Some Facts About the Home at Tuam (Provided by Irish Contacts in the Diocese of Galway)
1.) It is not a septic tank, but a mass grave built during World War II
2.) The Home was open for about 35 years and served 5,000 women during wartime.
3.) Most of the children in the graves died during a tuberculosis outbreak in Ireland during the war.
4.) The government was heavily rationing food and medicine. What was scarce before was now almost utterly unavailable.
5.) The Diocese of Galway - the one running the Home at Tuam - never hid anything. All docuмents were handed over to the British government
6.) The docuмents are accurate, as they are now the ones being used to confirm the number of dead in the mass grave.
7.) The sisters intended to build a proper cemetery for the dead long before the outbreak.
8.) They had no land on which to build said cemetery, nor the money to purchase any from neighbors.
9.) The Home closed in 1961.
10.) The Diocese had long-term plans to have a proper memorial service for the dead children, and to move the bodies to an appropriate graveyard.
11.) The Irish Government has been stubborn about giving the Diocese permits to build the graveyard, not helped by the fact that suburban development is being zoned for and begun around and near Tuam, and the government is hesitant to give up any of that land for a graveyard - presumably because it would drive down property values.
12.) There are many mass graves like this one all over Ireland from the tuberculosis outbreak and the potato famine. This one was accidentally discovered by locals moving into the new suburban area and there was a mild amount of hysteria over it.
The media campaign going on among a lot of editors, dressing this up like some great atrocity, are distorting the facts to cause a media circus aimed at defaming the already crippled Church of Ireland. It's undoubted bad things went on at the Home, and the Victorian-Era principles which governed its use and even its construction (Victorian morality never really fell out of favor until after the 1920s) were undoubtedly morally wrong and opposed to Catholic teaching. However, the nuns were not these abusive monsters who's neglect was killing hundreds of children, like it's being dressed up to be. Granted, the Home wasn't a pleasant place and things were done that shouldn't have been - no one in Galway is denying that. But they're not about to be dragged through the streets by editorial lynch-mobs for crimes they didn't commit.