Thursday, September 3, 2020

The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns [3]





Babies taking the Air at a Mother and Baby Home

This is the third in a projected series of three articles on "The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns". These are links to Part [1] and Part [2] 

In March 2017, the Association of Catholic Priests - that had originally expressed skepticism about Judge Yvonne Murphy's appointment to lead the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes - seems to have accepted the secular consensus that awful things must have happened there. It should be noted that while the Commission's remit comprises 14 Mother and Baby Homes and 4 County Homes, it was the atrocity stories about Tuam that sparked the establishment of the Commission. These have been well described by Brendan O'Neill editor of the SpikedonLine website in an article "The Tuam Tank: Another Myth about Evil Ireland" subtitle The obsession with Ireland’s dark past has officially become unhinged. [Sample quote: A hysterical piece in the Irish Independent compared the Tuam home to the Nazi Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebrenica, saying that in all these settings people were killed ‘because they were scum’.] 

Statement from the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) on the Tuam Babies revelations and the resignation of Marie Collins from the Vatican Commission on Clerical Sex Abuse 

The latest revelations about the burial of babies in the former Mother and Baby home in Tuam, though widely predicted, provoke a sense of both sadness and shame. Sadness, that the very precious, elemental relationship between mothers and their children could be so disrespected by institutions of Church and State in Ireland; and shame because as priests we are part of an institution that has played a central role in this sorry saga.
It will be argued, with some cause, that the Catholic Church was not totally to blame, as the whole culture of Ireland during that period made it acceptable for pregnant unmarried girls to be treated so shamefully. But the Church, because of its dominant position in the Ireland of the time, must take a large degree of responsibility for what happened. Also, we must acknowledge that individual priests in parishes, through the advice they gave to parents of unmarried pregnant women, and in some cases through public condemnation from pulpits, helped to limit to Mother and Baby homes the options available to parents.
The recent Tuam revelations, coinciding with the attitudes of Vatican officials which led to the resignation of Marie Collins from the Vatican Commission on Clerical Sex Abuse, serve to underline our conviction that Catholic sexual teaching and the attitudes that can underpin it need urgent renewal. There is still a long way to go before women are treated with equal respect and dignity in the Catholic Church.

There are a total of 56 Comments after the article. The following are a selection:


1. Padraig McCarthy  March 4th, 2017 at 10:06 pm 
Nowadays we take it for granted that graves will be marked, but it has not been always so. I remember the first time I saw the Angels’ Plot in Glasnevin – it was a wilderness. It has now been enormously improved; but infants were buried there from maternity hospitals in a manner perhaps not as well as they did in Tuam. The same happened in many other locations around the country. I enquired of Glasnevin last year, and was told that about half of their graves are unmarked. 

My mother’s parents are buried in Glasnevin; I tracked down the unmarked grave about 30 years ago while doing my family tree. It was only marked about four years ago by a cousin of mine. It’s certainly not that my mother and her brothers lacked respect for their parents; priorities were different in the first half of the 20th century, and finance was a factor. Many graves of children and adults were unmarked. As in the Murphy Report, it’s important that we do not judge the motives of people in former times and circumstances by the standards of what seems obligatory today.

There’s an item of mine from last year, putting the Tuam babies question in historical and social context, and followed by a discussion, on the ACP website, which may be helpful:
Tuam Babies 
 http://www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie/2014/06/tuam-babies/.

6. Eddie Finnegan March 5th, 2017 at 11:22 pm 
Also, we must acknowledge that individual priests in parishes, through the advice they gave to parents of unmarried pregnant women, and in some cases through public condemnation from pulpits, helped to limit to Mother and Baby homes the options available to parents.

So what should these “individual priests in parishes” have offered as an alternative option? A subsidized boat ticket from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead/London?

7. Bro. Jude March 6th, 2017 at 1:43 am 
Thank you Padraig for your objective assessment. Given the verifiable facts of your demographic research, on infant mortality and the link to same, I would have expected the ACPI to have made a more factual and objective statement. A reading of René Girard on scapegoating would have helped the ACPI from joining in what can only called a ‘group-think’. ‘Group-think’ is not based on fact. Ironically, the same ‘group-think’ being the very people who have sacrificed innocent priests and religious to the mob. One needs to discern well before joining the group-think’ which the ACPI statement has now aligned itself.

The ACPI statement has done a disservice to the innocent babies buried in Tuam. The statement of the ACPI on this tragedy is in sharp contrast to its demand for justice on other matters. It needs to amend its statement in the light of the national facts on infant mortality as outlined in Padraig’s findings. Anything less is merely joining in the emotional group-think. Groupthink makes good sound bites. Sound bites are not the same as the verifiable facts. They are the lowest form of journalism. I humbly suggest a reading of Girard.

10. Anne March 6th, 2017 at 3:41 pm 
This report on the Tuam Babies reminds me of the time when the Kerry Babies scandal happened. The newspapers had sensational stories every day and all sorts of wild theories were circulated . I actually bought the Offical Report from Government Publications and was amazed to find that the information in the report bore very little resemblance to what was in the newspapers at the time.

I fell it would have been better to wait until the investigation was complete,with all the facts on the table about what happened to these children. Keyboard warriors are today’s version of mob rule.

I lived adjacent to a County Home in the fifties. I often went to Morning Mass in the Home with my mother . There was usually three or four rows of young women at Mass. Sadly they were considered to be fallen women(no fallen men take note) the women bore all the blame ,can’t be ruining a young mans prospects. The church seems to be bearing the brunt of the blame for what happened to these unfortunate women but from my recollection of that era families were terrified by how the would be judged by society as so called “illegitimate” children were shunned. Shot Gun marraiges were common too for the same reason.

Hard to believe that today but that was the way it was. There were no marches or demonstrations by the general public to have these places shut down.

13. Pádraig McCarthy March 6th, 2017 at 10:07 pm 
Attached is a copy of a PDF document (in booklet form) which I sent to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission as a contribution to the social and historical context of the Investigation.
MOTHER AND BABY HOMES INVESTIGATION Some Notes on Social History DOWNLOAD

17. Sean O'Conaill March 7th, 2017 at 1:07 pm 
Many thanks to Padraig McCarthy (#13) for that pdf contribution to contextualisation. Pending further development of that by the MAB commission we should not venture at this stage into summary judgement, especially of those who staffed these ‘homes’. 

Social stigmatisation is a powerful and mysterious force, and the subsidence of the stigma surrounding unmarried pregnancy in Ireland has removed all of us from the psychic universe of that Tuam burial site. I can understand Paddy Ferry’s distress, but would counsel him to postpone despair until a far more detailed map is drawn of the international pattern of dealings with this issue. Every age has its own unquestionable ‘givens’ and every land has its own hidden secrets. That Ireland is an exception to the international pattern of management of this issue remains to be proven – and some of the current commentary is of a transparently opportunistic, axe-grinding and blinkered character.

Why, for example, is horror over the historical Tuam story, not matched by equal horror over the current international reality of late-term abortion? What we choose to see and to ignore in any given era will probably always cause consternation decades later, so the abortion-tolerant of this time would do well to test the clarity of their own lenses before wallowing in righteously superior indignation over the blindness of past generations.

19. Eddie Finnegan March 7th, 2017 at 4:13 pm 
A sincere thanks to Sean O’Conaill @17 for that thoughtful follow-through on Pádraig @13. The past may indeed have been a somewhat different country, but many of us were there and so were our parents, and in some cases our aunts or sisters. I stood with an old Maynooth classmate outside the ‘luxury Dunboyne Castle Hotel & Spa’ in June 2013 (I think Brendan H was there the same evening) as we met to mark the group’s 45th ordination anniversary. Tom was a bit quiet and withdrawn for a while before he mentioned that, as a curate in the 1970s, he had accompanied girls and their parents to the hotel’s main building – from the 1950s to the 1990s it had been the Mother & Baby Home for the area, run by the Good Shepherd Sisters. Tom was one of those “individual priests in parishes” who, I have no doubt, supported those families compassionately through an experience none of them would have chosen – he certainly never ‘read anyone off the altar’. Our contraceptively enlightened and abortion-tolerant age may feel it has all the answers and the right to lacerate an earlier era. But, like one or two others, I feel that a breast-beating ACP should not join the mob.

24. Paddy Ferry March 9th, 2017 at 8:51 pm 
I did not fully understand the impact the most recent revelations from Tuam has had on the country until the last couple of days. I had not been in touch with anybody from home in the last week but, even if I had, they probably would not want to say much about it. However, watching and listening to an Taoiseach at Leaders Questions in the Dáil on Monday brought it home to me. He was excellent. ( link below for anybody who did not see it.) And, this ,remember, is a Taoiseach who takes his Catholic faith seriously. And, he reminded us –perhaps a little indelicately, but it definitely had to be said—that only the young women were condemned and punished. Werner Jeanrond’s “cultural forces” were obviously at work here as well.

President Michael D, in his International Womens Day address yesterday was also excellent and quite rightly singled out Catherine Corless for special praise. What a great and brave woman she is! Donal Lynch, in last Sunday’s Sunday independent calls her the Erin Brockovich of the Tuam Babies scandal. I only got the paper over here on Tuesday but reading it through and realising that the horror and disgust that I was feeling was shared by just about everybody else, was somehow consoling. Sean @11, I agree, it is puzzling how the basic requirements of the Gospel did not affect the behaviour of the clergy at the time. I expect Lord Acton’s oft quoted remark about the corrupting effect of total power is ,once again,relevant here But, you are surely not telling us that we should save our despair until we learn how these situations were handled in other countries ! Surely not, Sean !! There have been some excellent contributions to this debate but I would especially like to commend Kevin for his gentle, thoughtful reflections.

I am now more baffled than ever as to why anybody could challenge the judgement of the ACP in issuing their statement above. It was the very least that was required and anything less would have been unacceptable and a serious mistake. 

► VIDEO: Tuam babies: Taoiseach decries ‘social and cultural sepulchre’

25. Eddie Finnegan March 9th, 2017 at 9:42 pm 
Keep it up, Paddy@24, 21, 15, but let’s also have a shout out for that atheist Brendan O’Neill’s excellent piece in this morning’s Irish Times: “Rush to moralise over Tuam has run ahead of the facts.” Alternative Facts, like the poor, will always be with us, I suppose. Meanwhile, praise to the Almighty for creating a few atheists to help us to think.

26. Rory Connor  March 9th, 2017 at 9:43 pm 
"The latest revelations about the burial of babies in the former Mother and Baby home in "Tuam, though widely predicted, provoke a sense of both sadness and shame. …"

What precisely is the cause of this sadness and shame on the part of the ACP? I see that Brendan O’Neill (editor of the online current affairs magazine Spiked) has an article in the irish Times today
Rush to Moralise over Tuam has Run Ahead of the Facts
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/rush-to-moralise-over-tuam-has-run-ahead-of-the-facts-1.3002786

I will quote just the extracts dealing with ascertainable facts:
On Friday, [the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes] confirmed what many had suspected: that babies and young children were buried in the grounds of the home. It said “significant quantities of human remains have been discovered” in a “long structure divided into 20 chambers”. It said the structure “appears to be related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or waste water”, but it has “not yet determined if it was ever used for this purpose”. …….

That the “structure” had 20 chambers suggests it had been turned into a kind of catacomb. That the children buried there were “swaddled up”, as one eye-witness described it, suggests they were not simply “dumped”. That the discovery of the structure in the 1970s was followed by a priestly blessing and then the setting up of a grotto by local people suggests the town of Tuam, and Old Ireland more broadly, was not a foul place but rather had many good people in it, concerned for the dead.

Brendan O Neill comments that “The rush to moralise about Tuam doesn’t only run ahead of facts – it seems also to run ahead of common decency” and gives as a example the fact that Commission told the media about the discovery of human remains BEFORE it told the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors (CMABS), some of whose members lost siblings in Tuam. A spokesman for CMABS said it was “shocking we [had] to learn of this news via the media”.

From this he concludes that
One can’t help feeling that the commission’s urge to emote publicly, to display its “shock”, overrode the traditional decorum of informing individuals of the potential discovery of family members’ remains. Nothing, not even basic civility, can be allowed to stand in the way of virtue-signalling over TuamNow THAT is something that should arouse “sadness and shame”.

29. Anne March 10th, 2017 at 8:53 am 
When the burial ground was excavated and it was discovered that”the structure had twenty chambers” surely experts in sanitation were consulted as to what exactly the structure was. Why wasn’t it made clear what it was as with today’s sophisticated methods of gathering evidence it should not have been difficult to establish facts like when was it built and what was its purpose,and whether or not it was used for sanitation.

The impression was given that nuns just opened up a cover and threw the remains into a septic tank. I know that this is not what the Report states.

But it left enough confusion for wild speculation to take flight There may be still some older residents alive who worked there or told stories of their time there and might be able to shed some light on this matter.

The people of Tuam showed that they respected the burial ground and have lovingly maintained it over the years.

30. Padraig McCarthy March 10th, 2017 at 10:58 am 
Many have jumped to exaggerated conclusions on the Tuam story. A letter in the Irish Times on Wednesday 8 March may free us from the hype:

Sir, – As the son of one of the residents of the Bon Secours home in Tuam, who still has contact with some former residents, I have issues with the story of the ‘discovery’ of a mass grave.

We always knew as a family that the plot currently in the news was where the babies who died in the home were buried. That was common knowledge.

The public record also shows that about 800 babies or young children were registered as having died in the home over a period of 35 years. So even without any technological examination of the site, it was clear that there had to be about 800 remains buried there. The coincidence of the number of the deaths recorded at the home and the number of remains buried at the site is what you would expect. Had only 200 deaths been recorded and 800 been discovered, for example, then it would indeed be real news. What in fact the recent examination has done is just confirm the information already available. Nothing new has been discovered. – Yours, etc,

PAUL CHURCHILL”

Note the final sentences: “What in fact the recent examination has done is just confirm the information already available. Nothing new has been discovered.”

33. Soline Humbert March 10th, 2017 at 5:53 pm 
@30 What in fact the recent examination has done is just confirm the information already available.Nothing new has been discovered.”Paul Churchill

Well it seems to be news to the Bon Secours Sisters:In 2014,Terry Prone acting as PR representative for Sr Marie Ryan, leader of the Bon Secours sisters,wrote in response to an inquiry about Tuam former mother&baby home :”If you come here,you’ll find no mass grave,no evidence that children were so buried….and the local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying” Yeah a few bones were found,but this was an area where famine victims were buried…”
Row Brews over Terry Prone Tuam Babies Email

Furthermore,in an interview/debate on RTE radio the day before the publication of his letter,when put before the facts presented by historian Catherine Corless about the burial site in Tuam ,Paul Churchill acknowleged :”That’s news to me” 
Tuam Babies Debate Catherine Corless and Father Paul Churchill
The full recording is worth listening to if you can.

40. Padraig McCarthy March 11th, 2017 at 6:09 pm 
We have had much heart-searching about the Tuam home situation, and many comments seem to presume that this is a particularly Irish and/or Catholic problem. I would like to emphasise a few points so that we can see the wider picture. I have no specific information about Tuam; we await the further results of investigations.

(i) Is burial in an unmarked grave a sign of disrespect – that those who died were just dumped or discarded?
In one location in Dublin there are about half a million people buried in unmarked graves. That place is Glasnevin Cemetery, where just about half the graves are unmarked. My mother’s parents who died in the 1920 and 1940s were in an unmarked grave until about five years ago when we erected a headstone.

Burial in an unmarked grave does not mean disrespect to the dead. Usually it means that the people concerned had other priorities on their minds at the time. It is likely that most families in Ireland (and perhaps elsewhere) have relatives in unmarked graves – you could enquire for yourselves.

This is the case not only in Ireland.

(ii) Was infant mortality in homes such as Tuam evidence of malpractice?
Again we await further reports. For reference keep in mind what Robert Karen PhD wrote in Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love, Oxford University Press, 1994, page 18ff:
It had been reported, for instance, in 1915, that infants admitted to ten asylums in the eastern United States had mortality rates of from 31.7 percent to 75 percent by the end of their second year…”

Perhaps Ireland may be found not greatly out of step with international experience.

(iii) Was treatment of unmarried mothers particularly harsh in Ireland?
Minister Katherine Zappone says that human rights were violated. As seen today it was undoubtedly harsh.

We must remember that our contemporary awareness of human rights dates from after World War II, following the abomination of how so many were treated in Nazi Germany. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights dates from 1948. Other jurisdictions had far more draconian ways of dealing with those who were judged unfit to procreate.

Legislation for mandatory sterilisation was enacted in 33 of the then 48 States of the USA, beginning with Indiana in 1907. These included many women who were sent to institutions under the guise of being “feeble-minded” because they were promiscuous or became pregnant while unmarried. Most notorious, perhaps, is the judgment of US Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in Buck v. Bell, in 1927, upholding a Virginia law: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Justice Pierce Butler, a Catholic, dissented.

European countries that had sterilisation programmes include Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, Iceland, Austria, France, Belgium and the Czech Republic. Winston Churchill was in favour, but, thankfully, failed to get it through.

From this perspective, how unmarried mothers were treated in Ireland then, however objectionable today, was less severe than found in other jurisdictions.

It is possible that the strength of Catholic teaching helped keep Ireland free of those excesses.

There is more information in PDF booklet referred to at #13 above.

This is not to imply, of course, that all was well, but it is important to understand the world and social milieu of the time. We have much to learn for our own day.

41. Rory Connor March 11th, 2017 at 11:01 pm 
When Enda Kenny spoke about the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in the Dáil he said.
Tuam is not just a burial ground, it is a social and cultural sepulchre. That is what it is. As a society in the so-called ‘good old days’, we did not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings, we dug deep and deeper still to bury our compassion, our mercy and our humanity itself. No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care.”

As David Quinn pointed out in the Independent on 10 March, our Taoiseach’s tone and his words contrasted very sharply with those of Labour’s Kathleen Lynch in 2013 when she addressed the Dáil about Bethany Home, which also housed unmarried mothers and their babies.
Harsh Victorian morality at core of Mother and Baby Home Scandals
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-quinn/harsh-victorian-morality-at-core-of-mother-and-baby-home-scandals-35517919.html

Ms Lynch, then the junior minister in the Department of Justice, used much softer language than the Taoiseach, even though hundreds of babies also died in Bethany Home and were buried in an unmarked grave.

Explaining the high death rate in the Protestant-run institution she said: “Unfortunately, poverty and disease were commonplace in Ireland up to the 1950s and this was reflected in infant mortality rates.

Infant mortality rates in the 1940s were at a level that is hard to comprehend today, about 20 times higher than now and that figure applies across the entire population. For those who were malnourished and subject to disease and a lack of hygiene, the figures would have been higher still.”

Responding to critics of the home, she said [my emphasis]: “Our Constitution demands we respect the rules of natural justice. People are entitled to a fair hearing and an opportunity to protect their good name…It seems to have been accepted at the time that Bethany Home was run by people with charitable motives.“

Why are the rules of natural justice not being applied to the Bon Secour nuns? Why is it assumed that the Tuam Mother and Baby Home was NOT run by people with charitable motives? Note for example the headline in the Connaught Tribune yesterday:
http://connachttribune.ie/tuam-babies-investigation-likened-to-nazi-war-crimes-trials-088/
Tuam babies’ investigation likened to Nazi war crimes trials
[ Link doesn't work now but same story appears to be online at Galway BayFM site
Tuam babies’ investigation likened to Nazi war crimes trials ]

As per the article, Junior Minister John Halligan is calling on Gardai to question any surviving Bon Secours nuns who ever worked at the home, to establish whether a criminal investigation is warranted. Minister Halligan says as was the case with the Nazi war crimes trials, if an individual has been an accessory to a crime then they should be held accountable, regardless of how many years have passed.

This is just a further development of Enda Kenny’s statement that “We took their babies and gifted them, sold them, trafficked them, starved them, neglected them or denied them to the point of their disappearance from our hearts, our sight, our country, and in the case of Tuam and possibly other places, from life itself.


Why was this not said in the Dail debate about Bethany Home? Just for the sake of argument, let us suppose that a Garda inquiry into Tuam finds no evidence of crime or any behaviour that would justify this rhetoric. Should we expect an apology from the politicians concerned?

42. ACP March 12th, 2017 at 7:00 pm 
Homily preached by Archbishop Michael Neary in the Cathedral of the Assumption, Tuam
11 March 2017 In recent years, and again during this past week, we in the parish, the archdiocese, the country and beyond have been endeavouring to come to terms with the heart-breaking news of the Mother and Baby Home here in Tuam. This is a deeply distressing story for all of us, but especially so for those affected individuals and families. We can only attempt to understand the emotional upheaval which mothers suffered as they felt so helpless and isolated.
What is particularly harrowing is the report of high levels of mortality and malnutrition. It was an era when “unmarried mothers” – as our society at the time labelled women who were pregnant and not married – were often judged, stigmatised and ostracised by their own community and the Church, and this all happened in a harsh and unforgiving climate. Compassion, understanding and mercy were sorely lacking. 
It is now timely that this dimension of our social history be addressed and thoroughly examined. To do so would begin the process of attempting to explain, but not to excuse, what happened in our not too distant collective past. Perhaps we could begin with this fundamental question: “How could the culture of Irish society, which purported to be defined by Christian values, have allowed itself to behave in such a manner towards our most vulnerable?” 
There is an understandable sense of shared anger arising from this situation; people are deeply distressed and desperately upset by what they hear and read. There is a danger, however, that when anger begins to die down, we may be tempted to move quickly to the next social problem from the past without having fully understood the complex and tragic historical situation before us. The use of highly-charged emotive language, while understandable in the situation, may prove to be counter-productive. 
There is an urgent need for an enquiry to examine all aspects of life at the time, broadening the focus from one particular religious congregation, and instead addressing the roles and interrelationships between Church, State, local authorities and society generally. Such an approach should ensure that the truth will emerge no matter how unpalatable it may be to those on whichever side of the present discussion. In this way we will be enabled to move genuinely forward. One hopes that the Report of the Commission will enable that truth to surface in a clear and objective manner.
Even today there are huge challenges surrounding how we care for the disadvantaged in our society. In years to come our present society will inevitably be subjected to scrutiny and will most likely be found deficient in many areas to which we are blind at present. We need to learn from the past in order to prevent similar injustices in our time, and so as to inform our future generations.
I wish to again apologise for the hurt caused by the failings of the Church as part of that time and society when – instead of being cherished – particular children and their mothers were not welcomed, they were not wanted and they were not loved.
In the story of the Transfiguration in today’s Gospel, frightened disciples are given a preview of the Resurrection in order to give them courage to face the scandal of the Cross. Today, we pray for that courage to enable us to face squarely and honestly those agonising questions which confront us from our recent past. Let us pray for the light which will illuminate the dark recesses of that past and bring hope and healing to us all. Amen.
 44. Kevin Walters March 13th, 2017 at 7:57 am 
Padraig McCarthy@40
We have had much heart-searching about the Tuam home situation, and many comments seem to presume that this is a particularly Irish and/or Catholic problem” 

No the problem is about the action and manifestation of love or lack of it in a Catholic county where the Church has a monopoly over that culture.

(i) Is burial in an unmarked grave a sign of disrespect – that those who died were just dumped or discarded?”
Probably not under difficult circumstances, burial at sea etc but generally it would be preferable to do so as it gives comfort to those who are still living. But in your statement you have by passed the most important aspect of this scandal and that is of a Christian burial, to be buried in consecrated ground. Was there not a cemetery close by?

It has been stated on the radio that some of the children/mothers have been buried there, given the indignation that was shown by the Church’s teaching on suicides etc. Yes, they were just dumped and discarded by those who should have behaved better. As religious those who participated in this deception knew exactly that they were doing, it was a cover-up to hide the true reality of the situation at this institution (Mother and Baby Home) in Tuam.

The motive for doing this was to maintain an image of goodness for the benefit of the powers that be in order to maintain the power of Clericalism. 

(ii) “Was infant mortality in homes such as Tuam evidence of malpractice?
We will have to wait and see but the lack of respect and dignity for each individual human life gives us a good indicator to the mentality and behaviour of many of those involved.

(iii) Was treatment of unmarried mothers particularly harsh in Ireland?”
My opening statement address this question
“The problem is about the action and manifestation of love or lack of it in a catholic county where the Church has a monopoly over that culture”.

Within the context of the above statement, yes absolutely.

kevin your brother
In Christ

45. Padraig McCarthy March 13th, 2017 at 10:17 am 
Archbishop Michael Neary asked: “How could the culture of Irish society, which purported to be defined by Christian values, have allowed itself to behave in such a manner towards our most vulnerable?” 


On Mother and Baby Homes, we bought, at least partially, into the dominant paradigm of the time in Britain & USA: segregation in an institution. We must also ask: if religious organisations (not just Catholic) did not take up the task, what would have happened the single pregnant women? The State, through the County Homes, could not have coped financially or otherwise, and the women would have had nowhere to turn. Certainly, it is wrong that they were rejected by their families, and the churches were part of that society which was greatly influenced by a (Victorian?) puritanical conformism, especially with regard to more disadvantaged sections of society. It would be of interest to know how many, if any, women from the wealthier sections of society were ever residents in a Mother and Baby Home.


On the matter of taking the children, we bought into the “wisdom” of the day that it was better to take the children to give them the possibility of “a better life”, as England did in sending children to Australia. In February 2010 UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to the families of children who were taken.


On how the unmarried single women were treated, we did not buy into the dominant paradigm in 32 States in USA and at least 10 countries in Europe, that the best thing was to sterilise such “feeble-minded” women so that they would not give rise to a new generation who would be a burden on society. (Winston Churchill was in favour but failed to get it through.) It is little consolation to the women and children who suffered, but at least in this matter we have reason to be grateful that we did not follow the example of so many other jurisdictions which would usually be seen as civilised.


46. Padraig McCarthy March 13th, 2017 at 12:54 pm 
Kevin @44:
The Tablet in June 2014 reported: “Fr [now bishop] Fintan Monaghan, spokesman and archivist for the diocese of Tuam said the diocese’s baptismal register showed that 2,005 children from St Mary’s mother and baby home had been baptised from 1937 to 1961.” 

Since children from the home were baptised, it seems very unlikely that those who died were buried in unconsecrated ground. I’ve never been involved in the “consecration” of a burial ground, but it seems quite possible that a priest from the parish, or a chaplain to the Home if there was one, could have blessed the ground at the beginning. The Home was originally the workhouse; I don’t know how much knowledge there is of the details of that operation. In Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, I was chaplain to St Colman’s hospital, on the site of the previous workhouse. Nearby there is a burial ground, known locally as a famine graveyard, but likely to hold more than just famine victims. There is just one memorial stone.


Many say that they were “dumped and discarded.” The Notice from the Commission on 3 March does not come to that conclusion. It seems better to wait the results of whatever further investigations may take place, and not condemn those responsible for the burials without clear evidence of disrespect.

52. Rory Connor March 14th, 2017 at 2:27 pm 
We must identify and own our own failures, without flinching, if we are to learn from them.” – Sean O’Conaill and Mary Vallely
In the case of nuns, the failures of the religious congregations also include the refusal to defend nuns who have been subjected to obscene and lying allegations – including the rape and murder of children. In a previous post on the topic “Child Abuse Scandal Almost Fatally Destroyed Catholic Church”, I referred to the article in the Daily Mirror on 11 October 1997 entitled
HOT POKER WAS USED ON LITTLE MARION.. NO CASH WILL GET HER BACK; I THINK MY BABY WAS MURDERED AT THE ORPHANAGE, SAYS PAYOUT MUM.”

The tabloids have very high powered lawyers to defend them against libel actions and I’m sure they advised the Mirror editors that the allegation – that a Sister of Mercy had killed a baby by burning holes in both of the child’s legs with a hot poker – was highly libelous. However the editors understood – correctly – that the Sisters would not sue, possibly because they did not want to cause pain to the woman who was making the claim!

Two years later when former Sister of Mercy Nora Wall was convicted of raping a young girl, the media exploded with hate-filled headlines: “Vile Nun, Pervert Nun”, “I was Raped by Anti-Christ”. The conviction collapsed with extreme speed when the two accusers gave a newspaper interview that named them for the first time and one of their OTHER victims recognised the name of his own accuser! The following is an extract from the Wikipedia article on the case:

Nora Wall
Reaction of Sisters of Mercy   After their conviction, the Sisters of Mercy issued a statement, which read:We are all devastated by the revolting crimes which resulted in these verdicts. Our hearts go out to this young woman who, as a child, was placed in our care. Her courage in coming forward was heroic. We beg anyone who was abused whilst in our care to go to the Gardaí.”
Even after the collapse of the case against the two accused, the Sisters of Mercy made no effort to apologise to Wall or to withdraw their statement of support for Walsh. One commentator remarked: “The young woman their hearts were going out to, was the false accuser, not their own innocent nun. Our absolutist system had seduced them into identifying with the accuser and betraying their own sister.”
Anyone who reads the Wiki article should also note the paragraph headed “Reaction of Kevin Myers, July 1999”. Kevin Myers, no friend of the Catholic Church, was prepared to defend Nora Wall even BEFORE the collapse of the rape conviction. Her former colleagues have failed to do so, even to the present day.

Something similar may well happen in relation to the Bon Secour nuns who served at Tuam. I referred at # 41 above to the Connaught Tribune article headlined "Tuam babies’ investigation likened to Nazi war crimes trials" regarding Junior Minister John Halligan’s claims. I see from a related article in the Irish Times on 11 March that Minister Halligan is not just using the term Nazi as a kind of generic insult – like the guy in the pub who calls someone a “bastard” without knowing what the word means. Mr Halligan knows and intends to be taken literally.
Death Rates in Mother and Baby Homes Similar to Concentration Camps
Old age should not diminish accountability for any crime or alleged crime. If you bear in mind that the child mortality rate at Bessborough in 1943 was approaching 70 per cent, sure that’s similar to concentration camps,” he said.
Are we seriously saying that because somebody is ill or aged that we shouldn’t at least interview them? If you look at what’s happened at Belsen, Auschwitz, Dachau, even up to last year individuals who are alleged to have carried out horrendous crimes in their 80s and 90s were interviewed.”
As it happens, I am in full agreement with Minister John Halligan that the Gardai should carry out an investigation into the deaths of babies in Tuam, Bessborough and elsewhere. Just for the sake of argument, let us suppose that a Garda inquiry into Tuam etc. finds no evidence of crime or any behaviour that would justify this rhetoric. Will the leaders of the Catholic Church request an apology from Minister Halligan? Or will they display the same kind of “compassion” shown by the leaders of the Sisters of Mercy when they failed to defend their colleagues against false allegations, up to and including the murder of a child? (And just what is the nature of such “compassion”?)

53. Rory Connor March 15th, 2017 at 10:31 pm 
Further to my previous comment, an Irish Times article by Breda O’Brien regarding Judge Harding Clark’s report on the Symphysiotomy “scandal” is also relevant here. How many people still recall this fake scandal that occupied media headlines for a mere 17 years – prior to the publication of the judge’s report in November 2016?

Breda O'Brien: Why Did So Many Women Say They Had Symphysiotomies?
Sensationalist consensus may overlook one third of applicants who never had procedure
……But medical experts proved that a third of those who made applications, including some very vociferous and active campaigners, had never had the procedure at all.

Other applicants claimed to have had it in hospitals that were not yet built, or to have had it carried out by doctors who were not there, and “in several statements the applicant claimed being held down by nuns (in hospitals where there were no nuns) while she was being ‘assaulted’.”…..[My emphasis]

Ms O’Brien points out that this is eerily reminiscent of Nora Wall, who was accused, convicted and jailed for allegedly holding down a child while Paul McCabe raped a victim. Nora Wall was subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing, as was Paul McCabe. But reasons why such an utterly egregious miscarriage of justice were allowed to happen have never been properly investigated, and never will be.

Breda O’Brien writes about the role of the media and indeed the Wikipedia article on Nora Wall points out that she and Pablo McCabe “were originally accused in 1996 shortly after the broadcast by RTÉ of the TV documentary “Dear Daughter” in February of that year; they were convicted in June 1999 one month after RTÉ’s broadcast of the States of Fear series produced by Mary Raftery.” 

There were also comments about nuns made by Dail Deputies at the time – of a tone similar to the recent ones by Minister of State John Halligan. 

The main difference since then is that the Catholic hierarchy themselves now seem determined to join the witch-hunt against the Bon Secour Sisters. The Archbishop of Tuam Michael Neary has recently asked us to begin with this fundamental question: “How could the culture of Irish society, which purported to be defined by Christian values, have allowed itself to behave in such a manner towards our most vulnerable?”


I would answer the Archbishop as follows: The late Pablo McCabe was a homeless schizophrenic man who presumably qualified as one of “our most vulnerable” and former Sister of Mercy Nora Wall was hardly a member of high society. McCabe had no money but prior to 1999 no woman had ever been convicted of rape so McCabe was accused to make the allegation appear more plausible. The leaders of the Sisters of Mercy betrayed both of them and sided with the accusers. Archbishop what makes you think that the current accusers are more plausible? Do you really find it acceptable that a Government Minister should refer to Nazis and talk about Belsen, Auschwitz and Dachau? Archbishop, if a Garda investigation into the Tuam Home produces no evidence to support such claims will you do or say anything at all? Or will you remain silent like the current leaders of the Sisters of Mercy?

54. Rory Connor March 21st, 2017 at 3:43 pm 
It looks like this discussion has ended but perhaps I can say a final word. I note from an article in the Irish Examiner that
Tuam: No Evidence of Crime, Nobody to Prosecute
A garda source said reasons for establishing a criminal investigation would be a reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed, such as homicide or neglect, but said it would be almost impossible to prove the latter after so long. A forensic expert said that 50 years on, the chances of establishing a cause of death were “very low” as except for cases such as strangulation, [my emphasis] bones would bear no signs.
And I had almost forgotten that there were allegations in 2014 that the nuns had refused to baptise children because they were “spawn of Satan” but the Tuam Archdiocese proved this story false by producing records of thousands of Baptismal Certificates. The Associated Presss carried this story, which was reported in hundreds of newspapers worldwide, but then issued an apology as reported by the Jesuit Review “America” on 24 June 2014
AP Expands on Corrections of 'Tuam Babies' Story
…The Associated Press ….. repeating incorrect Irish news reports that suggested the babies who died had never been baptized and that Catholic Church teaching guided priests not to baptize the babies of unwed mothers or give to them Christian burials.
The reports of denial of baptism later were contradicted by the Tuam Archdiocese, which found a registry showing that the home had baptized more than 2,000 babies. The AP issued a corrective story on Friday after discovering its errors. 
Some of the lunatic allegations regarding the Bon Secour nuns are reminiscent of the 19th century anti-Catholic scandal centered on Maria Monk. “The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk” published in 1836 contained tales of depravity and infanticide centered on the Hotel Dieu convent in Montreal. Priests supposedly visited the convent via a tunnel. Because of this, infants “were sometimes born in the Convent, but they were always baptized, and immediately strangled.” The Catholic Church of course denounced the book as a fraud but what really discredited “Maria Monk” (never a nun and in fact, a Protestant) was that prominent PROTESTANT clergymen and journalists – who had originally believed her horror stories – carried out an investigation and pronounced her a fraud. However if Canadian Catholic bishops at the time had chosen to throw the nuns to the wolves and believe the atrocity stories, then honest non-Catholics would not have dared to take a stand against the mob hysteria! There is a lesson here for the Irish Hierarchy today.

55. Kevin Walters March 22nd, 2017 at 11:56 am 
Rory Connor @54
In the past I have deliberately avoided making any comments on the Tuam babies story, but rather concentrated my efforts in regard to the culture of cover up relating to the child abuse scandal this article brought them together by including the resignation of Marie Collins from the Vatican Commission on Clerical Sex Abuse.

You have made many comments now and previously and put a lot of effort into citing headline such as “Tuam babies’ investigation likened to Nazi war crimes trials” the Symphysiotomy “scandal" etc. And yes much of this is hype and very unjust indeed, but what you need to know is that mankind see our Shepherds as having taken on the public mantle of our Saviour Jesus Christ and are now seen by them to be walking in His footsteps, proclaiming the good news, this mantle (Truth) is all they own, Jesus teaches that this is their only protection in this world, the world knows this also sadly this mantle has become so badly stained it is now almost unrecognisable and it needs to be cleansed quickly or our Shepherds will be trampled underfoot, the means are available to do this but this will take courage and honesty but then again if they possessed this courage and honesty in the first place the Church would not be in the mess it is to-day. 

One can only hope and pray that those men with the calibre and leadership qualities of Bishop Moriarty, that are now, so badly needed within today’s Church will make their presence known and step forward, if they do so all will not be lost, as the laity/mankind will see the truths within gospels actual working.

kevin your brother
In Christ

56. Rory Connor March 24th, 2017 at 11:34 pm 
It is possible that myself and Kevin Walters (and others) are operating at cross-purposes. I certainly believe that Christ’s call to establish a “Kingdom of Heaven” transcended Jewish Law and the Gentile attitudes to justice and truth that were accepted in his day – but it did not abolish them. 

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 
Matthew 5:18

Transcending (or fulfilling) the Law does not mean ignoring it or destroying it. A lot of Catholics today seem to be so consumed by guilt about child abuse that they have no interest in questioning the accounts of self-proclaimed “Victims” even where such accounts are either exaggerated or demonstrably false. Some Religious Sisters in particular, seem to take the view that the Catholic Church is (or was) Patriarchal and Clericalist and therefore bad. Thus even if “victims” tell fantastical stories they must have suffered deep pain at the hands of evil Church personnel – and the grosser the allegation, the deeper the pain. Their attitude is dogmatic in the most literal sense of the word i.e. there is no conceivable evidence that will cause them to revise their views!

I believe that the (comic) tragedy here is that these Sisters imagine that they are transcending the Old Testament attitude to Justice whereas in fact, they are failing to rise to it!

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns [2]


Tuam Babies Not Buried in Septic Tank



This is the second in a projected series of three articles on "The Tuam Babies and the Bon Secours Nuns". Part [1] is HERE  

The final report from the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy) is now due to be delivered to the Government on 30 October 2020. The Commission was set up in the wake of media claims that the bodies of up to 800 babies and children were buried in a septic tank in the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, located in Tuam, County Galway.



TUAM BABIES



[The following is an article by Fr Padraig McCarthy on the website of the Association of Catholic Priests dated June 2014 - plus extracts from Comments ]

Reporting on the Tuam story has often been wild and sensational, and out of touch with known facts.

Brendan O’Neill, whose website describes himself as a Marxist Proletarian Firebrand has a blog on the story of the misreporting at "The Tuam Tank: Another Myth About Evil Ireland" [Subtitle: The obsession with Ireland’s dark past has officially become unhinged. ]

The Tablet this week [June 2014] reports: “Fr Fintan Monaghan, spokesman and archivist for the diocese of Tuam said the diocese’s baptismal register showed that 2,005 children from St Mary’s mother and baby home had been baptised from 1937 to 1961.” 

Proportionately that would mean perhaps around 3000 children were baptised from the Tuam home 1924 – 1961. This, with the 796 recorded deaths, would indicate a mortality rate of about 20% overall. This would need to be related to the national infant mortality rates in those years, and to statistics in other countries.

It seems that mortality rates for what we used to call “illegitimate” children are generally higher in most if not all countries than for children whose parents are married, even today. The reasons for this are unclear. Possible causes may be that the mother did not approach a doctor as early; and the health of the mother may have been be below the average due to poverty in the case of mother and baby homes (better off families could make other arrangements). It would be relevant to know how the funding of the mother and baby homes compared to the funding of maternity hospitals at the time.

Stillbirths in Ireland were not registered until 1995, so a stillborn infant would have neither birth nor death certificate.

The burial of very young infants in the first half of the 20th century in Ireland was not as we do today. They were very often buried in mass graves, like the Holy Angels plot in Glasnevin where over 50,000 infants are buried, and there were no memorials with names. Only in the last 20 years or so has this plot been made more presentable. Poverty was also an important factor in providing a memorial stone on graves. A not uncommon custom was to put the body of a very young infant into the coffin with another burial taking place at the time, with no necessary family connection.

Adoption legislation in Ireland took effect in 1952. We hear stories of adoption of the child of a single mother, where the mother was under such pressure that there was not free consent. This was the case in many other countries as well. Until about the 1980s, adoption was “closed” – no information available which could facilitate later contact between the birth mother and the child. The USA had what is sometimes called the “Baby Scoop Era” (do an internet search).

The question of how to deal with illegitimate births was not just an Irish problem. Social engineering in the form of eugenics was in the fashion in a number of countries. Many European countries, and many states in the USA, had far more draconian measures: compulsory sterilisation of those considered unfit to be parents. In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr., Associate Justice of US Supreme Court, approved for the sterilisation of a young woman who had been raped: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Just recently, in May 2014, the California Senate passed Bill 1135 to prevent sterilisation of women prisoners in a coercive prison environment.

There are so many factors to be considered before we can come to a more complete understanding of the matter. Those who dealt with these matters in the past in Ireland faced situations which may be very difficult for us to envisage. The fact that we today may judge that some actions taken were not good does not mean that all those who made those decisions were bad people. We must also keep in mind our present-day situation, where the infant mortality rate for Traveller children is 3.5 times that of the general population, and where our provision for those seeking asylum in Ireland leaves so many in deplorable conditions.

Padraig McCarthy
Fr. Pádraig is a retired priest who has served 42 years in his pastoral work and currently does support work in Balally Parish, Sandyford, South Dublin . He is the author of "Unheard Story: Dublin Archdiocese and the Murphy Report"  that challenges some of the assumptions and assessments of that Report


RESPONSES


Rory Connor June 15th, 2014 at 12:03 pm
Very calm measured response from Padraig McCarthy to another blood libel of a type with which we have become all too familiar in Ireland. He refers to (Marxist firebrand) Brendan O’Neill’s editorial in the Spiked-online website that exposes the lunacy of our latest witch-hunt. A few quotes from O’Neill’s article should be taken to heart before our journalists manage to consign their latest idiocy to the memory hole:

Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, declared the Washington Post.800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers’, said the New York Daily News. ‘Galway historian finds 800 babies in septic tank grave’, said the Boston Globe. ‘The bodies of 800 babies were found in the septic tank of a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland’, cried Buzzfeed. Commentators angrily demanded answers from the Catholic Church. ‘Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway’s mass graves’, said a writer for the Guardian, telling no-doubt outraged readers that ‘the bodies of 796 children… have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway’.

The subtitle to O’Neill’s article is “The obsession with Ireland’s dark past has officially become unhinged”. Anybody who thinks he is exaggerating should read the article he refers to here
 A hysterical piece in the Irish Independent compared the Tuam home to the Nazi Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebrenica, saying that in all these settings people were killed ‘because they were scum’.”Tuam Babies Cry Not for Justice but for Vengeance" by Emer O'Kelly
Now that this has been transformed into a general investigation of all Mother and Baby homes, the people responsible for the atrocity stories about the Bon Secour nuns in Tuam should not be allowed to fade into the background. They should be questioned about their allegations!

Paddy Ferry June 15th, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Padraig, I do admire your taking on this horrible story and with your usual attention to detail and the relevant statistics. The silence on our ACP site was truly deafening all week. While I accept that we do not know, as yet, the full story, this could yet be the greatest scandal of them all. Just when you think — hope –that the worst must surely be past us now and things cannot possibly get any worse, they actually could get much, much worse. Even if the story remains confined to Tuam and does not eventually include Cork, Tipperary and God knows where else.

I cannot accept any attempt at justification or rationalization that is based on the premise that this kind of thing happened in other counties too — in fact probably was much worse in other countries. Nor does the argument that society as a whole must accept the blame. To a large extent our society was unthinking and uneducated until Donagh O’Malley’s famous stroke of his ministerial pen. Our morals and attitudes were completely moulded by the institutional church and the blame must rest squarely with that institution.

One thing that baffles and bothers me; how come those who were among the “educated” in our country , clergy and religious, seem to have been untouched — to a large extent — by the wonderful good news of the Gospel message of Christ?

I read all the articles in last Sunday’s Sunday Independent on the this awful topic. I had to ask myself; how can we, as a church, ever hope to regain respect among the masses?

Sean O'Conaill June 15th, 2014 at 1:57 pm
This concluding paragraph from Brendan O’Neill’s article in Spiked is worth quoting:
Was the Ireland of yesteryear a sometimes harsh and unpleasant place? Yes. Did the Catholic Church mistreat some of the women and children in its care? Undoubtedly. But the unhealthy obsession over the past 10 years with raking over Ireland’s past has little to do with confirming such facts and instead has become a kind of grotesque moral sport, providing kicks to the anti-Catholic brigade and fuel to the historical self-flagellation that now passes for public life in Ireland. There’s a terrible irony here: in desperately searching for demons that they can hate, in obsessing over evil and its capacity to destroy lives, in frequently substituting speculation for evidence, these history-combing Catholic-bashers employ the very same irrational tactics of demonology and mythmaking once beloved of Ireland’s old Catholic establishment.
History often seems to be process in which one set of brokers of honour and shame is replaced by another. The Irish ‘Catholic establishment’ of the 20th century (never exclusively clerical) has been displaced by a generally secularist and anti-Catholic establishment of the 21st, while the shamed pregnant single woman of the mother-and-baby homes is now replaced by the shamed cleric so often pilloried by the media establishment..........

Rory Connor June 17th, 2014 at 7:21 pm
Paddy
You read all the articles in the Sunday Independent (8 June) about this topic and you wonder how the Catholic Church can regain people’s respect. Does this mean you fully accept the truth of the article which Brendan O’Neill summarised as follows:
A hysterical piece in the Irish Independent compared the Tuam home to the Nazi Holocaust, Rwanda and Srebrenica, saying that in all these settings people were killed ‘because they were scum’.”

I take it you noticed that the Independent journalist specifically REJECTED the term “mass grave”, itself bad enough, and preferred to describe it as a “septic tank” and later as a “cess pit”? Did you also notice that in a separate article in the same newspaper the journalist wrote about the “800 bodies of children SAID to be found BY a septic tank run from 1925 to 1961 by the Good Shepherd Sisters”. [My emphasis and note that she also gets the name of the congregation wrong.]
The Tuam Babies case: An Inhumanity Born of Despair

The second article was presumably written shortly after the first to reflect the fact that the atrocity story was falling apart with great speed. In the Irish Times on the previous day, local historian Catherine Corless said she never used the word “dumped” and never told anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. According to an article in the Sunday Times (Irish edition) by Justine McCarthy on 8 June “The location of the grave in Tuam has been widely reported as the site of a septic tank, but contemporaneous maps show it to have been a water tank”. In fact the whole issue of a “tank” – water or sewage – would appear to be irrelevant. It is clear from the Irish Times report that in 1975 two local boys lifted up a concrete slab and found bones underneath. “In his kitchen, Sweeney demonstrates the the size of the concrete flag as he recalls it; it’s an area little bigger than his coffee table, about 120cm long and 60cm wide.” And later in the article: Would [the tank] have taken up the entire space of what is now known as the unofficial graveyard for the babies who died at the home? “No” [Catherine Corless] says. “Maybe a third of the area.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/tuam-mother-and-baby-home-the-trouble-with-the-septic-tank-story-1.1823393

The claim that Bon Secour nuns dumped the bodies of children in a septic tank is what caused this story to go viral world-wide and caused the Government to order an inquiry. What MAY have happened is that bodies were buried in the general area of what once was a water tank. But these bodies may well have been Famine victims from the previous century – which is what the Gardai appear to believe! (More on this later). It is grotesque for people to use this non-scandal as a means of expressing their hatred of the Catholic Church. It is also an insult to the dead – whether Famine victims OR children from the home.

Rory Connor June 17th, 2014 at 9:40 pm
I wrote above: “What MAY have happened is that bodies were buried in the general area of what once was a water tank.” I just came across the following from a Daily Mail article on 2 June
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2645870/Mass-grave-contains-bodies-800-babies-site-Irish-home-unmarried-mothers.html
The babies were usually buried in a plain shroud without a coffin in a plot that had housed a WATER TANK attached to the workhouse that preceded the mother and child home. [My Emphasis]

This ties in with the Sunday Times article on 8 June but the TITLE of the Daily Mail article is still “Mass Septic Tank Grave ‘containing the Skeletons of 800 Babies’ at site of Irish Home for Unmarried Mothers“. Our journalists appear to be amending their atrocity stories on the hoof!

Of course I appreciate that local historian Catherine Corless is upset by the way she was misquoted by a hysterical mass media. However the article in the Irish Times on Saturday 7 June also had this curious paragraph:
When Corless was researching the home she looked at old maps of Tuam. One was an 1840 Ordnance Survey map that shows the then workhouse. At the rear of the site is a space she believes to be the sewage tank for the workhouse, although it is not labelled as such. Later maps have “sewage tank” written in the same space. But there is confusion about what dates these maps relate to. One map Corless shows The Irish Times is dated 1892. It describes the building on the site as “Children’s Home”, but in 1892 the building was a workhouse. It did not become a home until 1925. Corless had not noticed this until her attention was drawn to it.
It is extra-ordinary that she did not notice this discrepancy. The 1892 map is presumably that shown in Philip Boucher-Hayes blog here
http://philipboucher-hayes.com/2014/06/04/tuam-babies-the-evidence/#comments
and HE doesn’t comment on the discrepancy either! He does quote a reply the Gardai sent him:
Hello Philip.The grounds in Tuam were being surveyed in 2012 and bones were found, they are historical burials going back to Famine times, there is no suggestion of any impropriety and there is no Garda investigation. Also there is no confirmation from any source that there are between 750 and 800 bodies present.
Boucher-Hayes goes on to state that The location of that site [of the Famine era bones] is about 100 yards away from the septic tank burial site. So the Gardaí are misinformed on this or have decided to find a reason not to investigate any closer.
[My Emphasis: Perhaps the Gardai are afraid of a belt of the crozier?]

In his latest post dated 12 June he does concede that at least one of the two plots possibly used by the Bon Secours nuns was not a septic tank as previously thought and also "But the most significant aspect to this information is this – whatever cruelties you could lay at the nuns feet, however harsh or medically incompetent the regime they ran was, it was always hard to believe that they would have knowingly put babies in a septic tank."
http://philipboucher-hayes.com/2014/06/

Well now THAT is a great relief. The trouble is that the Government inquiry is set to include all Mother and Baby homes, plus issues about Adoption, Vaccinations etc. So are the people who published atrocity stories about the nuns dumping babies in septic tanks, going to be questioned about their allegations? I suspect that the Investigation Report will ignore all the OBVIOUS lies and accept as true any claim that the Bon Secour nuns cannot PROVE are false. Since all the Sisters who worked in the Tuam Home are now safely deceased, my fear is that they will be demonised by the same kind of people who published the “babies in the septic tank” atrocity stories.

Paddy Ferry June 18th, 2014 at 12:22 am
Rory, I have to say fair play to you, you have mounted a strong and well-researched defence and I sincerely hope you are right and this is just a sensationalist false alarm. I say that even though I feel Fr. Gerard Maloney’s reaction (in the most recent article above)  to the “maybe” scandal is a better approach and one that I would empathise with more. However, you obviously feel strongly that the church is being unfairly treated. The article with the reference to “scum” may well have been the piece written by Gene Kerrigan. Now, I cannot check it because even in this high tech, digital age I receive my Sunday Independent on Tuesday and I pass it on to my Tipperary born mother in law on Friday. So, I don’t have it now. However, I have to say I greatly admire Gene Kerrigan. He is an excellent journalist as are many of his colleagues and he has been my first port of call when I get the paper and his analysis of, not just the church, but bankers and politicians as well, over the years has been excellent, in my opinion.

I have just had a quick look at Sunday’s paper which came to-day and the piece by Eilis O’Hanlon on victimhood seems very reasonable and mature. And, Rory, you know as well as I do that young women who had a child outside marriage were looked upon as scum at home in Ireland and were frequently denounced as such from the altar. And, with all due respect to you, Rory, I feel we would do better to be exercised more by the terrible attitudes and treatment– definitely unchristian — young, unmarried women and their children received in our native land not so very long ago

Joe O'Leary June 18th, 2014 at 4:20 am
The terrible treatment unmarried mothers received is quite a different thing from how mother-and-baby homes handled the great number of mothers and babies confided to their care by the state and by the families. In the case of the Tuam home it is quite possible that the Bon Secours nuns are guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever. The dangerous overcrowding of the home was probably not their choice. The death rate was lower than in most such homes (about 20%, as opposed to 90% in some US homes). The babies were given respectful burial in a vault grave (coffins were purchased from a local dealer). Contrary to the Daily Mail (aka the Daily Insult, says Salman Rushdie), the children were properly baptised. Why were the children not buried in the Holy Angels plot in the nearby cemetery? Could it be that that the locals did not want their children’s bones mixed with those of the unwanted?

As to the treatment of Irish unmarried mothers today, Fintan O’Toole has pointed to our huge abortion rates. As to non-Irish mothers and babies in Ireland, there are other 
questions to be asked.

Des Gilroy June 18th, 2014 at 2:59 pm
Thanks to Padraig McCarthy for his balanced piece on the story emerging from the Tuam mother and baby home over the past fortnight. Regrettably, too many commentators have gone overboard on this particular home and it is very hard for the public now to separate fact from exaggeration. A public enquiry has now been promised and the calls for its enlargement to take account of many other institutions makes one wonder whether this will ever get off the ground........

What is unhelpful at this moment is the media hysteria with the various commentators coming to their conclusions before the facts are known. We do know that shock horror stories sell newspapers and whip up tv and radio ratings but some of the comments made by people who should be more responsible have been very surprising. It was most disappointing, therefore, to hear one of our national treasures, Brian D’Arcy, referring to Tuam as “an atrocity” , “a serious crime” and finally referring to it “as shockable as something that happened in Germany in the war.” This latter comment has now been misrepresented in this weeks “Northside News” as Brian “ drawing parallels with Nazi Germany”. I am sure Brian never intended to equate the Bon Secours with the Nazis but it just shows how careful high profile leaders should be with their language.

Eddie Finnegan June 19th, 2014 at 8:30 am
As always, thanks to Pádraig McCarthy for attempting to place all this in the context of “not just an Irish problem” (his penultimate paragraph above). Thanks, too, to Des Gilroy@12 for his rational pursuit of “the facts”.

Vincent Twomey SVD has an Opinion piece in this morning’s Irish Times which, I’m sure, deserves reproduction on this site: “Catholic Church should set up its own commission of investigation following mother and child home controversy.”

His additional suggestion: “Government commission should be chaired by someone of evident distinction who is not Irish or of Irish extraction.”

[I realise that an appearance by Vincent Twomey on the ACP website may be something of a culture shock for both parties  ]

Association of Catholic Priests June 19th, 2014 at 8:40 am
Link to Irish Times article by Vincent Twomey SVD
Catholic Church should set up its own commission of investigation following mother and child home controversy

Joe O'Leary June 19th, 2014 at 10:33 am
Thanks to Vincent Twomey for insisting on historical perspective. Another good article is: http://americamagazine.org/content/all-things/galway-horror-part-ii

Des Gilroy June 19th, 2014 at 6:06 pm
As is his wont, Sean O’Conaill has penned a very thoughtful and cogently argued piece on the ACI website which is very relevant to this discussion on the Tuam Babies case. I would commend it to all.
The link is http://www.acireland.ie/honour-and-shame-and-irelands-culture-war-sean-oconaill/

Rory Connor June 21st, 2014 at 10:18 pm
There are interesting articles in (the Jesuit) America Magazine and in Forbes Magazine by Kevin Clarke and Eamonn Fingleton respectively regarding this fake scandal. I see that these critical commentators have succeeded in extracting apologies (or “clarifications”) for some of the most disgusting allegations – or at any rate for such allegations that can be readily disproved. This is Kevin Clarke in his Second and Third third articles on the subject:
The Galway Horror Part II [Kevin Clarke, 18 June 2014]

Babies born inside the institutions were denied baptism and, if they died from the illness and disease rife in such facilities, also denied a Christian burial.”
It is a sentence, unattributed to any source, which repeats—either word for word or in a close approximation—in HUNDREDS [My emphasis RC] of articles concerning the now infamous deaths and burials of hundreds of children in Tuam, Galway between 1925 and 1961. This appalling sacramental indifference is referenced in major U.S. and U.K. publications and cited in leading online opinion journals like Salon as more evidence of the cruelty of the Bon Secours sisters who ran the home and the Catholic Church in Ireland in general.
Associated Press Issues Correction Based on America Query [Kevin Clarke, 20 June 2014]
After our June 18 report on baptismal certificates recorded in Tuam, I queried the Associated Press regarding their stories on the Tuam Mothers and Babies Home.
Today AP issued the following correction:
Ireland-Children’s Mass Graves storyDUBLIN (AP) — In stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not church teaching. In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926.
It is interesting that Forbes the famous business magazine, which has NO connection with the Church, has published two highly skeptical articles about this witch-hunt. The second one by Eamonn Fingleton is here:
796 Babies In A Septic Tank": Does An Anti-Catholic Bias Help Explain This Hoax?

I recall that several years ago, Forbes published a long and highly sarcastic article about people making child abuse compensation claims based on decades old “memories” which they had suddenly “recovered”. In that case, I believe that Forbes were worried about the implications for the American Insurance industry but that issue hardly arises here! 

However it may be worth recalling that journalists on the Wall Street Journal were instrumental in discrediting the Satanic Ritual Abuse craze in the 1990s. Evidently, BUSINESS journalists are less likely to believe in witches and witch-hunts!

Pádraig McCarthy June 23rd, 2014 at 9:36 am
An interesting snippet from the Enda Kenny interview with Gay Byrne (22 June), “The Meaning of Life”. The Taoiseach’s mother gave birth to triplets who died: two died before she returned home, and one a few days later. These were buried (in two different locations), and it appears that they were laid to rest in unmarked graves. This was just how this was normally dealt with at the time. It was not a matter of poverty or neglect. The father of the children was a prominent GAA player, and the mother had worked for Fianna Fáil and RTÉ.

Memorials were erected just a few years before the death of the Taoiseach’s mother in 2011.

Rory Connor June 28th, 2014 at 12:14 am
As this particular discussion seems to be coming to an end, maybe it’s time to put it into perspective. The following is based on comments I made to an article in The New Republic by Jason Walsh:
That Story About Irish Babies Buried in a Septic Tank Was Shocking. It Also Wasn't Entirely True.
(Incidentally it’s remarkable how SOME secular and Marxist style publications have denounced the atrocity stories while our senior clerics grovel before the accusers)
This fake atrocity story is the latest in a series of grotesque claims that began in 1997 with a claim that a Sister of Mercy had murdered a baby girl by burning holes in the baby’s legs with a red hot poker. However at least that baby existed and actually died. This claim was followed by a long series of similar blood libels against the Christian Brothers – some of which related to periods when no boy died of ANY cause. Accordingly I coined the phrases “Murder of the Undead” and “Victimless Murders” – try Googling these. …….. the Blood Libels were published/broadcast by our “intellectual” Irish Times, our best-selling Irish Independent, the state broadcasting company RTE and the independent broadcaster TV3.
…… for those who want to sample Ireland’s history of hysterical allegations against Catholic religious see Letter to Sunday Tribune re Child-Killing Allegations” where I attempted to give a summary of the child-killing claims up to 2006.(There have been more since then).
At the time I actually forgot the one about the murderous nun with the hot poker but you can find the story here: Hot Poker Was Used on Little Marion
Note the title of the UK Mirror article "HOT POKER WAS USED ON LITTLE MARION.. NO CASH WILL GET HER BACK; I THINK MY BABY WAS MURDERED AT THE ORPHANAGE, SAYS PAYOUT MUM."
How did I manage to forget this when I was doing my summary article in 2006? Because the torrent of lunatic claims is so huge that it overwhelms you. The “babies bodies in a septic tank” is just the latest in a long and demented series!

Paddy Ferry June 29th, 2014 at 5:50 pm
Rory,
This is definitely my last word on this topic — I am not even sure what is the main issue we are discussing now. It may be — sensationalist and inaccurate reporting aimed at damaging the Catholic Church in Ireland. That would not be my take on this, Rory. It would be hard to make some of these stories more sensational than they already are. However, my main reason for responding to you is because I am puzzled as to why you gave us the link to the piece in the Mirror concerning the treatment of Christine Buckley and the child, Marion Howe in Goldenbridge. You are surely not calling into question the harrowing accounts that Christine gave of the treatment she and others were subjected to. I did not see the original interview when Christine Buckley appeared on the “Late Late” nor did I see the subsequent documentary. However, when she passed away earlier this year, I read quite a bit about Christine who was obviously an incredible woman who had the courage to speak out not just for herself but for all the others who experienced similar brutality in Goldenbridge.

However, when I read or hear the word “Goldenbridge”I do not think immediately of Christine but of the little child, Marion, who, sadly, did not live to tell her story.

Rory, I would not trust British tabloidism either but I would trust –yes indeed — the Sunday Independent, and it was in the Sunday Inde that I first read about Marion Howe. It is some years since I first read the story and my memory of some of the details may be a bit hazy. At the time it made a major impact on me. As I remember it, Marion’s Dad had gone to England to look for work and a short time later her Mum became ill. There were four children at that stage and they were all taken into care,– Marion to Goldenbridge. 

Sometime later she died. Her father came home and saw Marion in the mortuary and saw evidence of injury/wounding to the child’s leg. He subsequently made a request to see the death certificate which had mysteriously disappeared. He then went to the Gaurds and the Guard he spoke to told him he would be as well forgetting all about it. As far as I can remember, the family took no further action at that time.If anyone feels that any of this is not accurate then I stand to be corrected.

Rory, I have to say to you that defending the indefensible does not do our Church any favours nor does it bring any credit on ourselves. I am as concerned as anybody about the damage that has been inflicted — self-inflicted – on our Church and I am equally concerned about our prospects of regaining some respect and credibility. However, I would respectfully suggest that we would be better employed focusing on the ill-treatment and brutality inflicted on the weakest and poorest in our country by those who should have been influenced more by the Gospel of justice and love rather than continually fussing about the reporting of the atrocities, sensationalist or otherwise.

Rory Connor June 30th, 2014 at 12:06 am
Paddy,
One major reason I mentioned the 1997 “Hot Poker Was Used On Little Marion” atrocity story is that it bears some resemblance to the stories being published and broadcast about the Bon Secour nuns in Tuam e.g. claims that they allowed children to starve to death, buried the bodies in a septic tank and that the Church refused to baptise the children of unmarried mothers. For example today’s Sunday World has a story subtitled “Councillor Seeking Justice For ‘Murder’ of Babies” about People Before Profit councillor Deirdre Wadding. The following is an extract:

Deirdre said that what was happening to single mothers in Ireland even in the 1980s was a form of “torture”. “In later years, there was brutality, what you would call torture,” she said, describing the babies bodies found in the septic tank in Tuam as “nothing short of murder”. “Children seem to have been allowed to die. No doubt the cracks will uncover as time goes on and we can be sure if it happened in Tuam it happened elsewhere. We have to seek justice. Somebody has to be responsible for this. ……If that means individuals being brought to court, jail sentences, whatever it means, we cannot hold back”.

Another woman describes a “sinister scene” in the Good Shepherd convent in New Ross in 1964.
I saw a baby in a nun’s arms and blood dripping along the floor. I saw another nun standing with a shovel in her hand. I was a 12 year old. I knew they were going out to do something, or dig a hole for that child but nobody would listen to me.”

This is very much in line with the “Hot Poker was Used on Little Marion Story”. I don’t know the Sunday Independent article you refer to, but the allegation was dealt with in an article in the Sunday Times (Irish Edition) on 28 April 1996 – article entitled
Medical View ‘Inconsistent’ with Goldenbridge Abuse

……. One of the more chilling allegations to surface was that an 11-month-old baby died four days after she was put into Goldenbridge. When the infant’s father, Myles Howe. returned from England and went to St Ultan’s hospital, he was told by a nurse that his baby had burns on her knees but the staff had got her too late to save her. The postmortem said the child died of dysentery.The Howes have never been satisfied by the official response.
[Doctor] Prendiville [1] recalls that St Ultan’s was established largely for dealing with bowel complaints such as dysentery or gastroenteritis, a common illness among children which at that time could reach epidemic proportions in Dublin. He speculated that Marian Howe was more than likely admitted to St Ultan’s with a bowel complaint. “I wouldn’t say that burns of that size on a child’s legs would have been the cause of death. They didn’t treat burns in St Ultan’s. If the baby died from a burn, there would have to be an inquest. But failure to communicate information is a defect in many hospitals,” he said.
But if the burns were not the cause of Marian’s death, asks Howe, why was he told by Xavieria that it was an “accident” and not dysentery that killed his child? Why, on his arrival at St Ultan’s to see his dead child, did a nurse indicate to him that his daughter had died of burns? And why could nobody explain to him the large burn marks on the sides of her knees?
The outrage that followed the Prime Time programme was directed as much at Xavieria’s denials of abuse as at an apparently “soft” line of questioning. The allegation that a baby in her charge died of burns was not put to her on the programme. The reason was that after researching the allegation, the Prime Time team could find no evidence to support it. according to an RTE source. The reporter did ask Xavieria about the incident, he said, but her response was edited out of the programme. [Emphasis is mine RC]
[1] Doctor J. B. Prendiville was a senior surgeon who worked at the hospital where children from Goldenbridge were treated during the 1950s.

It wasn’t only Prime Time that failed to find any evidence to support the allegation – neither did the Gardai. This is despite the fact that the original “Dear Daughter” documentary contained allegations that could easily be checked even decades later.

Christine Buckley [on my website IrishSalem.com ]
In the words of Irish Times journalist Eddie Holt (writing on 24 February 1996) “Christine Buckley was once beaten so badly by the unidentified Sister Sadist of the Shining Stick that she had to get about 100 stitches in her leg. On another occasion, perhaps too tired from walking up a flight of stairs, Stick just poured a kettle of boiling water over 10 year old Christine’s right thigh”.

Perhaps the Gardai did not investigate because they were afraid of a belt of the crozier? The child-killing and related allegations were also omitted from the Ryan Report published in 2009. Was Judge Ryan also afraid of the Bishops?

It is very important that the forthcoming investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes DOES produce a Report that deals with the allegations that have been made, especially the ones that can actually be proved/disproved even decades later e.g. child-killing and burials in a septic tank.

Joe O'Leary June 30th, 2014 at 6:33 am
Paddy Ferry, in the Tuam Babies scandal what “atrocities” were committed? The state authorities seem to have been well aware of mortality rates in these homes (more than matched in other countries) and vault burial of children must also have been known.

Joe O'Leary June 30th, 2014 at 7:07 am
In the case of the baby Marion Howe it is not clear that an “atrocity” occurred either:
“In a statement read to the court yesterday, the Sisters of Mercy said: “We, the Sisters of Mercy, accept that Marion had a burn to her leg at the time of her death and died of acute dysentery infection. We have been unable to establish how this burn occurred.”

“The statement continued: “We, the Sisters of Mercy, wish to express our deep sorrow to Myles and Christina Howe for the anguish and distress they experienced on and since the death of their baby daughter, Marion, while in our care in May 1955.”

“”We also wish to express our sorrow and regret if there was any lack of courtesy and compassion at that time,” it added.”

Afterword 25 August 2020

The Statement by the Sisters of Mercy referred to above by Fr Joe O'Leary was made in October 1997 - as per Irish Times article "Goldenbridge Nuns to Pay £20,000" I understand that the Sisters subsequently discovered a record showing that when baby Marion Howe was in her crib, a child thought that she looked cold and put in a hot water bottle that was too hot and caused a small burn. This would tie in with the statement by Dr Prendiville that I quoted in my last Comment above
"I wouldn’t say that burns of that size on a child’s legs would have been the cause of death. They didn’t treat burns in St Ultan’s."

As per the Irish Times article:
 Marion was visited by the orphanage doctor, Dr Dillon, who examined her and referred her to St Ultan's Hospital, the statement said. The child died on May 21st, 1955, and a post-mortem was held two days later. The coroner for the city of Dublin certified that Marion had died of acute dysentery infection.














Wednesday, August 19, 2020

‘Many People Were Damaged By Carl Beech’




‘Many people were damaged by Carl Beech’

Carl Beech ruined lives with fake accusations of sex abuse. Why? Vanessa Engle, the director of a new film about him, explains


Monday August 17 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Vanessa Engle, director of The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech


Vanessa Engle has built a reputation on asking straight questions about knotty subjects. Engle’s television documentaries on the art world, Jews, lefties, Harley Street and domestic violence have been marked out by humanity, curiosity and her disarming, direct interviewing style. The British journalist’s new film, though, is perhaps the most disturbing of her 30-year career. The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is one of those rare titles that’s not an exaggeration.

In 2012 Beech, a hospital inspector in his forties from Gloucester, claimed to police that he had been abused, raped and tortured as a boy in the late Seventies and early Eighties by a paedophile ring that included the politicians Edward Heath, Leon Brittan and Harvey Proctor and the senior army officer Lord Bramall. Beech, referred to by the police as “Nick” to protect his identity, also said that he witnessed members of that ring murder three boys and that he had been abused by his stepfather. “I had poppies pinned to my chest whilst they did whatever they wanted to do,” he says of the “VIP ring” in a police interview. That would normally begin with him being forced to perform oral sex, he adds, “but would always culminate in being raped”.

As Proctor said in an incendiary press conference at the time, Beech’s claims amounted to “just about the worst allegations anyone can make against another person”. Yet, after an 18-month investigation that cost £2.5 million and put huge stress on the accused men — Proctor lost his job and home — not a single arrest had been made. The allegations were completely fabricated. Last year Beech, who had been awarded more than £20,000 in compensation for non-existent injuries suffered in the alleged abuse, was tried and sentenced to 18 years in prison for offences including fraud and perverting the course of justice.

Carl Beech (left) in Court 2018


And yet his unbelievable story was at first widely believed in a country that was reeling from Jimmy Savile’s crimes. Victims of abuse were being listened to like never before. In the police interviews Beech looks plausibly nervous, vulnerable, damaged. 
“We were at a moment where people would believe literally anything on this subject,” Engle, 57, says by phone from her home in north London. “The press believed it, politicians believed it, police believed it, the public believed it. There are still people saying, ‘Oh, no smoke without fire. It must be true.’ ”
Except in this case it wasn’t. Beech, it is clear now, is a fantasist on a grand scale. If notes read out in the film are anything to go by, he is also a dreadful poet. “Electrocution and drowning were some of the tools/ They used when I broke the rules,” he wrote. “They used snakes and wasps/ Or left me out there to die in the frost.”
“Well he obviously didn’t die, did he, because he’s alive and still in prison, for f***’s sake,” says his ex-wife, Dawn Beech, in the film. She is a peach of an interviewee — candid, courageous and funny — which is extraordinary, given her travails. Her sex life with Beech, she tells Engle, “just wasn’t good at all”. 
Another interviewee is Mark Conrad, a journalist who was taken in by Beech. “Some people have probably assumed that Beech took you for a fool,” Engle says to Conrad. See what I mean about direct? “I’m a very direct person,” she says. “I did ten years of therapy and that gave me the tools to be very aware of what’s happening in the room when I ask questions and what it’s possible to ask. You know you’ve done a good interview if you know you’ve taken a risk in some of your questions.”
Nevertheless, she says she was nervous about making this documentary. “Why would I spend time on somebody who was not a real victim, as far as we know, and who had inflicted so much damage to the real victims? Normally, the more you familiarise yourself with stories, the less strange they become, but with this one Carl’s motivation just seemed stranger and more despicable to me.”
What was that motivation? Engle thinks there may have been a past trauma. “You just have to look at him. He does not look comfortable in his own skin, does he?” When police searched Beech’s home they found substantial amounts of child pornography, the possession of which contributed to his prison sentence. While there is no evidence that Beech was abused, Mike Pierce — an anti-abuse charity worker and survivor of child sexual abuse who appears in the film — met him and felt that he had been. “So, I can’t categorically say that he wasn’t,” Engle says. “I don’t know how bad a thing has to happen to someone to send them off the rails.”
The film ended up becoming an examination of the damage that Beech has done. “There was just wave upon wave,” she says. “We all understood that the falsely accused were very damaged, but I hadn’t really realised that Beech’s own family was damaged too. The family of his step-siblings has been really badly damaged. I hadn’t understood that the journalists [who covered the case] were damaged.”
Conrad talks about the long period of depression he went through when Beech was found to be a liar. “I know that some of the police who were fooled have had breakdowns as well,” Engle says.
She coaxes brilliant details out of people, punctuating the grimness with off-kilter interludes. Brittan’s widow and housekeeper talk about the police searching the house. “The thing that hurt the lady more than anything — they took his slippers,” the housekeeper says. “Were they nice slippers?” Engle asks. “They were pretty awful, to be honest,” Diana Brittan replies. “No monogram.” 
This is ultimately, Engle says, “a film about truth. Which, of course, is very relevant in the post-truth era.” In the age of Trump and Johnson, will fantasists like Beech become more common? “That’s a terrifying thought,” she says. There have always been fantasists, she points out. Her previous film, The $50m Art Swindle, was about Michel Cohen, a Frenchman who made a fortune by selling Picassos and Monets that he didn’t own. “He was a conman and a very deluded person too. We all have a tiny strain of deluded thinking. That’s not always a bad thing. It’s what makes people have dreams and grand ambitions.”
It’s hard to put a positive spin on Beech’s case, though. What’s most heartbreaking is how much damage it has done to the cause of genuine abuse victims. “We just were at a moment where the victims of historic child sexual abuse were coming forward and were being believed,” she says. “What kind of a person would want to get in the way of that?”
Engle asked Beech for an interview, but he refused. “We’d have loved to ask him why he did it. But when you see his extraordinary performance in those police videos, I don’t think you could whip off the mask and the real Carl Beech would step forward.”
Does she think he feels any remorse? “From everything I know and from everything I’ve heard from those closest to him, no, he doesn’t,” Engle says. “He’s never said, ‘I made it up.’ He really does seem to believe what he’s saying.”

The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is on BBC Two on August 24 at 9pm