Mayo priest hits out at new Liam Neeson film on Tuam Mother and Baby Home
Fr Brendan Kilcoyne had previously described the nuns who ran the Mother and Baby Home as ‘outstanding’
A Mayo parish priest has criticised Liam Neeson’s new film on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home for propagating a “mistaken narrative” of wrongdoing by the nuns who ran the institution.
Fr Brendan Kilcoyne had previously praised the nuns as “outstanding”, and claimed there was an “outrageous myth” that children had “met an untimely end through bad action” at the home in Tuam.
He has now taken aim at The Lost Children of Tuam, a dramatisation of the investigation into the institution operated by the Sisters of Bon Secours, which he said ensured the “stubborn survival” of the mistaken narrative about the home.
“This is actually some sort of pathology. It’s something wrong or sick in the body social and politic. It’s not healthy,” he said in the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan Option.
“If some of these people had the decency to say that they hate Catholics… it would be refreshing. We would have the truth. We would have a certain kind of peace.”
Fr Kilcoyne previously served as the diocesan secretary of Tuam and was president of St. Jarlath’s Secondary School. He was also the parish priest in Athenry before moving to his current parish in Balla, Co Mayo.
In his podcast, he noted that more than 100 bodies had been discovered at the site of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam since excavations began, and all of these had been buried in coffins.
He contrasted this finding with purported claims that “nuns threw bodies in a septic tank”. Fr Kilcoyne said there was no evidence for such a claim, and instead suggested that bones may have ended up in tanks when they were disturbed by construction works.
“None of this is being stated as yet, because it can’t be proved absolutely but, I mean, if you put two and two together… unless you’re a very brilliant mathematician, you’ll come out with four,” he added.
The Sisters of Bon Secours have admitted that they “did not live up to [their] Christianity” in Tuam, and acknowledged that “infants and children who died at the home were buried in a disrespectful and unacceptable way”.
A Commission of Investigation and the current excavation works appear to have dispelled the suggestion that human remains entered a disused septic tank as a result of construction work.
The decommissioned tank was found to have been divided into individual chambers or vaults, suggesting that remains were deposited there deliberately over decades rather than inadvertently moved there during ground works.
The Commission of Investigation also found that the nuns had kept no record of burials, and that infants were “buried inappropriately in the grounds of the institution”. It also highlighted catastrophic child mortality at the home.
It also suggested that the operators of the home had deliberately retained children for longer periods in contravention of Department of Health guidelines because they relied on per-head capitation payment from local authorities.
In a previous podcast, Fr Kilcoyne claimed the Church was being “shafted” by the deliberate propagation of misinformation surrounding the history of the Tuam home, and said the Commission of Investigation had “largely exonerated” the nuns.