IRELAND
Irish Examiner
Friday, August 07, 2015
By Conall Ó Fátharta
Irish Examiner Reporter
The 2014 inter-departmental report on mother-and-baby homes listed just 25 infant deaths in Bessborough mother-and-baby home, in Cork, despite two departments having figures that showed 500 deaths.
The report, published in the wake of the Tuam deaths scandal in 2014, listed 25 infant deaths at Bessborough.
This figure was taken from the 1934-35 annual report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, which, as its title suggests, is a report on a single year and which covered the entire country.
However, both the Department of Health and Department of Children and Youth Affairs had a 2012 HSE report which showed that 478 children died at Bessborough from 1934 until 1953 (the only years for which deaths were recorded) — that’s almost one infant a fortnight for nearly two decades. This was a higher death rate than revealed by Catherine Corless, at Tuam, two years later, in 2014.
The 478 figure was also taken from the death register, which the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Order, who ran Bessborough, handed over to the HSE in 2011. The HSE report described the infant death rate as “wholly epidemic”, “shocking” and a “cause for serious consternation”.
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