Eight Hundred Babies Like You

When you died, the staff at the hospital were wonderful. They were so kind to us in our shock and grief, so supportive. And so well trained. There were two chaplains, both Catholic nuns and there is not one thing that I could fault them on, they treated us and you with dignity and respect. Your little body, all that remained mortal of you, was treated with the utmost reverence, you were clothed in a white hat and white blanket and laid in a Moses.basket. Nothing was too much trouble. When your organs which the hospital had needed to retain for post mortem were returned to us, they were in a little white box, which we were able to have buried with you. One of the hospital chaplains came and prayed over your grave. It was effectively another burial, but again, tastefully and reverently done.

Your grave is not always as pretty and tidy as I would like it to be but the place where you are buried is marked with your name and the day you died. It's a place to visit, a place which tells the world, "Sylvie-Rose was here, she lived. She Mattered"

All this week, in the news,  there is talk of eight hundred babies, who lived and died in a mother and baby home in Tuam. When their little lives came to an end, there was no grave for them, no little white cross, no plaque, no place to leave flowers. Their bodies were cast into a septic tank, en masse. There are women alive today who do not know if the baby they gave birth to, was one of those eight hundred babies, or whether their fate was to be adopted in Ireland or abroad.

Cast into a tank because they didn't matter. Did the people who cast them in, even think to whisper a prayer as they did so?

Those babies did matter. They were little human beings like you. And I know they mattered to their mothers, even though those poor young women were told to move on, to forget. But mothers never forget. And there is nowhere to move on to.

Those women need answers and they need them now. And the Ireland that judged and shamed those young mothers and treated their innocent babies as less than human, should be banished forever to the past.