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?

Not only does the author do a hatchet job on the ABC, he simultaneously does a snow job on the Roman "Catholic" church.

Bruce and Julian

I think you need to stick to the facts and to the subject under discussion. My article covered three main topics only. The "septic tank" hoax, the Four Corners programme and to a lesser extent the movie "Philomena". I made no comment on Magdalene laundries or on anecdotal "horror" stories, nor did I set out to write a new historical narrative on mother and baby homes.

In regard to the three main topics I covered, all I have argued is that (based on the evidence cited) these media stories were greatly exaggerated and widely duped the public. Pointing out factual inaccuracies or gross imbalances in a widely-disseminated narrative is not the same as a whitewash. If nobody is ever critical of poor journalism then standards will never be raised.

Just because I am critical of the media stories referred to does not mean that I disbelieve all the negative stories about mother and baby homes.

I suspect that some people (because of my very Irish name) stereotype me as a conservative Catholic of Irish background. I did indeed grow up in Ireland but I am agnostic and more of a critic than an apologist for the Catholic Church. Whatever our religious views, we still need to be fair-minded and base our opinions on evidence rather than prejudice.

It would be nice to get a truly balanced picture of the era referred to. The reality is that the main survivors are the adopted children and to a much lesser extent some of the relinquishing mothers. The nuns that ran these homes are at least a generation older. They are nearly all dead and their accounts will never be heard

Bren’s tirade against the ABC and SMH remains, despite his disclaimer, no less a hatchet job backed by a snow job on the Roman Church. The warning of deceptive journalism shows early on: “The story was exposed as ‘b*’ ” . A writer telling the truth would use the word ‘described’, not ‘exposed’. Piecing together what facts can be gleaned from the author’s polemic, hundreds of babies died as a result of the church’s neglect and general ill-treatment between 1925 and 1961 of mothers and children in just one of the church’s “homes” for unmarried mothers. Recent research by historian Catherine Corliss showed there were no burial records to match the death certificates, and she concluded that the nuns had “disposed of” the bodies. Irish society at the time was, in Bren’s words, “deeply conservative” (in my words, “rabidly superstitious”) which formed the cultural background for the vile treatment of its hapless mother and child victims by the Roman church which called the shots.

All that Brad could come up with to support his intemperate attack on the ABC and SMH was that the dead children MAY not (the caution is based on the Irish Times report he cited) have been buried in a septic tank, that the makers of a movie based on another victim of the Roman “Catholic” mother and child homes, Philomena, had over-dramatised the story, and that most of these homes were not Irish-based (so?). If the ABC and SMH were supposed to retract any mis-statements, it is hard to find what there is to retract.

As Brad reports, there’s to be an inquiry into the mistreatment of unmarried mothers and their children. Let’s hope it’s more transparent than the British inquiries into the Bloody Sunday murders, the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes, the tissue of lies about Iraqi WMDs and the “suiciding” of Dr David Kelly who didn’t keep his mouth tight enough shut. The Irish could take a leaf from Australia’s book to conduct genuinely searching inquiries into mistreatment of institutionalised children.

Sorry, I twice referred to Bren as Brad. Lucky I wasn't writing for the ABC ! Btw I wouldn't have mistaken his Irish-based surname as signalling religion. Can't generalise and in any event the Irish have wised up a long way since 1961.

Emperor Julian
The description of the "dead babies in the septic tank" story as" BS" was not mine. It was the ABC's Paul Barry's. If you have an issue with his choice of words take it up with him. Few across the world, apart from some Irish media and Paul Barry made any attempt to correct the grossly false public record about this story and that is a scandal.
The evidence suggests that the convent had its own burial ground and deceased babies were buried there. There is nothing sinister about this. Unmarked paupers' graves existed in that era (including in Australia) but they are not the same as a mass grave. The home probably kept records but as it closed 50 years ago these could have been lost.
I note the comment that " The Irish could take a leaf from Australia’s book to conduct genuinely searching inquiries into mistreatment of institutionalised children". The reverse is in fact the case. The (Australian) Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is modelled on an Irish inquiry by Justice Yvonne Murphy into child abuse in the Dublin diocese of the Catholic Church.

I suggest people check out Harts Island in New York, where approximately 400,000 babies, children and still borns were buried in mass unmarked graves between approximately 1911 and the early 1970s (when welfare for unmarried mothers was finally introduced). Most of them would have died from much the same social conditions as the Irish 'septic tank' babies - poverty, abuse, poor medical care, lack of birth control, and the widely held belief that unmarried mothers and their offspring were 'sinful'.

There is a Harts Island equivalent in virtually every Western country.

Emperor Julian

'The Irish could take a leaf from Australia’s book to conduct genuinely searching inquiries into mistreatment of institutionalised children.'

Well, I live in Ireland for part of each year and I can assure you that genuinely searching inquiries into past mistreatment of institutionalised children (as well as every other kind of past and present sin committed by the Catholic Church) are being held ad nauseum. In fact, all the mea culpa obsession in the Irish media is getting almost ridiculous.

Yet, the issue that is really crying out for a 'genuinely searching inquiry' is the British dirty war in Ireland and Northern Ireland, which the Irish government, Irish media and Irish society in general prefer to politely ignore. The Catholic Church is a much easier target.

“The story was exposed as "BS" on 30 June 2014 by none other than the ABC's own Media Watch programme”

Media Watch DESCRIBED the story as BS*. Bren claimed that it had EXPOSED the story as BS. That’s his comment, not Media Watch’s. The word “exposed” expresses Bren’s lack of objectivity, not Media Watch’s, and foreshadows the lack of objectivity shown throughout his article. Twin agendas shout from the page, both in synch with what can be expected from the Abbott (opus dei) Mafia: (1) attack the ABC (2) excuse the Roman church.

Thanks for the info about the Irish predecessor for the inquiry into institutional child-abuse. Not surprising – Ireland is a great country having largely shucked off the centuries-old Roman empire tyranny.

*I’m not being mincing in using the abbreviation BS. The system wouldn’t let me through till I’d got rid of the profanity.