Mother and baby homes a letter in Irish Times below:

Sir, – Ellen Coyne’s timely and important report (November 24th) of inadequate State preservation of mother and baby institution records will hopefully provoke an adequate Civil Service and ministerial response.

The report said: “Mother and baby homes were religious institutions where women who had children outside of marriage were sent by their families, local authorities or the Catholic Church. A six-year commission of investigation set up in 2015 found that 9,000 children had died at the “regimented” institutions, about 15 per cent of all the children that had passed through them”.

Referral of women and babies was not confined to the Catholic Church. Clergy in Protestant churches did so also. Three of 14 religious institutions examined by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of investigation were Protestant in ethos: Bethany Home, Church of Ireland Magdalen Home (renamed Denny House in 1980) and Miss Carr’s Flatlets.

Children died there as well. Four more institutions examined were local authority county homes.

Reports on consequences of the treatment of women and children by the Irish State are sometimes affected by this sin of omission.

Awareness of the Catholic Church’s dominant role is too often accompanied by ignorance of misogyny and abuse perpetrated by other Christian churches, plus by secular institutions and individuals.

The effect is to exaggerate the role of one denomination, diminishing that of others and of the State itself that franchised its responsibilities to private bodies. – Yours, etc,

Dr NIALL MEEHAN,

Journalism & Media Faculty,

Griffith College,

Dublin.