The
Taioseach intervened from the
United States yesterday to say that he had ordered his officials to
'see what the scale is, what's involved here, and whether
this is isolated or if there are others around the country that need
to be looked at.'
Michael
Dwyer, of Cork University’s School of History, found the child
vaccination data by trawling through tens of thousands of medical
journal articles and archive files.
He
discovered that the trials were carried out before the vaccine was
made available for commercial use in the UK.
Homes
where children were secretly tested included Bessborough, in Co.
Cork and Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, both of which
are at the centre of the mass baby graves scandal.
Other
institutions where children may also have been vaccinated include
Cork orphanages St Joseph’s Industrial School for Boys, run by
the Presentation Brothers, and St Finbarr’s Industrial School
for Girls, run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.
In
Dublin, it is believed that children for the trials came from St
Vincent’s Industrial School, Goldenbridge, St Joseph’s
School for Deaf Boys, Cabra, and St Saviours’s Dominican
Orphanage.
But
Mr Dwyer said: 'What I have found is just the tip of a very
large and submerged iceberg.
'The
fact that no record of these trials can be found in the files
relating to the Department of Local Government and Public Health,
the Municipal Health Reports relating to Cork and Dublin, or the
Wellcome Archives in London, suggests that vaccine trials would not
have been acceptable to government, municipal authorities, or the
general public.
'However,
the fact that reports of these trials were published in the most
prestigious medical journals suggests that this type of human
experimentation was largely accepted by medical practitioners and
facilitated by authorities in charge of children’s residential
institutions.'
A
spokesman for GSK – formerly Wellcome – said: 'The
activities that have been described to us date back over 70 years
and, if true, are clearly very distressing.
'We
would need further details to investigate what actually took place,
but the practices outlined certainly don’t reflect how modern
clinical trials are carried out. We conduct our trials to the same
high scientific and ethical standards, no matter where in the world
they are run.'
A
spokeswoman for the Sisters of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the
order that ran Bessborough and Sean Ross Abbey, said that like GSK,
they would also welcome an independent inquiry.
Fianna
Fáil leader Micheál Martin called on the Irish
government to add vaccine trials into the investigative remit of any
inquiry into the mother and baby homes.
He
said: 'We need to start with an independent investigation into
the mother and baby homes which would be followed by a wider
separate investigation into the vaccine testing.'
Historian
Catherine Corless, whose discovery of the suspected mass baby grave
at Tuam was revealed by the Mail earlier this week, said her study
of death records for the St Mary's home run by Catholic Bon
Secours nuns from 1925-1961 pointed to the existence of the mass
grave.
The
Irish PM interrupted a trade visit to San Francisco to order an
inquiry in the Tuam home and others, saying that Dublin must decide
what is the 'best thing to do in the interest of dealing with
yet another element of our country's past.'
St
Mary's was one of several such 'mother and baby' homes
for 'fallen women' who had become pregnant outside marriage
in early 20th century Ireland.
Another
such institution was the Sean Ross Abbey in Tipperary, was where
Philomena Lee gave up her son for adoption in the 1950s. Her story
was made into the Oscar-nominated film 'Philomena' last
year.
The
'mother and baby' homes accommodated women who were
ostracised from their own families and had nowhere else to turn.
Under
conservative Catholic teaching of the time, children born outside of
marriage were not baptised and were therefore denied a Catholic
burial on consecrated ground.
