DUBLIN — For decades, some of Ireland’s church-run “mother and baby homes” gave the bodies of many of the children who died in their care to medical schools for dissection, a government inquiry reported Wednesday, indicating that the scale of the abuses at the homes for single mothers was greater than previously known. The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, created in 2015 by the Irish government, revealed that in Dublin alone, several of the homes run by the Roman Catholic Church had sent the bodies of 950 children, almost all born to single mothers, to medical schools as anatomical subjects. Some other homes also kept few, if any, records of what had been done with the bodies of the children who died in their care, the report found. “The more difficult question to answer is why the children were ‘buried’ in such an inappropriate manner,” the report said. With growing public demand for a full forensic search of the mother and baby homes, the commission recently carried out geophysical underground surveys of the former Tuam home and of another in County Tipperary.

Source: National Post April 18, 2019 14:26 UTC