Fr Brian Says Mass Grave Discovery Is Akin to Horror Story from Nazi Germany

By Karl Doyle
Sunday World
June 6, 2014

http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/news/fr-brian-mass-grave-discovery-like-horror-story-from-nazi-germany

Fr Brian Darcy has spoken of his shock at the discovery

Sunday World columnist, Fr Brian D’Arcy, has reacted with shock and disbelief to the discovery of the bodies of almost 800 babies near a ‘mother and baby’ home in Tuam, Co Galway.

Speaking on Newstalk’s Lunchtime programme, the curate told interviewer John Keogh that the grim find was akin to something that would have happened in Nazi Germany during WWII.

He has also demanded that those responsible should be brought to justice for what he called “an atrocity”.

Speaking about his outrage on hearing of the mass grave, he told the programme: “When I heard it first I began to think that this was some atrocity that had happened in a foreign country - the remnants of a famine in some other country, or a bad regime, because that’s what it sounded like to me.

“It’s just a dreadful, horrible thing. I simply couldn’t believe it was in my own lifetime and in the same religion to which I belonged to and have professed to all my life.

“It just simply doesn’t bear thinking about it.

A ‘scoping exercise’ is currently underway to find whether something similar could have happened in other institutions around Ireland, and the Government has promised a thorough investigation.

“It’s just a kind of hypocrisy that keeps popping up from that era - political hypocrisy, religious hypocrisy, and it’s the kind of thing which says some children were very valuable while, at the same time, it seems to have been this massive thing that children from unmarried mothers were not valuable. When you look at it there can be no other conclusion drawn from it.”

“We cannot claim to be pro-life and allow that to happen to children. We need to establish the facts of what did happen but it seems to me that, over a short period of life, over 800 people weren’t even given recorded deaths, some of whom seem to have died from starvation”

“It’s not just a sinful approach to life - it’s also a serious crime.

“I presume some of the people from that era are still alive and need to be brought to justice for that.”