I recently watched a documentary that dealt with the horror of mothers and their children who were incarcerated in an institution, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns in the township of Tuam, in Galway County in Ireland.
The mothers were young single Irish girls, who had committed the ‘crime’ of having a baby out of wedlock.
The documentary filled me with horror and sadness and left me horror-struck at the reported level of human abuse, callous indifference and decadence.
The Bon Secours Mothers and Baby Home harboured a secret which was only discovered and exposed through the tireless research and dedicated work of amateur historian Catherine Corless.
Corless’s research led to the discovery that 796 children had died at the home and while she discovered death certificates, alarmingly she was unable to locate actual burial records of the children.
Sadly, acts of physical and sexual abuses and inhumanity have scarred human history since the beginning of time.
Nowhere has this abuse been more pronounced and felt more profoundly than the manner and scale of the brutality that children have suffered, some even murdered, whilst incarcerated in institutions administered by the church and with the apparent apathy of the state.
Suspicions about the Tuam Mothers and Babies Home first emerged in 1975, when the skeletal remains of children were discovered in a pit by two young boys who were playing in a field close to the home.
But it was almost 40 years later, in 2012, that the tireless research conducted by Corless revealed the full extent of the fate of mothers and their babies at the home.
Following the publication of her research in 2014, and after weeks of speculation, the Irish government ordered a Commission of Investigation into Ireland’s mother and baby homes.
Announcing the investigation Edna Kenny, then Irish Prime Minister, said that the mothers and babies had been treated as ‘an inferior sub-species’.
The final report of the Commission of Investigation was released in 2021 prompting the government of Ireland to declare that it would issue a formal apology for ‘the appalling level of infant mortality’ discovered and identified in the report.
The order of the Bon Secours Sisters apologised simply stating ‘We did not live up to our Christianity when running the Home.’
Another scandalous and disturbing matter covered by the documentary referred to earlier, involved what can only be referred to as child trafficking. Children from the Tuam home were adopted, often illegally, to families in the USA and elsewhere.
Some of these children, now grown adults, have since reunited with siblings that they never knew they had.
Similar child abuses have also been reported in Canada, particularly in respect to First Nations and Indian children while in the US genocidal measures designed to eradicate Indians is captured in the statement attributed to Army Officer, Richard Henry Pratt who said when establishing the Carlisle Indian School that it was necessary to ‘Kill the Indian to Save the Man’.
Acts of human rights abuse and atrocities also punctuates Australian history.
The Forgotten Australians, is a term that was coined in the context of the 2003–2004 Australian Senate ‘Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care’.
The report of the inquiry identified that an estimated 500,000 children emigrated, or perhaps the more correctly, were transported to Australia during the 20th century.
As with many of these children,their childhood had been stolen and they were subjected to abuses, the pain and scars of which they undoubtedly carried throughout their lives. In 2009, then Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, issued a formal apology to the children raised in institutional care.
Aboriginal people in Australia also continue to battle the intergenerational trauma stemming from the experience of their children being forcibly taken from them, an act that has become known as the ‘Stolen Generation’.
This and other acts of depravity undergirded by eugenics inspired policies and practices serve as Australia’s eternal shame.
In February 2008 then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also nobly issued a formal apology to the Stolen Generation but little has been done since to ease the lingering pain and trauma.
It is beyond the scope of this piece to explore, in detail, the motivation for such abuses but a tragic aspect of this shameful history is that it existed at all and that it was allowed to exist with the apparent sanction of church and state while people stood silently, averting their gaze, allowing evil to flourish.
There is no greater evil than the abuse of innocent and defenceless children. Innocent parents and loved ones are left to endure endless pain and trauma rendering their search for closure as fragile, incomplete and ever elusive.
Surely humanity is better than this.
Professor Bob Morgan is a Gumilaroi man from Walgett western NSW, and is an Aboriginal educator/researcher.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
