Woman's Hour R4 today - Tuam etc

[Davros]

This was a really excellent and very moving programme. Plus they are looking for relatives and people's stories.

Oh will have to try and find this, thanks for posting

I heard it. And that statement from the care home.

I think they said they were going to upload DNA information into Genealogy websites?

Link to the programme
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0023g60

If you believe you are related to a child buried in Tuam, please contact Daniel MacSweeney's team. The confidential phone line is 00 353 1 5391777, or email [email protected]
The postal address is: Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (ODAIT), Custom House, Flood Street, Galway, H91 XV2C, Ireland.

There was a lot of bollocks about excluding people from compensation in questionable ways

A huge amount of children have been excluded from the redress scheme.
Also a lot of the private M&B homes hate also excluded, apparently those victims/survivors are not as traumatised. Bull**it,

Babies who were only in them from 180 nights are included, apparently 170 nights and adopted/fostered etc on 180th day means they couldn't possibly have been abused.

but more vile is children outsourced as free labour doing back breaking work long hours in the fields only to beaten, SA, limited food or simply scraps and in many cases told to sleep in the barn.

I am sure there were some decent people which took care of these children but the stories overwhelmingly say otherwise.

There is nothing to be proud of in RO'G department with roll out.

The amount of records from the RO's which have mysteriously vanished and/pore simply never existed to begin with is phenomenal.

On top of that there is Tusla, who have the power to decide who and what information is provided to people, huge amounts of redaction. This means pages and pages of blank records, along with lines and lines of redaction.

The whole scheme is a farce and MM standing up in the Dail crying his crocodile tears, just like EK for the Magdalene survivors,

all the whole RO'G was issuing Letter or Determination that ML money be redirected to TENI as their HSE funding had being withdrawn due to missing/unavailable book keeping.

Tuam is another farce, those babies have been known about since 2014, 10yrs and they have still not been exhumed and given names and simple respect of a burial or cremation.

Two different governments have come and gone there will be a new term of government and still those innocent victims will be ignored.

Typo

179 nights not 170

I didn’t hear the programme, but I know people who’ve been involved in the excavation since the beginning. It’s not as simple as ‘being exhumed and given names and the simple respect of burial or cremation’. For one thing some of the families are adamant they do not want the burial place of their relative disturbed, and, for another it’s going to be impossible, given the remains of several hundred infants and small children who’ve been buried for decades, to extract identifying DNA from many, if any at all. I entirely see why some families are desperate to reclaim their relative, but I can also see why experts don’t think it’s a feasible project.

And yes, the government attitude to living survivors of the laundries and MaB homes and compensation stinks to high heaven.

I live near a ruined laundry. Even though the land is owned by a developer and sealed off with security fences, the nuns’ graveyard is well-tended and pristine, while the Magdalens’ graveyard is inaccessible behind ten-foot walls and razor wire.

The crocodile tears of EK and MM sicken me.
Put your money where your mouth is and do something.

MechanicalDancingDoll - I wonder could the people you know who were involved in the exhumation confirm that the remains of the babies were interred ''not in a sewage tank, but in a second structure with 20 chambers which was built within the decommissioned large sewage tank'' which probably dated from when the workhouse was built in the 19th century, and was redundant when the sewage system was modernised.
It sounds like it hadn't been used as a septic tank or part of the sewage system for a long time, and had been adapted as a crypt at some point.

Like the Magdalen Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes- two very different institutions BTW - what really happened was awful enough, so it's a shame that the '800-babies-dumped-in-a-septic-tank' headline has become a sort of full stop to finding out what really happened and why and how. It's almost considered blasphemy to even suggest that the reality may be more complicated than the headline, but the full truth is always the best way to respect the victims.