Catherine Corless, the historian who exposed the Tuam Babies scandal, has called on the Government to release the names of more than 900 children who died in Cork’s Bessborough Mother and Baby home.

It was a miserable day on Sunday in Cork. Rain teemed from a dark and unpleasant sky, the grass underneath turned to mud, there was no respite from the cold.

It comes as a number of prominent independent politicians introduced a motion in the Dáil calling for an immediate inquiry and for immediate redress to be offered to survivors of Mother and Baby Homes.

When I read that skeletal remains, indicating an infant “on its left side”, lie in a structure that was probably designed for sewage, in the former grounds of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam, I feel sick.

It is opportune that the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby homes should be published during Holy Week when another unjust crucifixion, that of innocent babies and children, occurred at these homes.

The Tuam Home Survivors Network has savaged the appeal to the Pope by Children's Minister Katherine Zappone for funds for the Mother and Baby Home site, calling it "nothing more than a publicity stunt".

Tusla has refused to say if it informed the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of evidence it has held since 2003 that children from the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home were buried in unmarked graves as recently as 1990.

The Government has been urged to direct that a full forensic excavation, exhumation, and DNA testing of the remains at the Tuam site be commenced immediately.

Adoption campaigners have queried why the Mother and Baby Homes Commission has taken three years to issue a public call for information relating to the burials of children who died at the Bessborough home.

Children from the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, some of whom died as late as 1990, are buried in unmarked graves in a Cork City cemetery.

More than €20,000 was spent on carpet for the office of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA).

A participant in the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home vaccine trial has made a formal Garda complaint after it emerged files relating to the trial were altered in 2002.

The Government has acceded to a request from the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes for more time to complete its reports on foot of an unexpectedly large number of witnesses seeking to give testimony.

Underage girls, pregnant as a result of rape, ended up in Cork’s Bessborough Mother and Baby Home into the 1980s. The ages are revealed in maternity registers kept by the order which ran the home and released under Freedom of Information.

The religious order that ran the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home reported significantly higher numbers of infant deaths to state inspectors than it recorded privately.

Religious order reported to the State that 353 babies died in Bessborough, but its own register showed 80 fewer deaths. A report found a system of ‘human trafficking’ in which ‘women and babies were considered little more than a commodity for trade’. Conall Ó Fatharta reports

The welcome announcement of the terms of reference for the long-awaited Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes inevitably provokes a sense of foreboding but one tempered by a considerable degree of relief.

Campaigners have called for vaccine trials to be included in the upcoming mother and baby home inquiry, after it emerged a previously unknown fifth trial was carried out on children here in the 1960s.

The Minister for Children said he wants the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes set up before the Dail goes into summer recess.