Ugh...

Scot Dutchy wrote:Well another catholic home under investigation:

Bodies of hundreds of children 'buried in mass grave in Lanarkshire'

‘Whoever is behind this, I hope they can live with themselves,’ says child's brother

The bodies of hundreds of babies, toddlers and older children who were living in an orphanage are thought to be buried in a mass grave in Scotland, according to a new report.

The remains of at least 400 infants, who had been cared for by Catholic nuns at the Smyllum Park Orphanage, are believed to be buried in a plot in St Mary’s Cemetery, in Lanarkshire.

Allegations of abuse at the home – including beatings, psychological abuse and public humiliation – have also been uncovered by the The Sunday Post and BBC’s File on Four investigation.

“Whoever is behind this, I hope they can live with themselves,” Eddie McColl told the BBC. His brother Francis is thought to be buried in the unmarked grave.

Mr McColl never found out what happened to Francis, but said he was told at one point that he had died after being struck on the head with a golf club.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry is investigating what occurred at Smyllum.

The home, which was run by The Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, cared for 11,600 children between 1864 and closed in 1981. Former residents of Smyllum – Frank Docherty and Jim Kane – uncovered a burial plot containing the bodies of a number of children in 2003.

More...

This is also not that long ago which sickens me.

Most of the deaths were before 1930, that is, before antibiotics, or most vaccines, became widely available, according to the Guardian here:

The institution, which looked after children from broken homes, opened in 1864 and closed in 1981. More than 11,000 children stayed at the orphanage over that period.

Records reveal that most of the deaths were due to natural causes, mainly from diseases such as TB, pneumonia and pleurisy. About a third of the victims were under the age of five, and the majority of the deaths occurred between 1870 and 1930.

Controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases where large numbers of young children were housed together must have been very difficult.

zoon wrote:
Controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases where large numbers of young children were housed together must have been very difficult.

True, but tossing them all in a mass grave, forgetting their names, and refusing to cooperate with the police to at least retrieve the identities is what makes all this criminal.

aban57 wrote:

zoon wrote:
Controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases where large numbers of young children were housed together must have been very difficult.

True, but tossing them all in a mass grave, forgetting their names, and refusing to cooperate with the police to at least retrieve the identities is what makes all this criminal.

Would you point me to the report which says they have been refusing to cooperate with police? I'm still disinclined to think the nuns before 1930 have been shown to be especially criminal, organising and paying for burials and keeping up with the paperwork may not have been easy when there were children dying around them and they were on a limited budget.

Go back to the beginning of the thread, there's the link.

What about this which has nothing to do with disease:

Allegations of abuse at the home – including beatings, psychological abuse and public humiliation – have also been uncovered by the The Sunday Post and BBC’s File on Four investigation.

The poor nuns were swept off the feet? It did not close until 1981. Even if only one child died due to treatment by the nuns it is a crime.

zoon wrote:

aban57 wrote:

zoon wrote:
Controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases where large numbers of young children were housed together must have been very difficult.

True, but tossing them all in a mass grave, forgetting their names, and refusing to cooperate with the police to at least retrieve the identities is what makes all this criminal.

Would you point me to the report which says they have been refusing to cooperate with police?

aban57 wrote:Go back to the beginning of the thread, there's the link.

The thread's currently discussing the Lanarkshire orphanage, and the original link was in Scot Dutchy's post #199, it's to an article in the Independent which I'm linking again here. That article doesn't say they are refusing to give information to anyone. A BBC article here, states: "The nuns refused to respond to detailed questions from reporters about how many people were buried in the mass grave." Refusing to cooperate with reporters is not a crime. There is no indication that they have refused to cooperate with the official investigation.

I thought it would better to append this report to the other one. I think it is better to have topical threads instead of a multiple similar threads.

Scot Dutchy wrote:What about this which has nothing to do with disease:

Allegations of abuse at the home – including beatings, psychological abuse and public humiliation – have also been uncovered by the The Sunday Post and BBC’s File on Four investigation.

The poor nuns were swept off the feet? It did not close until 1981. Even if only one child died due to treatment by the nuns it is a crime.

I'm not defending the running of the orphanage after 1950; certainly, as you say, even one death from abuse is a serious crime, and the Roman Catholic church has been far too slow to tackle it, public investigations are overdue. I'm not so ready to pile all the criticism for the many deaths before 1930 on to the nuns and their religion. Linking again to the BBC article here, most of the deaths were before 1930, when no antibiotics and few vaccines were available, and they were from diseases common at the time. Very many more children died then than now, even when they were not crowded together in orphanages. They would have been more neglected than most children from intact families because of the child/staff ratio, orphanages were cheap, which was why they were sent there, and they are also fairly disastrous for infants, which is why infants are no longer in orphanages in wealthy countries, but that would have been the wider system and the more general poverty, rather than the nuns. It may yet turn out that the orphanage was being much more badly run than other orphanages at the time, but so far I don't think anyone's saying that, I haven't seen any comparisons with other similar institutions from that time in the UK.

zoon wrote:

zoon wrote:

aban57 wrote:

zoon wrote:
Controlling outbreaks of infectious diseases where large numbers of young children were housed together must have been very difficult.

True, but tossing them all in a mass grave, forgetting their names, and refusing to cooperate with the police to at least retrieve the identities is what makes all this criminal.

Would you point me to the report which says they have been refusing to cooperate with police?

aban57 wrote:Go back to the beginning of the thread, there's the link.

The thread's currently discussing the Lanarkshire orphanage, and the original link was in Scot Dutchy's post #199, it's to an article in the Independent which I'm linking again here. That article doesn't say they are refusing to give information to anyone. A BBC article here, states: "The nuns refused to respond to detailed questions from reporters about how many people were buried in the mass grave." Refusing to cooperate with reporters is not a crime. There is no indication that they have refused to cooperate with the official investigation.

I didn't mean crime in a legal way. And I'm sorry, but I had a clear memory of a passage in the article saying that the nuns interrogated refused to give any name or information to the police, but it was probably another case.
My bad.

Our government voted to seal the records by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Home for 30 years. It, predictably, isn't going down well.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politic ... 9?mode=amp

One has to wonder who they are protecting, and why.

Would a new government be able to unseal the records and make them public?

Animavore wrote:Our government voted to seal the records by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Home for 30 years. It, predictably, isn't going down well.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politic ... 9?mode=amp

Vile bastards.