Fr Brian D'arcy: Tuam Mass Baby Grave "an Incredible, Awful, Unchristian and Unsocial Thing"

Irish Independent
June 6, 2014

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/fr-brian-darcy-tuam-mass-baby-grave-an-incredible-awful-unchristian-and-unsocial-thing-30332378.html

Speaking to John Keogh on Newstalk Lunchtime earlier today, he said it was unbelievable that such a thing could have happened in his own lifetime.

“When I heard it first I really began to think that this was some atrocity that had happened in a foreign country, or remnants of a famine in some other country, or a bad regime, because that’s what it sounded like.

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

“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, and when you look at it there can be no other conclusion drawn from it.”

He has called for those responsible to be brought to justice.

“It’s not just a sinful approach to life it’s also a serious crime. This seems to have been self-imposed and cruel and ruthless and therefore needs investigated. I presume some of the people from that era are still alive and need to be brought to justice for that.

“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."

The well-know curate also said it was “contradictory” how Irish people are known for their generosity in similar situations yet do the contrary at home.

“It just seems so contradictory that all around the world Irish missionaries and Irish religious orders are known for what they did positively for people in precisely those situations where justice didn’t prevail and they helped them to establish themselves, whilst here at home we were doing exactly the opposite.”