The stories from Bessborough are devastating.
One: “I was screaming with the pain, three days screaming with the pain and all you got was, ‘Oh you should have thought about this nine months ago.’ ‘You have got to suffer for your sins and you have got to put up with it.’ And the more you screamed the more she abused you.”
Another: The midwife “wouldn't give any painkilling. She was cutting the girls down below and just would tell them this is your punishment for what you have done and you are never doing this again.”
Another: “When my baby boy was six-seven weeks old, he was wrenched from my breast by one of the nuns whilst I was feeding him and taken away for adoption… I ran after the nun down the corridor, but there were two big doors that women weren’t allowed to go through… [1/2]
“…and so all I could do was bang on those doors.
“About an hour later the nun came back and told me that my baby was gone… At no time did I give my consent to my son’s adoption.”
“About an hour later the nun came back and told me that my baby was gone… At no time did I give my consent to my son’s adoption.”
Others reported how, just after the deaths of their own babies, they would be sent back to the standard duty of working in the nursery feeding the other babies. While grieving their own. Without, in some cases, even being allowed to attend the burial of their own child.
One former resident in Tuam said the food was not very good and that they remembered eating moss off the wall.
One child of a former Tuam resident told how their heavily pregnant mother was carried on a bicycle by her father and brother, at 2am, for the 20-mile journey to Tuam’s precursor in Loughrea so that she would not be seen by anyone else.
Another child born in Tuam:
“I was born in a jail and I spent six-and-a-half years in a jail. I got no love, no care, no education, no nothing.”
Asked if he had any positive memories:
“Nor a good memory in the world, no. Nothing whatsoever, nothing.”
“I was born in a jail and I spent six-and-a-half years in a jail. I got no love, no care, no education, no nothing.”
Asked if he had any positive memories:
“Nor a good memory in the world, no. Nothing whatsoever, nothing.”
Everyone was responsible... so who is responsible?
My overview of what's in the Mother & Baby Homes report this evening for @VirginMediaNews:
My overview of what's in the Mother & Baby Homes report this evening for @VirginMediaNews:
.@Nicole_gernon’s report contains some of the personal testimonies from some who lived inside mother and baby homes:
…while @ericgclarke was in Tuam, for which the Commission wasn’t able to find full burial records - and says there’s probably more information out there which it couldn’t track down.
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