00:00 [music]
00:03 [music]
00:32 They actually made me stand on the steps of St. Patrick's for punishment, to watch my son be taken.
00:41 Tiong was probably the first supermarket in Ireland.
00:44 The only reason they fostered me was to help them work on the land.
00:50 When you go on to the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, there were various TDs of that time
00:58 who asked questions in relation to the nourishment within the hospital or within the mother and baby home.
01:05 A tomb is not just a burial ground, it's a social and cultural sepulchre.
01:10 That's what it is.
01:11 Because as a society, in the so-called good old days, we did not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings.
01:22 We dug deep and we dug deeper still to bury our compassion, to bury our mercy, to bury our humanity itself.
01:30 Any woman that went in there had to suffer.
01:34 You know, they think like, oh, we've just this report and then that issue from the 50s and 60s is done.
01:41 We've dealt with that now. But it's having such a long-lasting, genuine impact.
01:45 There's so many people like our family or me in the country.
01:49 She was sent back to the home, but she was fostered out again at eight years old, out to Killaloe family.
01:56 And unfortunately, her experience there was horrific.
02:00 We see the financial consideration coming up again and again, that it was a concern over money.
02:08 The decision on whether to close this institution where hundreds of children died in appalling conditions,
02:16 where children were forcibly separated from their mothers, that money was the main consideration.
02:23 We took their babies and we gifted them or we sold them or we trafficked them or we starved them or we neglected them
02:31 or we denied them to the point of their disappearance from our hearts and from our sight, from our country
02:38 and in the case of Tum, possibly other places, from life itself.
02:43 These are the pictures that they gave me when we got the autopsy.
02:47 That's not something that you want to remember your child like.
02:54 (sobbing)
02:57 (music)
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