Kenny said Irish authorities will “draw together a number of senior officials from across the departments until we see what the scale is, what’s involved here, and whether this is isolated or if there are others around the country that need to be looked at.” He said Dublin must decide what the “best thing to do in the interest of dealing with yet another element of our country’s past.”

Another leading Irish politician, Brendan Howlin, said a criminal investigation may be in the future. “The government is ruling out nothing,” he said, according to the Daily Mail. “The sense of revulsion almost all of the people of Ireland have at the callous disregard for the most innocent of our young people has to be met with openness and with clarity, and that’s what the Government will do.”

The announcements came as international rights groups expressed shock at the grave’s discovery in the western Irish town of Taum. “As disturbing as the ‘Tuam babies’ case is, it must not be viewed in isolation,” Colm O’Gorman, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, said Thursday. “The Irish authorities must look into possible allegations of ill-treatment of women and children in other so-called ‘mother and baby homes’ and other institutions run by the state or religious authorities.”

Local leaders also seized upon the issue on Thursday, calling upon the Irish parliament to investigate how it happened. “The history of ‘mother and baby’ homes in Ireland reflects a brutally, unforgiving response by society,” Minister for Children Charlie Flanagan said in the parliament on Thursday.

News of the mass grave of babies’ bodies went viral this week after a local historian named Catherine Corless discovered never-before-released records that pointed to the babies’ remains. She still lives near the institution, known locally as “the Home,” that was operational from 1925 to 1961. According to Irish Central, a local health board in 1944 reported the children living at the Home were “emaciated,” “pot-bellied, “fragile” and with “flesh hanging loosely on limbs.”

“If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless told The Washington Post in a phone interview earlier this week. “Couldn’t they have afforded baby coffins?”