Children's Minister has ordered ground scans surrounding Tuam mother and baby home

Further geophysical surveys will begin this month at the site of the former Mother and Baby Home in Tuam in County Galway.

Children's Minister Katherine Zappone has ordered ground scans around the location where infant remains were confirmed last March.

The consultation process for former residents is also being extended to further locations outside Dublin.

Sinn Féin TD and spokesperson for Children Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire has said that it is crucial that every resource is made available to the excavation of the mass grave at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

He also called on the Government to properly support and engage on an ongoing basis with survivor groups, including those representing survivors who were children in these institutions, as well as the mothers separated so cruelly from their children.

The Cork South-Central TD said: “The most recent report into the Tuam Mother and Baby Home makes for some horrific reading. The nature in which these babies and children were so callously discarded now may make it extremely difficult to properly recover and identify their remains.

“Every resource must be made available to Dr Niamh McCullagh and her team to allow respectfully recover these remains and give them a decent burial and place of remembrance. What was done to them was truly heinous and we cannot walk away from it.

“The Department may have hoped that this report would slip unnoticed into the weekend but it is deeply shocking and now the Government must make every effort to respect the survivor groups of these terrible institutions. I intend to raise this with Minister Katherine Zappone at the first opportunity.”