The Republic Of Ireland has been doing a very hard job over the past couple of decades of confronting the awful legacy of having its civil government so closely married to the institutional Roman Catholic Church. For years, the Church was given a free hand in running a great deal of what passed for educational and social-welfare policies in Ireland. The results were almost uniformly authoritarian and almost uniformly godawful, in every sense of that word. Over the past 20 years, the country has slowly, but steadily, made a project of telling the truth to itself about the atrocities that the civil government allowed to be perpetrated against its citizens by the institutional church. A remarkable number of these crimes against decency and humanity were conducted against the country's women, although the crimes of the Christian Brothers against boys and young men were no less horrendous, as were the crimes committed in Cork that werethe subject of the Cloyne Report, which prompted this remarkable speech in Dail Eireann by Taoiseach Enda Kenny, which may be the clearest and most uncompromising statement of the importance of the separation of church and state produced since Madison's Memorial And Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. it was Irish women who took the brunt of the Church's vengeful indecencies.The countryis still coming to grips with what it still owes the women who suffered the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries, the last of which closed only midway through the Clinton administration.

Comes now what might be the worst story of them all.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate. More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed - where a housing development and children's playground now stands - what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins. "The bones are still there," local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. "The children who died in the Home, this was them."

Here, you had the Irish church -- with, it must be said, the support of the Irish people -- taking its vengeance out not only on the women who got themselves pregnant, but on the children those pregnancies produced.

According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high. "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 said. "Couldn't they have afforded baby coffins?" Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were "usually gone by school age - either adopted or dead."

And there is no arguing that people didn't know what was going on at the time.

A local health board inspection report from April 1944 recorded 271 children and 61 single mothers in residence, a total of 333 in a building that had a capacity for 243. The report described the children as "emaciated," "pot-bellied," "fragile" with "flesh hanging loosely on limbs." The report noted that 31 children in the "sun room and balcony" were "poor, emaciated and not thriving." The effects of long term neglect and malnutrition were observed repeatedly. Children died at The Home at the rate of one a fortnight for almost 40 years, one report claims. Another appears to claim that 300 children died between 1943 and 1946, which would mean two deaths a week in the isolated institution.

Holy mother of god.

The purpose of the institutions in which these peacetime domestic war crimes took place, of course, was to shame women who showed the visible signs that they were sexually active. Certainly, that line of thought has died out over time, right?

But that proposal was in turn attacked as a big government solution by a smaller faction of Congressional Republicans, led by Representative James M. Talent of Missouri. They have argued that work programs are wasteful and that the Government should instead simply abolish benefits to discourage unmarried women from having children in the first place. Mr. Talent would permanently deny payments to children born to mothers younger than 26. States could use the money instead to care for children in orphanages or other group settings. While as recently as a year ago, such talk was considered far too radical for mainstream politics, it is edging into the prime-time debate.

Certainly, nobody with aspirations toward high public office in the year of Our Lord 2014 would feel this way, right?

"You know, but we have to teach our kids that. But some of that's sort of some tough love too. Maybe we have to say 'enough's enough, you shouldn't be having kids after a certain amount.' I don't know how you do all that because then it's tough to tell a woman with four kids that she's got a fifth kid we're not going to give her any more money. But we have to figure out how to get that message through because that is part of the answer. Some of that's not coming from government. It needs to come from ministers and people in the community and parents and grandparents to convince our kids to do something different."

The bones of Tuam tell quite a different tale.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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