Ireland to pass law to allow exhumations at 'mother and baby homes' - Yahoo News
The Irish government on Tuesday unveiled legislation to allow excavation and DNA testing at mass burial sites, including one at a former home for unwed mothers and their babies.
Campaigners and relatives have called for years to have the site in the western town of Tuam excavated following the discovery of an unmarked mass grave in a disused septic tank on the grounds of the former home run by Catholic nuns.
"What happened in Tuam is a stain on our national conscience," children's minister Roderic O'Gorman told reporters as he presented the legislation.
"I've heard the sense of urgency and frustration around why exhumations have not happened yet."
With the law expected to pass in the coming months, the minister said exhumations at Tuam could begin later this year or in 2023.
O'Gorman said under the proposals a director would be appointed to oversee the intervention in Tuam and a DNA programme would simultaneously establish potential matches with relatives.
The legislation is not "site specific" and can be used where other interventions are necessary, he added.
"This will be one of the most complex forensic excavation and recovery efforts ever undertaken not only in Ireland but anywhere in the world," he said.
"The legislation we are announcing today gives us the best possible chance of recovering the remains from the site and reuniting them with their loved ones," he added.
In 2021, a six-year-long enquiry sparked by the discoveries in Tuam concluded that 9,000 children had died in state- and Catholic Church-run "mother and baby homes" across Ireland, some of which were still operating as recently as 1998.
Prime minister Micheal Martin in January last year offered a formal apology, calling it a "profound generational wrong" and acknowledging "significant failures of the state, the churches and of society".
Records found by a local historian in 2014 showed that 796 children, from newborns to a nine-year-old, died at the Tuam home, which was run by the Bon Secours Roman Catholic order of nuns, between 1925 and 1961.
source: https://news.yahoo.com/ireland-pass-law-allow-exhumations-155323980.html
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