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Scene in Tuam this morning.
Gemma O’Doherty on GETTR : Canada's Indian Residential Home Hoax And Its Comparisons To Tuam: Monika Schaefer and Brian Nugent
Canada's Indian Residential Home Hoax And Its Comparisons To Tuam: Monika Schaefer and Brian Nugent
gettr.com
So a much anticipated date is finally upon us, this morning they are closing off the recognised graveyard of the Tuam Children’s Home and sending in earth moving equipment to dig up the whole area. This site is, as I say, the well known graveyard of that Home that closed in 1961, so of course they will find remains of children there.
The above video might be able to clarify matters and hopefully I can post updates here. This event has generated even some international news coverage as well as much national publicity. Incidentally some small roads around the site have been cut off, its thought because of some major accident late last night.
As this hoax has played out in the national media over the last decade (it started in early 2014) we seem to have arrived at an acceptance that the nuns did not physically or sexually harm any of these children. But two claims are still circulated about this Home. One is the whole question of whether or not the area was a septic tank and that is covered already in articles like this one which I recommend people might like to see: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/108088 .
Secondly it is claimed that the nominal rate of death was higher in the Home than the national rate, and hence proves some kind of negligence on the part of the nuns etc. But this statistical question is very complex and it is easy to see, when one considers it, why that rate would be higher, e.g.:
– For a lot of the early decades of this period, from the 20s to the 60s (the Home death rate was below the national average in the last 10 years or so of its existence), there was patchy reporting of deaths to the national registers across Ireland. This meant that the national rate was underestimated, while all deaths in the Home were properly and promptly registered. So comparing the Home rate with the national rate creates a distortion for those years, because the national rate isn’t accurate.
– The Home death rate is been calculated on an institution with a lot of transient coming and going, and with a strong bias in favour of leaving ill people in the Home. This might not be clear to people, but is in fact very important because it can lead to huge statistical anomalies. How the death rate is been calculated is like this: Say you have x large house in the country, housing 100 people and 50 people die in 1936 or whatever, so you have a death rate in that year of 50%, fair enough.
Now consider if you had a transient type of house, with people coming and going in that house, maybe 400 people have passed through the house in that year (even though at any given time there is only 100 living there), of whom that 50 people had died. Now if it is the case that of those that pass through, the ill people will stay and then, unfortunately, some die in the house, then should your figure for the death rate not be calculated on that 400? So you should actually calculate the rate as having 50 people die out of 400, a death rate of 12.5%?
That is what is happening with the statistics on the Home, they are calculating like the former example, as if the population was static, but it wasn’t, and there was a strong bias in favour of keeping ill children in the Home. Consider who is passing through for a minute:
a) Mothers who are taking their children out at the end of a year (about half did this), they will probably leave very ill children there to be looked after by the nuns, and nurse and doctor assigned to the Home, because they would hardly be in a position to provide better medical care to a seriously ill child?
b) They certainly will not foster out or send a child out for an adoption if they are ill, they will also be kept in the Home, while many healthy children will leave this way.
c) It was presumed earlier, but explicitly confirmed in the Commission report, that actually many fostered out children were sent back to the Home, maybe years later, if they got seriously ill. This is very important because it begs the question that the death rate ought to be calculated on all of those children already fostered out in the local community, but if so the calculation of the death rate in the Home would fall dramatically.
– Not just Tuam, but apparently all of these Children’s Home, like on the Navan Road in Dublin, cared for chronically ill children as well as the well known illegitimate ones. This was again explicitly brought out in the Commission report. If you were born with serious physical illness, although not an acute illness, in the West of Ireland in those years, the chances are they will send you to this Home. So of course you have a higher death rate among children with serious chronic illnesses, who are brought into the Home especially because they are ill.
Anyway hopefully this hoax is fraying at the edges in modern times.
by Brian Nugent, http://www.orwellianireland.com
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