More on the Tuam Scandal

I have to thank my friend RMJ for alerting me to some problems with the story of "800 corpses of babies in a septic tank" at the Tuam institution for unwed mothers.  It would seem that the story, widely reported in the media is based mostly on conjecture and reportorial license.  How widely spread and believed can be seen from a report in the Irish Times

‘I never used that word ‘dumped’,” Catherine Corless, a local historian in Co Galway, tells The Irish Times. “I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words.”
The story that emerged from her work was reported this week in dramatic headlines around the world.
“Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves” – The Guardian.
“Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – The Washington Post.
“Nearly 800 dead babies found in septic tank in Ireland” – Al Jazeera.
“800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers” – New York Daily News.
“Almost 800 ‘forgotten’ Irish children dumped in septic tank mass grave at Catholic home” – ABC News, Australia.

It would seem that the septic tank angle which, I will predict, is what most people will remember about this years from now, is based on the decades old memory of a boy who was 10 at the time of the reported discovery.   And it's not clear that what he was describing would have been a septic tank at the time that former workhouse became the institution for unwed mothers.

On St Patrick’s Day this year Barry Sweeney was drinking in Brownes bar, on the Square in Tuam. He fell into conversation with someone who was familiar with Corless’s research, and who repeated the story of boys finding bones. “I told her that I was one of those boys,” Sweeney tells The Irish Times in his home, on the outskirts of Tuam. “I got a phonecall from Catherine a couple of weeks later.”
Sweeney was 10 in 1975, and the friend he was with on that day, Frannie Hopkins, was 12. They dropped down from the two-and-a-half-metre boundary wall as usual, into the part of the former grounds that Corless and local people believe is the unofficial burial place for those who died in the home. “We used to be in there playing regular. There was always this slab of concrete there,” he says.
In his kitchen, Sweeney demonstrates the size of this concrete flag as he recalls it: it’s an area a little bigger than his coffee table, about 120cm long and 60cm wide. He says he does not recall seeing any other similar flags in their many visits to the area.
Between them the boys levered up the slab. “There were skeletons thrown in there. They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins,” he says. “But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that.” How many skeletons does he believe there were? “About 20.”

At the Irish Times link you can read other problems with the story of the septic tank, as reported around the world and believed by, among others, the idiot whose comment embroidered on a shaky story even more to slam Catholic in general and Irish Catholics, in particular.

But the central fact of the high death rate for children at the Tuam institution, while it was being run as a place for unwed mothers should be looked into.  Until there are answers as to how the children actually died, why they died, we can't just assume we know what happened.

We certainly shouldn't believe we know what happened on the basis of what has been reported.   Ireland, which was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe at the time, is reported to have had a very high infant mortality rate.
And when the deaths occurred, in what years and why,  matters in determining culpability.  Within living memory, things were entirely different.  Even outside of institutions, where death rates are often quite a bit higher,  it's just a fact that a lot more babies died then, than now.  Even in a relatively far wealthier country.

Sixty years ago, Britain's children were born into a dangerous world.
Every year, thousands died of infectious diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and polio.

Infant mortality - deaths of children before their first birthday - was around one in 20.

It took some startling medical discoveries and pioneering work from paediatricians and doctors to turn around an appalling situation.

The early 1930s were a time of frustration for many doctors who powerlessly witnessed the deaths of thousands of babies and young children.

"When I was a student and newly qualified, there was an enormous area where we knew we could do nothing," Dr Leslie Temple remembers.
"We made the most of what little we could do, but over the vast area of childhood illness, all we could do was hold their hands and hope."

Poverty, poor diet and bad living conditions lay at the root of much childhood illness. 

Harold Everley Jones was one of Britain's first paediatricians, and spent 40 years working with children. He qualified as a doctor in 1934.

"I stood in a house to which I was called and was amazed to see the wallpaper moving due to the bugs underneath. Many of these houses were little more better than hovels." he recalls.

Antibiotics like penicillin changed everything  It was only in 1939 that the world's first anti-bacterial drugs, Sulphonamides, became widely available. 
They greatly reduced childhood deaths from pneumonia. Shortly afterwards, in 1944, Penicillin, the original antibiotic, was used to wage war on meningitis.  The second antibiotic to be developed, Streptomycin in 1947, tackled the horrors of TB. In 1960, a vaccination to protect against Polio was introduced to British shores from the United States.

I would guess that what was true in Britain was probably at least as true in Ireland and likely worse.  Only, there has been too much guessing in this story, already.  If not imagination.  Since that imagination is going to be heavily relied on in this story, I still recommend both William Carlos Williams Doctor Stories, informed by his personal experience as a doctor in that period, and the sections of his memoir dealing with his medical practice.   I also depend, heavily, on my mother's accounts of working as a nurse and technician in hospitals from the late 1930s until after the introduction of penicillin,  which she said was like a miracle to medical professionals used to seeing people die of diseases and infections that people my age never even heard of.

Also widely unreported is that the Irish Government and Catholic officials have both called for and begun an inquiry into the institutions for unwed mothers, not all of which were Catholic.  It would be worse than a useless waste of time if any investigations concentrated on any particular case in the past because the neglect and deaths of children are hardly confined to any country, religious orientation, social group or identifiable institution.   While attitudes towards women who are pregnant while not married or while not married to the father have changed greatly, children still die in large numbers from neglect and other causes.

The periodic stories of children who die because social services in the United States are both disgustingly underfunded and understaffed, the staff, frequently, under educated and under-trained as well.  There are also inevitable problems that come from the habits and common received thinking of social workers, trained in a particular theory or ideology of their profession.  The "keep the family together" at all costs is an ideal for which the weakest and least articulate people involved will pay that cost.   When you are dealing with children, any ethic that doesn't place their safety and needs above such institutionalized theories will, secular, religious, etc. end up with them suffering and dying.

As the paper about infanticide in the guise of baby farming recommended in the post yesterday shows, not all horrors done to children happen in institutions and to large numbers in any particular location or at any particular time.  Until a society takes responsibility for all of the children in it, worse than has even been attributed to the institution in Tuam is done.  Look at the entirely secular United States where even the mass slaughter of children in schools can't change our gun laws, the thousands of children shot dead here, every year, buried in unknown and forgotten graves haven't moved us sufficiently.

Reading the blog blather, the comments at The Guardian and other papers on this story have left me even more pessimistic about the potential of unfiltered chatter to inform people.   Most of the people who seem to believe they have something to say about this obviously are either making it up or depending on people who are making it up.  The fact is, we don't know what happened, we may never know, though it's unlikely that any one "thing" "happened" to result in almost 800 babies dying at an institution that operated over four decades.   The temptation to reduce that to a factoid or two serves to obscure reality, not to crystallize it so we know and can use that.