All through the twentieth century in Eire, some 56,000 pregnant single girls have been compelled to provide beginning in ‘mom and child houses’ run by the Catholic Church. Infants born into these establishments have been both put up for adoption – typically with out their mom’s consent – or fostered, or else raised on the premises in desolate circumstances. And, as revealed by the Irish authorities’s current inquiry into mom and child houses abuses, these kids additionally died inside with startling frequency, with a reported 15 per cent toddler mortality price on the 18 services investigated. Launched in 2017, the highly effective brief documentary Mom and Child by the Irish director Mia Mullarkey profiles a number of the surviving kids of the notorious Bon Secours Mom and Child Residence in Taum, County Galway, who’re nonetheless grappling, a long time later, with the wanton cruelty and trauma they endured – all with the complicity of the Irish state and the Catholic Church.
