By Eugene Jordan
The Irish taxpayer is about to be defrauded of another €800 million to be paid in compensation.
Astonishingly, the compensation is to be paid by the Irish government in spite of the findings of its own commission of investigation that no abuse took place at mother and baby homes.
In several recent TV interviews, the chief promoter of the scandal, Catherine Corless, has stated, and restated her claim that children were starved to death at these institutions.
However, after seven long years of investigation, the commission found that not one single child was starved to death at any of these institutions. Moreover, the commission was set up as a direct result of Corless’s allegations and it found no evidence to substantiate her other allegations.
Consequently, she has angrily dismissed the findings of the commission and carried on regardless. It would appear that despite spending millions of euros on the investigation, the Irish government has also chosen to ignore its own commission’s findings. Even before the commission was set up there was an abundance of evidence to question Catherine Corless’s abilities as a historian, not only with regard to many aspects of historical knowledge, but especially absence of knowledge in the area of medical history.
The Irish government managed to appoint individuals to head up a commission of investigation, to enquire into deaths at maternity hospitals and care homes, who had zero knowledge of historical medicine.
However, the commission had the good sense to seek the opinion of “medical experts” with regard to the use of the term ‘marasmus’ on death certificates. Marasmus is ‘starvation’ according to Catherine Corless but the medical experts have said that she is wrong. Marasmus was a general term used by medics to describe infants who failed to thrive, mostly due to an underlying undiagnosed medical condition, which in turn was due to the inability of the infant’s digestive system to absorb nutrients.
It was never the medical term for starvation, and any historian with access to a Latin dictionary can see that the term translates as ‘wasting’. It was originally classified as a wasting disease, but these days has been redefined to refer to a particular type of malnutrition. Mrs Corless and others bypassed the dictionary, took the notion of malnutrition and set it in flight with their imagination, so that by the time it landed, it became the nonsense story of starving babies.
Numbers also have an amazing power to mislead people, especially when relevant information has been left out, either deliberately or in error.
For example, the commission found that 9,000 children died in the County Homes combined with the small number of religious run homes in the 76-year period between 1922 and 1998.
However, they forgot completely to compare and contrast that figure with general infant/child mortality. This was a time period when many new-born infants and children were lost regardless of their mother’s marital status. To be precise, 219,064 young souls were lost in in the same period addition to the 9,000. They also failed to quantify how many of these children had married parents.
Similarly, Catherine Corless also failed to mention that out of the 796 death certificates she acquired belonging to children who died at Tuam, at least 62 were the children of married mothers. Thus, allowing the false notion to circulate that it was only the children born to unmarried mothers who died at these institutions.
Infant mortality rates were yet another set of numbers used to instantiate the notion of poor-quality care. The statistics were nothing more than a hospital effect. Many people die in hospital; therefore, hospitals always have higher mortality rates. Those hospitals dealing with high-risk individuals have the highest rates of mortality. However, no competent health authority nor any medical researcher would use raw statistics as a measure of the quality of care. Accordingly, when comparing hospitals, statisticians take account of the type of patients who are treated in various institutions. For example, a cancer hospital will have more deaths than a private hospital that treats patients with treatable diseases. Accordingly, patients who were expected to die are removed from the dataset before analysis can begin.
Decades of medical and social research has proved that poverty has a major influence on health and life expectancy.
Consequently, hospital comparison statistics now include a deprivation index. In other words, hospitals dealing with patients from economically deprived backgrounds have higher mortality rates. The issue has long been reported in the scientific literature and appears with increasing frequency in the popular press. Newsweek, for example, reported in 2015, that “Washington’s poorest infants are ten times more likely to die that those in the richest”.
Another foundation stone of the murder and abuse allegations is that the authorities overseeing all types of children’s institutions had a hatred of illegitimate children. According to one commentator, they acted to “hide an embarrassment to Catholic Ireland”. However, many children who were born to married parents also died in these institutions. When we ask the question, why were they abused and murdered, it has the potential to cause a suspicion that the allegations do not appear to be as presented.
In the trade, the act of leaving out important information is known as ‘lying by omission’ and a mountain of evidence has been omitted by the scandal promoters, journalists and broadcasters. The commission report included testimonies from former residents that they were well treated by the nuns, the homes were their refuge, and that they were grateful for their kindness. Many women escaped from violent, incestuous and abusive homes. Although their testimonies have been published in the Commission’s final report, not one has appeared in any Irish news publication. Moreover, it is very hard to find in the mainstream media, stories that would have allowed readers to contemplate a more rational and sensible interpretation of historical events.
The Commission of investigation found that there was no evidence to support the allegations of abuse, neglect or murder. However, evidence of governmental incompetence is abundant if we know where to look.
