The potential state exposure over Tuam is clear. It could be accused of being a party to an ongoing criminal offence, writes Conall Ó Fátharta

A recommendation on the future of children’s remains at the site of the former mother and baby home in Tuam is expected to be announced in early autumn, a meeting in the Co Galway town was told last night.

The religious order which ran the Sean Ross Abbey mother and baby home has put a large part of the campus up for sale, just six months after placing the Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork on the market.

Mother and baby home campaigners have said as many as 180 institutions that dealt with unmarried mothers and children need to be examined by the commission.

The names of almost 800 children who died in two of the country’s largest mother and baby homes were given to the HSE by a religious order in 2011.

Excavations at other mother and baby homes are being demanded after the discovery of “significant quantities” of infant remains at Tuam.

Philomena Lee, whose devotion to finding her adopted son inspired a recent film, has called for a more open adoption system here to allow people access their “genetic entitlement”.

Three separate diphtheria outbreaks among infants in one of the country’s mother and baby homes had 100% mortality rates.

Adoption campaigners have again expressed concerns that tens of thousands of people could be excluded from the mother and baby home inquiry.

Babies of unmarried parents were treated as "an inferior sub-species" for decades, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has admitted.

A statutory inquiry is to be set up by the Government into state sanctioned, religious-run institutions used to house pregnant mothers.

The dozens of teddy bears left at the gates of a Cork City mother and baby home in memory of the babies and children who died there, were moved overnight to a Little Angels’ plot within its grounds.

Up to a third of infants died in mother and baby homes in Dublin, Tipperary and Cork in 1933.