The author complains about a hatchet job and exaggeration!
Then proceeds to do a fine hatchet job on the ABC, who were just one of many, fooled by this alleged hoax!
He waxes lyrical on the fact that the children adopted by Americans was only 50,000!
But given Ireland's total population, this is a huge percentile!
Or put another way, the entire population of one Australian electorate!
Or as many as say, fifty rural schools!
And he only focuses on America, which possibly was the largest recipient of unwanted kids.
Many of whom would become (earning their keep) farm laborers and the like, well before their teens!
He adroitly whips over the years of virtual slavery practiced on so called unwed mothers in care; with every exported child having in most cases, an unwed and hugely over exploited mother!
Christian charity had absolutely nothing to do with it.
These girls were worked from dawn to dusk, mostly for just very substandard, (prison like) keep!
And just so a commercial enterprise, could capture and largely hold onto a captive laundry market, no other commercial tax and fair wage paying organisation, could compete with!
And then we wonder why the Catholic church is one of the richest organisations in the world, with even the most impoverished, asked to put a few coins in the collection plate several times on Sunday, and who knows what during the week!
Let's neither underplay nor exaggerate these things, but shine a spotlight, via a royal commission on Ireland's Catholicism; if only to understand; those receiving worse treatment at the hands of their warders, may well have been prisoners of war!
I know because I was one of their inmates; as was a sister!
Rhrosty.

Thanks Rhrosty but your take is a little off the mark.

My criticism of the ABC was not that it had been taken in by the septic tank hoax. The point was that, having been taken in once, the ABC should have been more careful with the second story, which was also much exaggerated.

You also state that that the article "waxes lyrical on the fact that the children adopted by Americans was only 50,000!
But given Ireland's total population, this is a huge percentile!"

You have your facts wrong. Most babies of unwed mothers in Ireland were adopted locally. The total number adopted by Americans was only 1500 out of total adoptions of 50,000 (only 3 per cent) between the 1920s and 1950s. The Irish population (Republic only) in 1950 was about 3 million.

I have not ignored that the unmarried mothers we badly treated. Inter alia, I said that "No one can dispute that the nuns took a highly puritanical attitude to the "fallen women" and were punitive (even cruel) in many respects".

I find the undue focus on Irish mother and baby homes a somewhat odd. Such homes existed in many other countries including the UK, USA, Canada and Australia. They tended to be run along similar lines, as in Ireland, and by all the major Christian churches. I gather from your comment that you were born in such a home in Australia.

The story that the lost babies suites not only the abc but 'progressives ' narrative. They are more likely to run a fantasy like this than abuse in Indigeneous communities because its only evil Catholic priests who are depraved. The more secular Ireland becones the more lies you will get. One of the dogmas of secularism is moral relativism. No doubt they have a million excuses for their lies and who says lying is wrong anyway? Don't foget feminist and sympathesisers get degrees on manipulating statistics and verifying their narrative by lies.

This is yet another example of the dangers we face, when religion dominates Govt. People make the grave mistake of assuming that the Church "is doing good works", so fail to question what is going on, as was clearly the case here.

I remember seeing a documentary about the Philippines, where a woman had popped out 8 kids as she lived on the Manilla rubbish tip and pleaded with the hospital to tie her tubes as she simply could not feed or cope with them all. The hospital denied her request as it was run by Catholics. I consider that cruel and hardly humane, more like a scandal by an organisation which IMHO is not be to trusted or relied upon for good judgement.

I don't always like Brendan O'Reilly's work, but when he writes on this sort of issue, he has my utmost admiration.

I'll put aside the ABC hatchet job, which was not really necessary to the narrative, because the rest of the article was so well argued.

This 'septic tank' narrative is not only very similar to the equally dubious Philomena narrative, but also to the supposed 'Magdelene Laundries' scandal. This scandal exploded in 2002 due to the release of a film about the laundries made by a Catholic-hating Scot, which also took all kinds of liberties with the truth. And like the film Philomena, portrayed the nuns, and Catholicism in general, as a bunch of sadistic bigots.

A full inquiry into the laundries in Ireland culminated in a report released in 2013, which found that although some abuse did occur (as with all institutions everywhere in those days), none of the atrocities depicted in the film ever happened.

The 'septic tank' scandal, along with films like Philomena and the Magdelene Laundries, has at its core three separate but overlapping issues: (1) the centuries-old British disdain for the Irish, (2) the still-lingering British hangover from the Reformation wars, which in Britain (and its colonies) declared the Protestants as the clear cultural winners, and (3) a centuries-old misogynistic morality system that ruthlessly controlled every aspect of women's sexuality and reproduction.

Having read the book, seen the ABC's report, read the article and the comments, and bearing in mind my own awareness of some of these matters I feel that the truth lies somewhere between the alleged distortions and this church-apologist whitewash article.
Many of the "horror" stories are not "proven" yet that does not mean they are untrue, just that they don't meet a legal standard of proof, one that is almost impossible to meet most of the time for a lack of corroborative evidence or supporting witnesses. Given all the factors at play in the situation that lack is hardly surprising.
Consider, where lies the "truth" in the nun-run laundry situation?
In the later reviews of the records kept by the church and interviews with the very few willing to speak of those times, or in the way that the abused mothers lived it, what they experienced and felt then and remember now?
Perspective matters, doesn't it?