tann. She pocketed close to $2,700 in the deal, nearly $40,000 in today's money.
Tann's scheme coincided with a sharp increase in families looking to adopt kids

In the 1900s and 1910s, formalized adoptions were fairly rare, but in the 1920s adoption began to be marketed as a shortcut to societal improvement. According to one ad from the National Home Finding Society, adopting would "reduce divorces, banditry, murder, and control births, fill all the churches and do real missionary work at home and abroad, exchanging immigrants for Americans and stopping some of the road leading to war."

At the time, the theory of eugenics — that is, the controlling of the reproduction of genetically "inferior" people through sterilization — was popular. The movement claimed that people of better genetic endowment were subject to greater infertility. It became important in adoption not just to get babies but to get the best babies. A campaign to explain the superiority of adoption was launched.

This new outlook, along with the popularization of baby formula, helped Tann's baby-trafficking business grow. Suddenly, nonnursing mothers could easily and affordably feed their babies. The demand for adoptable infants rose, especially among busy, successful women.

Tann was calculated in her approach and targeted the rich and famous, who paid premium prices for their adopted children. Actors, authors, and entertainers, including Dick Powell and June Allyson, Lana Turner, Pearl S. Buck, Smiley Burnette, and New York Gov. Herbert Lehman, all adopted Tann babies. In 1947, Joan Crawford adopted twins, Cathy and Cindy, from Tann.

Joan Crawford with her adopted children. From left: Christopher, Cindy, Cathy, and Christina. The twins were Tann babies. Getty Images / Bettmann / Contributor

A network of corrupt social workers, police officers, doctors, lawyers, and judges helped Tann get away with the scheme
Stealing children wasn't a small side business. During the 21 years Tann ran the Children's Home Society, it's believed she made more than $1 million from taking and selling children — about $11 million in today's money. And she didn't do it alone.

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

Cont...

Tann's extensive child-trafficking operation required connections, and she quickly linked up with E.H. "Boss" Crump, who ran a powerful Tennessee political machine. Crump offered Tann protections in exchange for kickbacks.

To kidnap and traffic her victims, Tann paid off a network of social workers, police officers, doctors, and lawyers. Some kidnapped children from preschools, churches, and playgrounds for her. Kidnappers preyed on poor children and families who didn't have the means to fight back. Tann's coconspirators were authority figures — people not to be contradicted — so children often went with them willingly. Sometimes, Tann would approach families and offer medical or other help. Tann would tell parents she could get their children into a clinic at no cost, but if they came along as well they'd be charged a large bill.

In the era before internet and with few phones, Tann relied on her network of spotters. They alerted Tann to children on riverbanks, in shantytowns, or walking home from school. She drove up in her big black car and offered them rides.
Tann was also in cahoots with a local judge who helped procure children, specifically from impoverished single or widowed mothers. One of her most high profile coconspirators was Judge Camille Kelley, who presided over the juvenile court in Shelby County, Tennessee, for 30 years.

"She had a stooge down in the welfare department when someone would apply for assistance, this person would get their name, and get in touch with Camille Kelley," Robert Taylor, an investigator, said in a 1992 interview with "60 Minutes."
In 1950, Taylor, a local lawyer, was asked by newly elected Gov. Gordon Browning to do an in-depth investigation into Children's Home Society and Tann. "Camille Kelley would send a deputy out to pick them up and award custody to Georgia Tann," he added.

Tennessee law required children to be adopted in state for a fee of $7, about $75 in today's money. But Tann moved her "merchandise" at $1,000 per head — $10,000 today. When the state finally investigated, the report on the Children's Home Society, the Browning report, found that Tann conducted "private" adoptions and pocketed up to 90% of the fee. She would gouge prospective parents on everything from travel costs, to home visits, and attorney's fees.
The report also detailed how children were then spirited away from the Home Society in the middle of the night to avoid detection by authorities who weren't in the know or others who might ask too many questions. Her "nurses" had regular circuits to New York and California, though she shipped to all US states and Great Britain.

A report released in 1951 found that children who lived at the Tennessee Children's Home Society were drugged in order to keep them quiet. Benjamin Hooks Library Archives

Tann preyed on the poor

Norma Sue and her five siblings were kidnapped from the yard of their river shanty in January 1943.
Tann had pulled up in her shiny black Packard and asked the children if they wanted to go for a ride. A matronly woman, she appeared non-threatening.

"They were poor children who had maybe never even seen a car," Norma Sue's daughter, Peggy Koenitzer, told Insider. Tann had been tipped off. The kids were home alone. Their mother was in the hospital.

"My mother was 8 years old when it happened — she knew her name and family," Virginia Williamson, another of Norma Sue's daughters, said. Norma Sue and her siblings stayed at the Home Society for three months, where they were exploited as free labor.

"Basically, she and her sister had to run and fetch and take care of the babies, changed diapers, stuff like that," Koenitzer said. Norma Sue and her twin sister were the only siblings to stay together. They were adopted out to a family in Philadelphia.

"Mom was told by the woman who met them that she was their new mother. She said, 'No, you're not.' From that moment on, Mom refused to be part of her new family," Williamson added.

By the time Norma Sue and her sister were in Philadelphia, Tann had moved on to other victims.
Virginia Williamson, Peggy Koenitzer, daughters of Tennessee Children's Home Society adoptee Norma Sue, with their newfound cousin, Jackie Mafori, at a reunion in October 2019. Erika Celeste

Tann often made up the backstories for the children to make them more appealing to prospective parents
Elaborate backstories were added to stolen children's files to make them more "marketable." Their files said they came from "good homes" with "very attractive" young mothers. Fathers were described as "intelligent" and often in medical school.
Tann told Norma Sue's adoptive parents that she and her sister were younger than they were — 6 years old — to make them "more desirable." To make them difficult to trace, she often changed children's ages and renamed them before adoption.

Tann also knew how to capitalize on opportunities in the adoption market. Few agencies adopted to Jewish families, and Tann saw her chance. A few pen strokes turned a Southern Baptist child into a baby from a "good Jewish" family. As the Children's Home Society scandal was exposed, the scenario played out in the adoption records over and over again.
Debbie Branco, adopted under the name Catherine Shredder, was shipped to her new family in New Jersey when she was only days old.

"I went to Hebrew school, the whole thing," Branco told Insider. "But later found out I'm not Jewish. Who knows what I am?"

If parents, biological or adoptive, asked too many questions about children, Tann threatened to have them arrested or the child removed. She was known for "repossessing" children whose adoptive parents couldn't make full payments on time. And she wasn't above blackmailing customers for more money later.

Often she would return to adoptive parents months later and say relatives of the child had come around asking for a baby's return. But for a hefty fee she had lawyers who could make the situation go away.

Tann took out ads in newspapers. Digital Archive of the Memphis Public Libraries

She preyed on desperate women, exploiting their sense of shame

Tann was savvy about her child-trafficking business and responsive to the demands of the market. Because many families were interested in babies only, she concentrated her efforts on procuring infants — though she wasn't above kidnapping older children to fill out her inventory.

Homes for unwed mothers, welfare hospitals, and prisons were targeted. Doctors, working with Tann, told new mothers their babies had died during birth. Those children were "buried" at no cost to the families.

Gene Tapia, who eventually became a NASCAR driver, had a child taken by Tann's network. While he was fighting in World War II, his son was stolen moments after birth. It would take Gene and his wife Francine 47 years to eventually be reconnected to their son Robert.

Other mothers were coerced into signing their children away while still under sedation from labor. Tann preyed on women's' desperation, their poverty, and their sense of shame.
"If they were unsedated and tried to hold on to the babies after the baby was born, then Georgia Tann would step in and say, 'Well, you don't want people in your home town to know about [your pregnancy], do you?'" Robert Taylor, a lawyer who investigated the Tennessee Children's Home Society scandal for Gov. Gordon Browning, said in his 1992 "60 Minutes" interview.

By the 1930s, as a result of Tann's scam, Memphis had the highest infant mortality rate in the US.
'We found that on many occasions babies had been taken … only a few hours old and placed in nursing homes in and about Memphis, where they were without medical care'

Taylor spent more than a year working on a 240-page report for the governor about the Children's Home Society. He spoke with countless child-welfare experts, psychologists, and pediatricians who relayed the terrible truth of life at the children's home.

"We found that on many occasions babies had been taken … only a few hours old and placed in nursing homes in and about Memphis where they were without medical care," Taylor wrote. "Children placed in the Memphis home itself were not properly cared for, and many children died while there as a direct result of violations of physicians' orders."
"Some people started to raise a stink when a dysentery outbreak swept through the orphanage," author Lisa Wingate said. "Taylor's report used the phrase 'babies dropping like flies' when somewhere between 40 and 50 children died in 1945 in something like four months."

Archives at the Benjamin Hooks Library, in Memphis, reveal some of the cruelties children were subjected to. Babies were kept in sweltering conditions, and some children were drugged to keep them quiet until they were sold. Other children were hung in dark closets, beaten, or put on starvation rations for weeks at a time. Drug addicts and pedophiles were hired to watch over them.

According to "The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption," sexual abuse was a common occurrence at the home.

"Yes, sexual abuse at the hands of Georgia Tank was very true, and it was presented as your favor," said one adoptee who was 5 years old when she lived at TCHS. "I remember being told to sit in her lap," she continued. "I keep trying to block it all out, but it keeps coming. It's caused me a lot of problems. You won't find a whole lot of healthy adults who went through there."

"Back then, every boy in an orphanage got molested," one adoptee said, and pointed to male caretakers as typical perpetrators.

Tann was brutally unsparing in her cruelty. Former Home Society employees revealed to Taylor that if an infant was deemed too weak, it might be left in the sun to die. If a child had a congenital disability or was considered "too ugly" or "old" to be of use, Tann had people get rid of them. Many were buried on the property, though about 20 children were buried in an unmarked plot of land within Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.

The children's deaths did little to stop Tann's baby-adoption juggernaut.

Tann toured the country lecturing on adoption. Employing the language of eugenics, she told the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and President Harry Truman that adopted children "turned out better" because of the "selective process" in which poor children could be remade into a "higher type."

Bolstered by her popularity, Tann grew increasingly audacious. She placed ads in newspapers featuring children with titles like "Yours for the Asking" and "They'd Like to be Your Christmas Gift." Tann created a "Baby Catalog" to help prospective parents choose the perfect child, for an ever-growing price tag.

Tann employed "Christmas specials" offering reduced adoption fees for prospective parents. Benjamin Hooks Library Archives

In the 1940s, Tann developed a new publicity stunt.

"They would raffle 20 or 30 babies off every year in the 'Christmas Baby Give Away' in the newspaper," Wingate said. "How did anyone ever think that was all right?"

For $25 — about $350 today — purchasers could buy as many raffle tickets as they liked.
Tann pocketed thousands of dollars that ticket holders assumed went to the Home Society, and had to give away just a fraction of her "merchandise" in the process.

After more than 20 years, Tann's adoption scam was shut down

Tann's baby-selling scheme carried on unabated for over two decades. But in 1949 things took a turn. Tennessee elected a new governor, Gordon Browning. Weakened, E.H. Crump, Tann's crony, lost his hold on Memphis politics.

On September 12, 1950, Gov. Browning held a press conference during which he revealed Tann and her network managed to amass more than $1 million from her child-selling scheme — nearly $11 million in today's money.

But Tann was never held accountable. Three days later, she died at home after slipping into a mysterious coma from untreated uterine cancer.

On November 11, 1950, Judge Camille Kelley, who had worked so closely with Tann, quietly resigned. It took until late November or early December to find safe homes for the remaining children. Somewhere in the waning days of 1950, the doors to the Tennessee Children's Home Society were closed for good.

No one was ever prosecuted for their roles in the black-market baby ring.

In the spring of 1951, Robert Taylor submitted his report. To protect lawmakers and their influential friends from prosecution, the Tennessee Legislature sealed all adoption records. Adoptees of the Home Society needed a court order to get their birth records.

The process was arduous and arcane. In the 1990s, Marianne "Denny" Glad, a historian and cofounder of the adoption nonprofit Right to Know, whose three cousins disappeared in the adoption system, came forward to help the Tennessee Children's Home Society adoptees.

Sallie Brandon displayed her life story in photos at the latest Home Society reunion in October 2019. Erika Celeste
"She had access to a lot of the records and a lot of the people, the judges, the lawyers that were still alive," adoptee Sallie Brandon said referring to Glad. "She put together an amazing collection of information."

Brandon had already uncovered her birth name, Sue Nell. She knew her brothers had been sold as "twins" to a California couple. But Glad told her she didn't know the whole story.

Brandon paid the $150 processing fee. "It was amazing what I got back," she said.

Brandon learned her father was a sharecropper who was murdered when she was 14 months old. The man she remembered as an abusive father was her mother's second husband. She also received photos of her parents, their marriage license, and health information.

Tennessee Children's Home Society child Matt Lucas never found his birth family. He felt too guilty while his parents were alive. Now, at 84, he doubts there's anyone left to find.

"I'll be buried at the feet of my adoptive mother. But I'd still like to find my first mother's grave," Lucas said. "I'd like to stand there and let her know I turned out all right."

"What strikes me is that the adoptees have different situations, but they also have a lot of common threads," author Judy Christie told Insider. "The need to connect with their families, their lifelong feeling that something was missing. The joy of coming together here in Memphis with other people who understand what they went through at the hands of Georgia Tann.

This past year, Wingate and Christie published a nonfiction account of the reunion, "Before and After."

"People in this day and age are disconnected in many ways. We all yearn for connection. We yearn for family connections and community. I think this story speaks to people overcoming and connecting," Christie said.

Many families never found each other again. Archive documents at Benjamin Hooks Library mention that Tann was fond of cremation because it left no evidence.
The memorial at the Elmwood Cemetery honoring Tann's victims. It reads, in part: "Their final resting place unknown. Their final peace a blessing." Erika Celeste

While no one knows where many of Tann's victims were buried, many adoptees and their families take comfort in a small memorial in Memphis' Elwood Cemetery erected in 2015.

The memorial inscription reads, in part: "In memory of … all the hundreds who died under the cold hard hand of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. Their final resting place unknown. Their final peace a blessing."
Victims' stories 'remain in the DNA' for generations

Adoptee Norma Sue died a few years ago. Last year her daughters brought their mother's ashes back to be scattered on the banks of the Mississippi, close to where she was stolen long ago.

Her abduction and time at the Children's Home Society, her daughters said, had so traumatized their mother that she became chronically depressed. By 15, Norma Sue was pregnant. By 22, she had five children and was divorced. She moved frequently and institutionalized her own children, repeating the cycle.

"I feel rather strongly that people should know this doesn't stop with the victims. The story goes on and on and remains in the DNA of the generations," Virginia Williamson said.

Norma Sue's children found some peace in cousin Jackie Mafori, who told them their mother's family never stopped looking for them.

"I'm hearing from people all over the world who are to this day still fighting very similar things," Wingate said. "One of our takeaways from all this should be that children are still monetized and we have to be on the lookout for situations where money takes precedence over the welfare of kids. We now know the effects of something like this can last lifetimes."

 

[Melodi]

Really good article Joker, now expand this to an:

1. A number of such places run by RELIGIOUS ORDERS and the HANDS On abuse (physical, mental, and sometimes sexual) were done by NUNS (or Brothers in the case of the Boy's Homes).

2. Was enforced with the full authority of the Federal State (not just a locally corrupt town) for nearly 100 years.

3. Is still large covered up, hidden and now the public outrage is getting out-of-control because a piece of "protective legislation" is being "slipped through" (they tried to do it under cover of COVID) that will HIDE THE NAMES for THIRTY YEARS, at which point almost everyone it matters to will either be dead or their bio parents will be.

4. No one trusts the government because a similar law was used to cover up the adoption scam itself (separate from the whole Unwed Mother Home issue) and the public was promised a law that would allow exceptions for information given to direct family members, it was never passed and is currently a dead letter and simply ignored.

5. There are probably anywhere from one to eight or nine "sewer" type of burials yet to be found, and everything is being done by the religious authorities (and some on the State level) to delay things; again this is especially horrifying to Roman Catholics because these babies are usually not in proper consecrated ground.

6. Finally, last but not least, so far there is no real program for compensation or support for those who are still alive and their families that I am aware of, and the one for the surviving "Fallen Women" aka LEGAL SLAVES in the Magdaline Laundries that were connected in most cases to these homes has dragged on for years.

Like some veterans or Black Lung survivors in the US, this is obviously in hopes more of them will die; personally, I think when that happens if the delay has been "paperwork" and foot-dragging any remaining family should get at least a double amount of award money and in cases where no living family can be located, placed in a fund for larger payments to those who are still alive.

Many of these older ladies simply can't survive without some sort of aid, they were never educated, kept in bondage and do not deserve an old age on the streets or shivering in a bedsit somewhere.

 

[Melodi]

Oh truth in advertising, my sister was adopted and my parents almost adopted a second child; and I can REMEMBER them talking about the possibility with the adoption counselor of using "private agencies" if the public option fell through, which included "Irish Babies" from the Catholic "agencies."

That would have been in 1969....I have nothing against proper adoptions of children in need, they can be wonderful but steeling babies first world or third is horrific.

 

[Melodi]

One more tibit, we have a friend from further South in Ireland who has no idea who she is biologically, her parents were childless in a small village.

One day the priest came to the house with a baby in his arms and told her childless parents that "God Told me He wants you to raise this baby," and that was her sister.

About two years later the same priest showed up with another baby, that was her.

She said:

"Back then if the Priest said God told you to do something, you did it and my parents did just that."

She told me that she loves her parents dearly (she lives at home caring for them in their old age) but she wishes she knew who she was, she also told us there was just such a baby "home" not too far away and that they were probably rejected for some reason as being unadoptable so the Nuns wouldn't have wanted them.

 

[Grouchy Granny]

Dennis -

Yes, there are still homes for unwed mothers in this country. They go under a variety of names, but they are still there. Most kids are put up for adoption.........

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

Dennis -

Yes, there are still homes for unwed mothers in this country. They go under a variety of names, but they are still there. Most kids are put up for adoption.........

Florence Crittendon Foster Care Agency is one such entity. They are completely reformed but are notorious for their facility security issues and history of having angry pregnant teen mothers that give up their babies (does not happen any more really)

 

[homecanner1]

There is no possible way St. Joseph's in Burlington operated in a void and the small city was not at least peripherally cognizant that kids were perishing in there. To bring a child to a local doctor to treat a scald or a fracture would have revealed the systemic abuses, so deliberate medical neglect was part of the ordeal for ALL to keep the secrets intact. Being kicked by a menopausal vicious nun down a staircase seems to be a universal rite of passage for many in various facilities.

There is suggestion the barber in Marianna FL was aware of Dozier boys who had bruising/head injuries, healed scalp wounds under their hair when he cut and trimmed but it was explained away as rough kids tumbling and fighting, boys being boys.

And yes, there was widespread savagery done to the Res native kids up in Canada, multiple mass graves that may make Tuam pale in comparison when its all excavated and exposed. The term "Vatican reparations" comes to mind. Its all so very disturbing, these were young Irish who chose life for their offspring who ended up sold in many cases in the Magdalene institutions. To wealthy American adoptees or outright guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical industry, early experimentation with 5 in one vaccine trials that resulted in injury or death and condemned to unmarked graves. Torture of illeg. toddlers.

"...Since it closed in the early 1980s, the dusty rooms of St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum have housed only memories of the thousands of children (and nuns) who passed through during its century of operation....Abbey Meaker, studio director for sculptor Richard Erdman, was the driving force behind the project — in part because of a close personal connection to the site. "My grandfather lived here in the '30s with his little brother ... [who] died of tuberculosis," Meaker says in a walk-through preview of the exhibition. In a later email, she adds that the nuns "wouldn't help Gilbert; they wouldn't take him to the hospital, so [my grandfather] snuck him out and walked there. When they arrived, Gilbert had died on his back.

"It's a horrible story, but I get the sense that many children had similar experiences," Meaker says. Learning details of those experiences is difficult, however. "The [Catholic] diocese is incredibly private, particularly with regard to the orphanage," Meaker notes. "Stories of abuse are known, but the evidence is mostly anecdotal. There are people who had positive experiences there, while others' lives were permanently destroyed by their time there."

One source to which the artists have turned for information is Facebook. A page called Children of St. Joseph's Orphanage in Burlington, VT, which has provided many stories, advertises itself as a place for "former residents to share their thoughts about life at the orphanage, good or bad." The comments tend toward the latter..."

Local Artists Bring New Life to Former Burlington Orphanage

Since it closed in the early 1980s, the dusty rooms of St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum have housed only memories of the thousands of children (and...

www.sevendaysvt.com

abuse survivor group from the Burlington Orphanage, personal anecdote that verifies it was systemic, not random.

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in the case of Baltimore's Keepers, series on Netflix, testimony of students of Sr. Cathy Cesnik. She paid with her life in 1969 to take off her habit, move out of the convent and to an apartment and interview her teenage girl's high school students who were being drugged, prostituted and then aborted, paid for by the Church, complicit with local police/medical involvement.

This was Mayor Allesandro's Baltimore.

Yes, Nancy Pelosi's dad.

The depth of the Diocesan corruption is vast.

We have only scratched the surface.

 

[Grouchy Granny]

Florence Crittendon Foster Care Agency is one such entity. They are completely reformed but are notorious for their facility security issues and history of having angry pregnant teen mothers that give up their babies (does not happen any more really)

Thanks for the memory jog Joker! I was trying to remember the real name and came up with a blank (old age ya know). I do know they are still all over the country.

And doesn't still happen????? I find that hard to believe, cuz there's money to be made in the adoption market don't ya know?

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

Really good article Joker, now expand this to an:

1. A number of such places run by RELIGIOUS ORDERS and the HANDS On abuse (physical, mental, and sometimes sexual) were done by NUNS (or Brothers in the case of the Boy's Homes).

2. Was enforced with the full authority of the Federal State (not just a locally corrupt town) for nearly 100 years.

3. Is still large covered up, hidden and now the public outrage is getting out-of-control because a piece of "protective legislation" is being "slipped through" (they tried to do it under cover of COVID) that will HIDE THE NAMES for THIRTY YEARS, at which point almost everyone it matters to will either be dead or their bio parents will be.

4. No one trusts the government because a similar law was used to cover up the adoption scam itself (separate from the whole Unwed Mother Home issue) and the public was promised a law that would allow exceptions for information given to direct family members, it was never passed and is currently a dead letter and simply ignored.

5. There are probably anywhere from one to eight or nine "sewer" type of burials yet to be found, and everything is being done by the religious authorities (and some on the State level) to delay things; again this is especially horrifying to Roman Catholics because these babies are usually not in proper consecrated ground.

6. Finally, last but not least, so far there is no real program for compensation or support for those who are still alive and their families that I am aware of, and the one for the surviving "Fallen Women" aka LEGAL SLAVES in the Magdaline Laundries that were connected in most cases to these homes has dragged on for years.

Like some veterans or Black Lung survivors in the US, this is obviously in hopes more of them will die; personally, I think when that happens if the delay has been "paperwork" and foot-dragging any remaining family should get at least a double amount of award money and in cases where no living family can be located, placed in a fund for larger payments to those who are still alive.

Many of these older ladies simply can't survive without some sort of aid, they were never educated, kept in bondage and do not deserve an old age on the streets or shivering in a bedsit somewhere.

1) The catholic order was notorious for systemic abuse of children and mentally inform individuals including women. They were having issues covering things up starting in the 50s-80s. The satanic ritual abuse cases kind of fell over into other systems in the 80s and exposed some shenanigans going on. Plus in the 80s as the homes were closed as part of the Tann case and the catholic run orphanages the foster care system came into being around the 1940s. Copied from NAZI Germany the foster care system brought its own set of issues almost collapsed in the 80s after a series of false accusation cases bringing rise to the foster parent bill of rights. As a result of all of this the family court system has been aggressively scrubbing cases and covering up a lot of the systemic abuses with agencies and individuals.

2) The enforcement or family court system had existed since the middle ages and were erected under English common law. The system is incredibly corrupt.

3) The names they are hiding are all of prominent politicians as the operations were used heavily for human and child sex trafficking to the highest bidder. Epstein was the tip of the iceberg. Ghislene has been leaking stuff and causing some of the busts we are seeing domestically but so many big names are endangered that they are covering things up to prevent a purge of corruption.

4) The trust never really existed but right now no one trusts any government system. With the whole defund the police narrative a scandal of this epic proportions would completely destroy that Antifa/BLM narrative. This is more about trying to artificially create a new narrative and destroy anything that could harm it. Being a foster parent I can tell you that this stuff is just the mild things. There are many, many more nastier stories that are buried and if they were to see the light of day there would be an absolute slaughter of all individuals connected once day after day the abuses were exposed to the public at large. Remember the individuals prosecuted for attacking child sex offenders by using the public registry? They are trying to prevent that from becoming the new normal as it were.

5) The Catholic church has an immense stranglehold on things in Brittain/Ireland at the moment. With all of the Islamic shite as it were, that grip is loosening and there are great fears that a huge backlash will occur killing many responsible individuals through vile attacks. Again they have to hide things to allow for their attempted narrative insertions to exist.

6) And the Magdaline laundaries as you mention are in the same boot as the Tann orphanage scandal. Governments do not like mass liabilities from this and instead try to bury things and destroy documents. Oddly every few decades paper record repositories suffer fires and other destructions from terror or other means. WTC7 and the Pentagon both had massive paper repository implicating those in power and many arguments were made that their destructions were to indemnify those in power from liability once investigations were kicked off.

The individuals that are afflicted with the abuse and lack of education are basically wards of the state regardless. Massive bills for the state and not something they want to acknowledge.

As a foster parent I had fostered on respite many black children. In many cases there was no father in the picture or mommy and or daddy ended up in the prison system before or during state custody. In some cases mommy and daddy died from various reasons while the child was in states custody. The problem is these children have many traumas and issues and they are constantly moved around suffering a 6 month loss of progress on development each time they are moved. The current system setup installs a thought process that their bad behavior causes a reward which puts foster parents in a bad position as how do you redirect and correct improper neurological behaviors reinforced by a dysfunctional system giving them the wrong signals and messages. The other problem with black children in general is that they are brainwashed with actual amounts of racism and fear of authority creating the entire self reinforcing dogmas of systemic racism which is an actual mental imaginary figment created by these same mechanisms to create a self perpetuating problem. I usually use the phrase that true racism died with the third Reich.

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

Thanks for the memory jog Joker! I was trying to remember the real name and came up with a blank (old age ya know). I do know they are still all over the country.

And doesn't still happen????? I find that hard to believe, cuz there's money to be made in the adoption market don't ya know?

Well there is a bit of a dual system. There are cases where there are non DCS involved adoptions and then there are DCS adoptions. The state absorbs costs more or less when DCS is involved. When DCS is not involved you are looking at about a 20-40k price tag.

There was a big issue in Guatemala where the children were getting adopted and then their bodies were used to harvest organs to sell. So now in Guatemala if you want to adopt you have to wait three years and go through a bunch of hoops.

Some of the big price tags are self-reinforcing mechanisms used to supposedly protect the children but are they really...

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

There is no possible way St. Joseph's in Burlington operated in a void and the small city was not at least peripherally cognizant that kids were perishing in there. To bring a child to a local doctor to treat a scald or a fracture would have revealed the systemic abuses, so deliberate medical neglect was part of the ordeal for ALL to keep the secrets intact. Being kicked by a menopausal vicious nun down a staircase seems to be a universal rite of passage for many in various facilities.

There is suggestion the barber in Marianna FL was aware of Dozier boys who had bruising/head injuries, healed scalp wounds under their hair when he cut and trimmed but it was explained away as rough kids tumbling and fighting, boys being boys.

And yes, there was widespread savagery done to the Res native kids up in Canada, multiple mass graves that may make Tuam pale in comparison when its all excavated and exposed. The term "Vatican reparations" comes to mind. Its all so very disturbing, these were young Irish who chose life for their offspring who ended up sold in many cases in the Magdalene institutions. To wealthy American adoptees or outright guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical industry, early experimentation with 5 in one vaccine trials that resulted in injury or death and condemned to unmarked graves. Torture of illeg. toddlers.

"...Since it closed in the early 1980s, the dusty rooms of St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum have housed only memories of the thousands of children (and nuns) who passed through during its century of operation....Abbey Meaker, studio director for sculptor Richard Erdman, was the driving force behind the project — in part because of a close personal connection to the site. "My grandfather lived here in the '30s with his little brother ... [who] died of tuberculosis," Meaker says in a walk-through preview of the exhibition. In a later email, she adds that the nuns "wouldn't help Gilbert; they wouldn't take him to the hospital, so [my grandfather] snuck him out and walked there. When they arrived, Gilbert had died on his back.

"It's a horrible story, but I get the sense that many children had similar experiences," Meaker says. Learning details of those experiences is difficult, however. "The [Catholic] diocese is incredibly private, particularly with regard to the orphanage," Meaker notes. "Stories of abuse are known, but the evidence is mostly anecdotal. There are people who had positive experiences there, while others' lives were permanently destroyed by their time there."

One source to which the artists have turned for information is Facebook. A page called Children of St. Joseph's Orphanage in Burlington, VT, which has provided many stories, advertises itself as a place for "former residents to share their thoughts about life at the orphanage, good or bad." The comments tend toward the latter..."

Local Artists Bring New Life to Former Burlington Orphanage

Since it closed in the early 1980s, the dusty rooms of St. Joseph's Orphan Asylum have housed only memories of the thousands of children (and...

www.sevendaysvt.com

abuse survivor group from the Burlington Orphanage, personal anecdote that verifies it was systemic, not random.

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in the case of Baltimore's Keepers, series on Netflix, testimony of students of Sr. Cathy Cesnik. She paid with her life in 1969 to take off her habit, move out of the convent and to an apartment and interview her teenage girl's high school students who were being drugged, prostituted and then aborted, paid for by the Church, complicit with local police/medical involvement.

This was Mayor Allesandro's Baltimore.

Yes, Nancy Pelosi's dad.

The depth of the Diocesan corruption is vast.

We have only scratched the surface.

I would say that this is the kind of stuff you read and lose your appetite. Please keep the links running.

 

[homecanner1]

Per facebook post of March 2019, Burlington Police still interviewing survivors from the 40's and 50's, a class action is planned and a book. Covid may have gotten some of these elderly witnesses but their testimony is videotaped now for that reason.

Expect more misery to be detailed

"...You are welcome to share her story here and/or you can contact the Burlington Police and share it them as they are still interviewing former residents. It appears that we will be starting a class action lawsuit.
Christine Kenneally
from BuzzFeed is or plans to be writing a book..."

 

[Knoxville's Joker]

Per facebook post of March 2019, Burlington Police still interviewing survivors from the 40's and 50's, a class action is planned and a book. Covid may have gotten some of these elderly witnesses but their testimony is videotaped now for that reason.

Expect more misery to be detailed

"...You are welcome to share her story here and/or you can contact the Burlington Police and share it them as they are still interviewing former residents. It appears that we will be starting a class action lawsuit.
Christine Kenneally
from BuzzFeed is or plans to be writing a book..."

And that stuff is what makes politicians very, very nervous.

Imagine the new movement once things go mainstream:
DEFUND SOCIAL SERVICES

Of all the irony.

 

[Melodi]

I should mention that I am sadly aware that in many third world countries, this sort of thing still goes on; maybe not always on the organized scale, it was here in Ireland or Canada; or even under the table as it was in Tenn.

I can remember hearing bits and pieces of that living in Mississippi, especially when visiting some of the still existing orphanages (almost all black and disabled kids by the 1970s) with my Mom's church group as an older teenager.

The problem with Ireland (and Canada) was not only was the Catholic Church directly and totally involved (in Canada there were other churches and groups too I gather, but I haven't studied that situation as much) but it was grim.

One of the most important talks I ever heard was in a college visiting lecture series by the wife of a congressman (I think it was Mrs. Udall but I can't be sure after these many years.

Her grandfather had been rounded up and sent by force to one of the "American" Indian schools where they tried to "beat the Indian out of them and tried to make them white."

The US government not only knew about the goings-on in these places, in fact in most cases they paid for it, often partnering with various different "church" (I won't call them Christian) groups to provide the actual "care": beatings, forced haircuts, starvation, punishment for speaking a native language, non-treatment of illness, no heat in the buildings etc, etc..

Just like in Canada a lot of children and young people ended up in marked and unmarked graves, and I remember the good lady telling us that her grandfather said "by the time we got out and tried to go home, we didn't know who we were or where we belonged, white people still didn't want us around and we didn't know how to live as "Indians" anymore either."

He said a lot of his friends didn't live very long lives, that he was unusual in having found a wonderful wife and had a good family life, despite everything he had suffered.

So I know from hearing that first hand (in the same way I first learned of concentration camps directly from a similar talk by Corrie Tin Boom as a teenager, that not only did the US also practice some of these horrors in the past but that sadly, their legacies can leave marks for many decades after they are closed down.

I am not pretending in any way that Ireland has a lock on this situation, it is just that I live in a very small country, so the percentages of people affected is very high.

Also, many or most of those Mothers didn't exactly get a chance to "choose life," though many did that too, either putting the baby up for adoption privately if their parents were wealthy or fleeing to England if they could get enough money together for the boat ticket.

They were taken to these "homes" by their parents, the police, their village priest, often "under police escort" and those who escaped the laundries were often returned by a similar use of force.

Or as one Irish woman who was found to be the bio-Mom of a famous British politician a few years ago said: "You have to understand, I had two choices - flee to England and give up my baby for adoption there where I could try to both affect the outcome and then continue to have some sort of life elsewhere; or stay in Ireland and be forcibly imprisoned in a mother and baby home, probably spending the rest of my life as a slave in a Magdalene Laundry."

Oh and I think I forgot to mention that things are changing quickly in Ireland, an attempt by the local "council" to just "concentrate the site as a grave" and not excavate and try to identify the missing babies 30 years ago would probably have worked; today it enraged the public and the affected families who are demanding the government DNA test every fragment found no matter the cost and even if it takes 30 years to do it.

The culture of "cover it up and it will go away" is fading fast here.

 

[homecanner1]

Just spent last couple hours scrolling all the comments going back to 2015.

Yes Burlington was complicit in some ways. The kids got a "free" Sunday matinee in exchange for cleaning up the movie theatre of all its weekend refuse popcorn bags, candy wrappers, so free labor. I do know in another community in another state, free suits and dress shoes were offered for masses but the orphan boys had to submit to a dressing room 'fitting' with the store manager individually first. These towns were rife for this sort of thing, an opportuity for weirdos to get 'contact'.

Burlington also let the students at the local Univ Dental School 'practice' on the children for medical experience.

I know for a fact Florida orphanages were used for free citrus fruit picking labor as well. Esp in the Depression era. And during WW2 some were used as Coast Guard 'sleeping quarters' dorms for shoreline patrols, housed with minor females on cots.

Sounds like St. Joseph's had a rooftop playground and that became a source of 'mystery falls'. That children were blamed for pushing them off, saddled with lifelong murder guilt. Nuns held small children underwater routinely during bathing there.
The general consensus is they were Quebec farm girls who had refused to marry and have lives of wifely servitude, so their parents had sent them off as unfit for marriage to the convent in Montreal. There some darker ideas were planted about American promiscuity, that children born out of wedlock in unsavory circumstances were 'the Devil's Children' and thus deserved every bit of what they dished out.

Some of the boys related being transferred to Boys Town in Nebraska. A few of the nuns had come from Maryville Academy in Illinois. At least one nun was German born circa the 1966 era residents and the group photo of the nuns was taken about 1965, at the height of the sadism. The camera really captured their essence, spirits of mischief and cruelty for all eternity. All have passed on but one in her late eighties.

The St. Joseph's inquiry is ongoing, a book, probably a documentary and class action is in progress. Since Covid, they now meet monthly on Zoom to discuss progress of the legal situation. They are all survivors.

They deserve every penny of whatever compensation they are awarded.

adding also, one of the former Burlington orphans related Babe Ruth was a product of the Baltimore Diocesan boys homes, did not know that.

*sigh*

St. Mary's Industrial School - Baltimore - History's Homes

St. Mary's Industrial School For Boys was located on Wilkens Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland. It was here that young Babe Ruth lived from 1902 to 1914. The incorrigible youth was sent here by his parents, primarily to get him off the streets and find some direction for the wayward boy. The...

historyshomes.com

 

[Troke]

Remember the horribly ugly Irish "Baby and Mother Homes"[Homes for unwed Mothers] in Ireland horror stories a few years ago, you know the one where the only "home" excavated so far found the bodies of dozens, maybe hundreds of dead babies and small children thrown in the sewer? The laundries attached to them where "unwed" Mothers were kept as slaves (per the courts) sometimes for decades doing laundry as "penance." You know the ones that the State of Ireland is liable for because they used these homes (run by the Catholic Church) as their official social services?

Well, the commission set on about these horrors has done its investigative work, the results I gather are horrifying in the extreme, and being Ireland a "legal excuse" is being found to just "lock up these records for 30 years" - basically until everyone that it personally matters to is DEAD or too elderly to keep searching for lost babies and kids, for "legal reasons" of "confidentiality" and it is "the law to always seal blah, blah"..

I felt like I had been "slimed" after just reading this and it is obvious even the journalist (and a good part of the appointed Senators) are sensing that "something is rotten in the State of Ireland" because it is.

And most of these homes, including one a few miles from our house, haven't even been excavated yet...let that sink in

[Note in Ireland incarceration in these homes was seldom voluntary and "inmates" who escaped could and were returned by the Irish Guards, police force, back into custody - this is why so many unwed Mothers fled to England from the 1930s until recently}
...Melodi

Senators express 'serious concern' that mother and baby home records will be sealed for 30 years

The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes is due to submit its final report later this month.

www.thejournal.ie

Senators express 'serious concern' that mother and baby home records will be sealed for 30 years
The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes is due to submit its final report later this month.
5 hours ago 22,011 Views 36 Comments
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Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children, Disability, Equality and Integration (file photo).
Image: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie
Updated 2 hours ago
CAMPAIGNERS AND ACADEMICS have called for the government to prevent records compiled by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes being sealed for 30 years.
Senators also expressed “serious concerns” over proposed legislation related to the commission’s records in a debate in the upper house today.
The Clann Project, Justice for Magdalenes (JFMR) and the Adoption Rights Alliance are against the records being sealed.
They say it will result in people being unable to access information “about their disappeared relatives or babies who are buried in unmarked graves”.
“All of the administrative files, which show how the abusive system of forced family separation was run, will also be withheld.
“It will not be possible to question the conclusions of the Commission of Investigation, to do further research, or to hold wrongdoers to account,” the groups said in a statement.
Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has denied the commission’s records will be put “beyond reach”.
The commission is due to submit its final report to O’Gorman by 30 October.
Under the 2004 Commissions of Investigation Act once it submits its final report, the commission will be dissolved and, prior to its dissolution, it must deposit all records with the minister to be sealed for a period of 30 years.
Last week the government approved the text of a Bill which it said will safeguard the records after the dissolution of the commission. The Bill was debated in the Seanad today.
A number of senators called for more time to examine the draft legislation, saying it is being rushed through.



The proposed legislation will see the transfer of certain documents from O’Gorman to Tusla, the Child and Family Agency.
Several people have raised concerns about the records being sealed, and have called for clarity on what evidence will be handed over to Tusla.
In a statement, O’Gorman said he understands concern around the issue “given Ireland’s history”. He said the new legislation is “needed to preserve access to invaluable information now and into the future, and not to put it beyond reach as has been reported”.
The commission was set up under the 2004 Commissions of Investigation Act. O’Gorman said the entire premise of the 2004 Act “is that investigations are held in private” – however, this has been disputed by academics.
“That confidentiality applies to the evidence and records gathered by the inquiry. It is central to allow testimony be given freely,” O’Gorman stated.
He added that the 2004 Act also requires that such records are sealed for a period of 30 years, pending their transfer to the National Archives, adding that this provision was already in place prior to the establishment of the commission.
O’Gorman also noted that earlier this year, the commission informed his department that it had created a database tracking who was in the main mother and baby homes, but “did not feel it had a legal basis to transfer that database and would be compelled by law to redact … valuable information”.
The minister said the bill being brought forward will preserve this information and allows the database to be transferred to Tusla, “with whom most of the original records are already held”.
O’Gorman said the new legislation will prevent the information “from effectively being destroyed” and will allow access to it under existing laws.
“The draft bill is focused on protecting a valuable resource which will assist in accessing personal information under existing law and be hugely beneficial in any future information and tracing legislation.”

Right to information
Speaking in the Seanad today, Labour Senator Ivana Bacik acknowledged the “important” work of the commission but said she and colleagues are “deeply disappointed” at the rushed nature of the legislation and cannot support it because of their “serious concerns”.
Bacik asked O’Gorman to ensure that data access requests to the archive of records will be facilitated.
“There’s a clear need for information. So many survivors, so many family members have expressed to us their urgent desire for information,” she said.






Bacik said “a huge amount of information” compiled by the commission “does not relate to statements given by witnesses”. She said survivors and their families should be granted access to the records kept by the religious orders in question.
She also called on O’Gorman to assure that an “appropriately anonymised index to the archive will be published” so that debate and consultation can be facilitated on the 30-year rule on sealing documents.
Bacik said an archive of historical abuse records needs to be set up, adding that Ireland owes this to the people affected by “our legacy of shame” over the treatment of women and children.
Speaking about privacy concerns, Bacik noted that senators failed to agree on elements of the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill 2016 when it was being debated last year because a compromise couldn’t be reached on privacy rights versus the right to information.
“In that bill as in this bill, there’s undue regard to privacy rights at the expense of the right to information and identity for those persons most directly affected, women and children and their own descendants,” she said.



O’Gorman told the Seanad the draft legislation must be passed before the commission dissolves upon the submission of its final report.
He said he wanted to reassure people who have “very legitimate anxieties” about access to birth information and tracing that future legislation will allow greater access to records.
“I am absolutely committed to addressing the long-running matter of birth information tracing legislation. This is not what this Bill today is going to address, but I’m absolutely committed to doing so.”
O’Gorman said “no future opportunity for access to this information will be lost, by virtue of this bill coming into effect”. He said the Bill’s purpose “is to preserve information … including the critically valuable database for future use to the maximum extent possible under the law”.
Senators and campaigners have raised concerns about records being given to Tusla, citing what they view as “discriminatory practices, including defining adopted people’s birth name as third party data”.
O’Gorman said the Bill is “not an expansion of Tusla’s role”, noting the body already holds many of the records in question.
When asked by TheJournal.ie about people’s concerns over Tusla’s involvement, a spokesperson said: “Tusla as a statutory body recognises the imperative for government to make a plan in relation to these records.”
They advised us to direct any other queries to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs.
‘Stopping families accessing infomation’
Speaking today, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said she had huge concerns about the fast-tracking of the Bill.
“There are huge concerns over the lack of consultation regarding this Bill, and there are serious questions as to why Minister O’Gorman is proceeding with this approach.
“The main concern here is the intention of the minister to transfer part of the Commission of Investigation’s archive to to Tusla without keeping a copy, and a plan to seal the remainder of the archive for a period of 30 years.
“This will prevent people from accessing their records from the minister’s archive, and it will stop families from accessing information about disappeared family members or babies buried in unmarked graves. I’m sure you will agree, Taoiseach, that this is very wrong,” she said, addressing Micheál Martin in the Dáil.
Responding, Martin said the reason the legislation has been put forward is to “provide urgent and critical legal clarity surrounding the future use” of the database.

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“It has been brought forward, genuinely being brought forward, to preserve invaluable information, not to put it beyond reach, as has been reported. So that’s not the intention.”
Martin said “the urgent issue in front of us is to ensure that we preserve the invaluable cache of information and not lose it forever”.
He said the database of the mothers and children who are resident in the main mother and baby homes “would be of considerable assistance to those involved in providing information tracing services to individuals who were residents in these institutions”.
Martin added that the legislation has been advanced to address current concerns raised by the commission about the need to redact personal information.
“The commission has concerns about the redaction of the information and wants to transfer the database in its entirety,” he said.
‘Not bound by the 2004 Act’
Dr Maeve O’Rourke, the director of the Human Rights Law Clinic and a barrister who has campaigned on behalf of survivors, said the Oireachtas is not bound by the provisions of the 2004 Act.
“It can legislate – as it is intending to do regarding the database & records it wants to send to Tusla – to ‘un-seal’ material gathered or created by the Commission,” she said.
O’Rourke said the 2004 Act “was never the appropriate legislation on which to base an inquiry into grave and systematic human rights abuse, including enforced disappearance, because of its provisions around confidentiality”, saying she and others argued this at the time.
She said the Act did not require the commission to proceed in private.
“The Commission had discretion under the 2004 Act to conduct some of its inquiry in public. It chose not to do so,” she said.
O’Rourke said people affected by the abuse under investigation should, under European human rights law, “have been enabled to participate properly in the inquiry and to see the evidence coming in from the State and other institutions responsible for the family separation system”.
“They should now have the option of receiving a copy of all of their personal data and information about disappeared family members that the Commission gathered, and they should be entitled to their own transcript of evidence.
“Crucially, the Minister must inform the public of what kinds of records he intends to seal for 30 years. They likely include innumerable state and institutional administrative records, which are crucial to piecing together how the system of forced family separation operated.”
Confidentiality
When asked by about people’s concerns, O’Gorman said in a statement yesterday: “Contrary to what has been reported, the intention of the legislation is not to put the information beyond reach.
“Rather, it is to ensure that information is not destroyed and that relevant information can be made available for information and tracing purposes in line with current and future law.”
O’Gorman said the effect of the “confidentiality provisions woven into the 2004 Act” is that the commission’s archive of records must be deposited with the minister in question in a sealed form and must remain so for three decades.
“While the records must transfer in their complete and unredacted form, the anonymity of those who provided testimony is maintained by virtue of this requirement for the records to remain sealed.
“While anonymity may be fundamentally important to some of those who provided testimony to the Commission, equally, I recognise that others may be anxious to have sight of their testimony and to know that it is recorded for posterity.”
O’Gorman said the commission’s final report will reproduce the anonymised testimony of each individual who appeared before it.
“While the testimony will be anonymous and slightly summarised, people will nonetheless be able to see and recognise their own story told in their own words.”
O’Gorman added that the proposed Bill “preserves the constitutional rights of those witnesses who wanted their identities to be recorded for posterity and relied on the existing law to achieve this”.
With reporting by Christina Finn

"...Remember the horribly ugly Irish "Baby and Mother Homes"[Homes for unwed Mothers] in Ireland horror stories a few years ago, you know the one where the only "home" excavated so far found the bodies of dozens, maybe hundreds of dead babies and small children thrown in the sewer? ..."

Seems there is (was?) an eyewitness to maybe 20.

But the number finally bandied about was 300 corpses. Unfortunately, that seems to be a Phact. ( A Phact is what is believed, whether true or not it is believed and therefore is true)

 

[WanderLore]

I was a 17 year old unwed mother. Many wanted me to abort. I went to live in a Florence Crittenden home in Charleston SC.
It was crowded at times but I don't recall anything bad happening.
I kept my son and he is a well loved successful man at almost 40 today.
There was a 13 yr old tiny black girl, on her 2nd pregnancy. I believe she kept that baby too, as well as the 1st one.