Ireland’s generation of stolen children deserve to know who they are

IF we did not deprive them of life, we deprived them of their identity. That is the hard truth about our relationship with “illegitimate” children which Stephen Frears’s film Philomena makes us face.

Some years we killed half of the “illegitimate” babies we got our hands on. In 1930, the year the Sean Ross Mother and Baby Home opened in Roscrea, 60 babies died out of a total of 120. That’s an infant mortality rate of 50%, more than four times higher than in the general population.

You would have to have to close our eyes very tightly if you were trying to deny that the death of those so-called “illegitimate” babies was a policy.