"796 Babies In A Septic Tank": Does An Anti-Catholic Bias Help Explain This Hoax?

By Eamonn Fingleton
Forbes
June 15, 2014

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/06/15/796-babies-in-a-septic-tank-does-a-hidden-anti-catholic-agenda-explain-a-global-hoax/

Tuam, County Galway: 796 babies unaccounted for.

In this space last week I challenged the sensational tabloid story of the moment: the idea that nuns at an orphanage in Ireland had “dumped” nearly eight hundred babies’ bodies in a functioning septic tank. The story had caused global outrage – but, as I pointed out, it not only did not ring true but no media organization had come even close to establishing the facts. Many of the reports were contradictory and even the most reliable-sounding evidence was at best confusing.

My reservations have now been vindicated and the “796 babies dumped in a septic tank” story has been revealed as one of the most outrageous press hoaxes in recent years. To their credit, some of the world’s more reputable news organizations have revisited the facts and published correctives. In particular the Washington Post and the New York Times have tacitly admitted that the implied image of satanic depravity that turned the story into a global sensation – that of wicked-witch nuns shoveling countless tiny human forms into a maelstrom of excrement and urine – almost certainly never happened. Their updated accounts can be read here and here.

At the end of the day, these facts seem well founded:

1. A total of 796 babies and children died at an orphanage in the town of Tuam in County Galway.
2. Even judged by the standards of  the time (the orphanage operated between 1925 and 1961), this represented a disturbingly high death rate.
3. The babies’ final resting place has gone unrecorded.
4. Basing their opinion on practice at other such institutions at the time, experts believe that the babies were buried in unmarked graves within the grounds of the orphanage.
5. In the mid-1970s, two boys playing on the site came upon what seemed like a crypt in which the skeletons of perhaps 20 babies were discovered.
6. Some observers have recently concluded that the so-called crypt had at one stage been a sewage tank dating from the nineteenth century.

Perhaps the fairest summing up has come from Andrew Brown, a religious affairs commentator for the Guardian. As he points out, for those who want to dismiss the nuns as wicked witches who consciously dumped babies’ bodies into a maelstrom of human waste, the problem is chronology. He comments: “If the bodies were placed in a sewage tank long after it had been drained and disused, this would seem much less shocking. That less shocking story is at least plausible.”

He could have added that a disused nineteenth century sewage tank would quickly have become overgrown with grass and weeds – so much that an examination by an expert would have been required to determine its original function.

To say the least the wicked witches story is unproved. Thus all of us who believe in decency and fairness should withhold judgment until the full facts are known. In this case therefore we must await the results of an official inquiry by the Irish government.

So why the unseemly rush to judgment in the media and on the internet? Why indeed.

Much of what has been written has been not just unprofessional but venomously mendacious. It is fair to say that had we been talking about prison guards at Belsen or the perpetrators of bestial biological experiments at Imperial Japan’s Unit 731 facility in Manchuria, the accused would have been accorded more fairness than the nuns of Tuam.

A tone of implicit and sometimes explicit anti-Catholicism has been apparent in much of the comment. Take, for instance, this reader contribution by Alec Rush at Forbes.com last week: “The Catholic Church needs to be dismantled. It should be treated with more historical contempt than the Nazi party…. Close it down. Now.”

In much of what has been written the nuns seem to be regarded as guilty by association. Supposedly just because many priests have been convicted on pedophile charges, we can it for granted that the nuns who ran the Tuam orphanage were wicked witches.

Here, for instance, is how Emer O’Kelly put it in an article in the Guardian: “What is the difference between the wall of lies, denial and secrecy the church constructed to protect its paedophile priests and a concrete slab over the bodies of 796 children neglected to death by nuns?”

Let’s sum up by stating the obvious: the death rate at the Tuam institution was a national scandal. But the blame for that reflects badly on the whole of Irish society not just on the undoubtedly overworked Sisters of Bon Secours who ran the Tuam institution. The fact is that Irish orphanages were grossly overcrowded, largely unheated, and for the most part deprived of even the basics of normal healthcare. The responsibility for such dismal conditions lay with society not with the nuns.

The conditions reflected a shameful effort by the whole of Irish society to ostracize and generally stigmatize children born out of wedlock. This effort was consistently made at every level. Political leaders were probably as guilty as church leaders, and the Anglican Church, known locally at the Church of Ireland, nearly as guilty as the Catholic Church.

Among the few people in the country who lifted a finger to help the victims of the stigma were the nuns of Tuam. Were they holier-than-thou harridans who looked down on the unmarried mothers who came to them? For the most part, probably yes. But they did do something for those ill-starred children. The rest of society did almost nothing.