David QuinnThere is a willingness to believe the worst about Catholic Ireland
I was at a conference a few days ago and a delegate from Chile came up to me and asked out of genuine curiosity what the nuns did to the babies in Tuam. A delegate from Croatia asked me the same thing. They are both practising Catholics and were doubtful about the story but the fact that someone from Chile and someone else from Croatia asked me about the Tuam babies story showed how widely it has been reported.
What the two people had picked up, of course, were the reports that the nuns had ‘dumped’ the bodies of almost 800 babies in a septic tank. The Irish Examiner, in possibly the most exaggerated comment on the whole episode, described it, and other stories that have emerged from our institutions, as “Ireland’s holocaust”.
Even the Washington Post and the Boston Globe were taken in by the original, horror movie version of the story. The former ran with the headline, “800 skeletons of babies found inside tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers”, while the later said, “Galway historian finds 800 babies in septic tank grave”.
The Associated Press, upon which many media outlets all over the world rely on for their international coverage, ended up having to clarify various important aspects of its coverage.
But it only did this after being challenged by America magazine, a Jesuit publication.
Incorrect reporting
Having been challenged by America, AP responded:
"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 baptised.
"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."
That last little bit about the date is only a detail. The rest is not. It is not a ‘detail’ to report that the children were unbaptised. In fact, the only children the Church does not baptise as a matter of firm policy – when the parents want them to be baptised, that is – are those who are stillborn because the Church does not baptise the dead for obvious reasons.
If the nuns running the Tuam mother and baby home were not allowing the children to be baptised that would have been completely against Church teaching. But as the AP now admits, the records show “many of the children were baptised”. If some were not baptised it is almost certain it is because they died before it could happen.
Completely untrue
The original AP story made things worse by saying it was actually against Church teaching to baptise the children of unmarried mothers. They could easily have checked this out and found it to be completely untrue. Why didn’t they bother?
Finally, AP, like many other media outlets, was very quick to believe that the nuns had dumped the bodies of the babies in a disused septic tank.
In fact, we don’t know exactly where the bodies are buried. It also appears to be the case that there is a deep burial crypt beneath the ground close to where the mother and baby home was, so perhaps they are in there.
I focus on AP because the manner in which AP reported the story was typical. There was a rush to believe the worst about the nuns and about Catholic Ireland.
Mistakes
The fact that some terrible things did happen in Church-run institutions is no excuse whatsoever. Journalists are supposed to check facts. That is absolutely basic to journalism. Mistakes will obviously be made from time to time, but when a whole plethora of various serious mistakes are made in the one story, and I’m not just talking about AP here, then we’ve got a problem.
As I asked in the Irish Independent a couple of weeks ago, why is there such a willingness to believe the very worst about Catholic Ireland? Why is there such an obsessive focus on the terrible things that sometimes happened here when terrible things, often of a similar nature happened in almost every country, many of them neither Catholic nor Christian?
Secular, Social Democratic Sweden often sterilised unmarried mothers over a four decade period from 1935 until 1975 and sometimes made them have abortions. It also ran institutions.
As Dan O’Brien commented in the Sunday Independent, Switzerland effectively sold orphans to farmers as cheap labour. This happened until the 1950s.
In respect of Tuam, there was even early reports that the nuns were starving the babies and that many had died of malnutrition.
The Sunday Independent published a list of exactly how the 796 babies and young children died. Only a handful died of malnutrition. Those who did may well have arrived in the home already severely malnourished or had badly malnourished mothers.
The rest died of highly infectious diseases like measles which would often kill a dozen babies in the space of a fortnight. From the late 1940s when antibiotics came on stream, the death rate plunged.
The Government has announced it is to hold an inquiry into the mother and baby homes. Hopefully it will be far more sober and balanced than much of the appalling reporting on this story that has taken place.