Part Two: How The Catholic Church Murdered Ireland's Babies

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue to discuss one the darkest chapters in all of Irish history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M Boy. Top of them are and Toya listeners. This
is Behind the Bastards, a podcast by Robert toy Evan's
talking about the wires people in all of our Irish history.
Chim Chim cherub uncle tie. That was my racist Irish. Wow,

(00:21):
it looks like the unsubscribed numbers for Ireland. A seven
people in Ireland have stopped listening to our podcast. Okay,
and now those seven people have told another seven people,
and they have told another seven people. And now and
as a result ship in Ireland. Hey yeah, but our

(00:43):
listenership in the UK has tripled. So uh, we do
love the Irish, don't we. Um. You know it's funny
because when we took the break, I went outside and
I had to water my plants because it's ninety in
Portland today. Um, we needed to water them a second time.
And most of what I'm growing is potatoes because I

(01:04):
love growing the potatoes I'm working on. I don't have
enough land right now. Because you got any sweet potatoes
in that ask? No, I don't trust sweet potatoes. Um.
I love normal potatoes, though I don't trust them. Um,
what do you think they're hiding? They're openly sweet? I know,
and that's what I don't trust about them. Okay, well
it's it's like people in my life who are sweet

(01:26):
and I don't truss them. Are you growing going you
can gold potatoes? Yes, that's one of the potatoes gifts.
I got you in the trash because you didn't trust
good because I don't trust people who are nice to me. Um,
it's true, he doesn't. That's why I'm so mean. Come on, yeah,

(01:47):
but I don't like being loved in return? Am I
am I the one who's responsible for your nickname podcast Daddy? Yes?
I am you are. Can you trust someone who has
nicknamed you such? You can? Would I ever steal a
knife from you? No? I would not. Well, I have
enough that you could get away with. Well, I would

(02:07):
solicit your listeners to send me my own knives. Send
Sophia knives. Just don't send Sophia knives and unlabeled packages.
And also remember our rule. If you send Sophia knives,
you absolutely put a happy face on the night. Yeah,
how we know it's a friendly knife or this is
not a death threat letter. That's always a nice thing

(02:27):
to send. Love. This is not a death a sticker,
you know, at any h Yeah, this is not a
death threat patch to put on your battle jacket. Yes,
I would fucking love that would actually be rad People
think I'm disarming and then I stabbed him in the heart.
It's it's great. At the end of this episode, I

(02:49):
will give you my geo box number so you can
send me You're happy face nine, Sophia. Some knives, some
some friendly knives. You deserve them, so so be up.
Last episode we talked a lot about a lot of
horrible ship and we talked about the Magdalian laundries and
how the Catholic Church was, you know, part of how
this was justified. It was like, the Irish government can't

(03:11):
afford a lot of social services, the Catholic Church will
provide them because it's just such a such a g
shocks good, good, good thing, the Catholic Church before it's
somehow cheaper to murder people than I promis and sell
their babies and forced them to labor for you in

(03:33):
a laundry room for profit, and also sewing for profit.
But that's not all they forced incarcerated women to do
for profit, Sophia. And that brings me to a real
fun story. We're gonna have a good time with this one.
We're gonna get it. I went. Before I get into
the story, I just want you to think about all
everyone here, everyone who grew up in the nineties and
early two thousands, all the good time, good times you had. Um,

(03:57):
you know, playing playing board games. Um, you're going to
be like playing on Uncle Bill Clinton's lap, well he
plays the sax homophone days. Just remember the good days
of play and playing mouse Trap, you know, little bit Monopoly, right,
playing playing all those all those classics, those classic board

(04:17):
games from your like an actual life. I just want
you to think of all those positive board game memories
you have as I read this story I found on
the website Little Adams as part of a series called
The Penance Industry by JP O'Malley or an article called
the Penance Industry by JP O'Malley. Now, the author's great

(04:38):
aunt was a woman named Elsie who spent basically her
entire life in service to the church. UH. The initial
crime for which she was incarcerated was having a child
out of wedlock. Now, Elsie was still basically a child
herself when her own family sent her to a Magdalene
laundry operated by the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford. This
is how it often worked in Ireland, a profoundly cath

(05:00):
population who were only too happy to report their daughters,
nieces and cousins for getting pregnant out of redlock. Elsie
wound up spending the rest of her life in the
custody of the church. She lived with them until her
late eighties. J. P. Omalley writes, quote, as far back
as I can remember, Elsie would talk openly to us
kids about the work she did at the convent. She
and the other women, she told us, were made to

(05:20):
a symbol and package popular has broboard games. That's right,
But yeah, has I knew I could smell the Hassan
fields coming off. Then yeah, the motherfucker's who made your
g I Joe's a major. I don't think those were
made in these places, but their board games were. Yes,

(05:41):
the Hasbro corporation profited off of the indentured labor of
women who in prison for the crime of having a
child or as we noted last episode of Stealing an Apple,
Now we're talking about brow more like how slave am I? Right? Okay,
I'll never come back to this show. This. This sounds
like some fucking fifties and sixties ship maybe, but this

(06:02):
program with Hasbro started in the nineteen eighties. There is
a very good chance that some, if not most, of
the people listening to this podcast played with board games
assembled by women who were basically slaves of the Catholic Church.
According to Elsie, mouse Trap was apparently the worst board
game to us, saying, this is probably more for our
listeners who played board games that were you know, they

(06:23):
bought an Ireland or the UK or in Europe. I
don't know how like, Hasbro sold a lot of board games. Now,
a lot of them had other labor rights issues, but yeah,
a lot of them were made by women in carcerated
in the Magdalene laundries. And again mouse Trap was the
worst of them. J. P Omalley continues, quote one Christmas,
when I was twelve, someone gave me a present of
a ker plunk set. I felt confused. Even at that age,

(06:45):
I still felt there was something inherently sinister about deriving
any kind of enjoyment from a gift that my great
aunt could have packaged in the convent at Waterford. I
knew from the stories Elsie told us at home every
Christmas about how strict the nuns were. It wasn't so
much the words Elsie would use when she talked about them,
but her gaze would shift when she mentioned them. The
warm smile would vanish. It was replaced by a look
of petrification. All you had to do was look into

(07:08):
Elsie's eyes when she mentioned the Good Shepherd's sisters to
understand how prevalent the culture of fear was. The nuns
were the masters, and the women Elsie and thousands of
others were treated like small school children. So you know
how dark is that when you're playing hungry hungry hippos.
Your fucking game was assembled by hungry, hungry, actual fucking women. Yeah,

(07:30):
being whipped by nuns forced to sleep in the cold
outside and the Irish winter because they didn't put together
the operation board fast enough. Yeah, and you're putting together
operation went for sure. If you got sick, they would
not pay for operation kill mass grave. Then sometimes dig

(07:53):
you up and rebar you in another mass grave. Thanks nuns,
not even skin pace for your ass. Just rest in
wherever the funky move you again. Yeah, you shouldn't even
be resting. You didn't do enough work for free for
the Catholic Church to profited even though they were already

(08:14):
worth most more than most nations. Honestly, shock they didn't
sell the remains as like fertilizer dollar. I'm not going
to say categorically that the Catholic Church never sold the
corpses of people that they let die for fertilizer. I'm
not willing to make that statement categorically because it's because

(08:36):
give us another like five years. Yeah, we're gonna dig
up some more mass graves, that's for damn sure. Now.
In recent years, the Good Shepherd Order has admitted to
running a board game sweatshop during the Reagan years. They
made a statement to the Sunday Times about it quote.
In the nineteen eighties, Hasbro entered into an agreement with
the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford to provide materials for

(08:57):
packaging by our residents. The residents who pertend scipated in
this activity were regularly given what was then known as
their Hasbro money envelope. So put a pin in that
money envelope comment, because we're gonna circle back to that soon. Now.
We don't know exactly how long this went on, but
the most detail I found suggests that the arrangement between
Hasbro and the Good Shepherd Order continued for more than

(09:19):
thirty years, which means well into the two thousands, some
version of this was still happening. Now. I think it
might have gotten better. Um. It's hard to say exactly
how long it went on. UM, but Hasbro, who currently
has a market cap of eight billion dollars, claims they
had no direct commercial involvement with the Order. They claimed
that their business relationship was with a charity called Rehab,

(09:40):
which purports to help disabled people into the workplace. It
seedn's odd defining incarcerated by a church for bearing a
child as a disability. Do you have to remember that
a lot of disabled people were also incarcerated by the
Catholic Church up until the nineties really gifts. I don't
want to go to Rehab like a whole as other
meetings like forcibly labor for the has Bro corporations. I

(10:01):
don't want to make fucking mousetrap until fucking die now.
JP O'Malley's reporting on this is the best that I found.
He succeeded in talking to two other women who had
worked at assembling board games for the Good Shepherd Order.
I should note that one of these sources experiences predates
the Order's relationship with Hasbro. This first particular case, she
was incarcerated and was assembling board games through the mid

(10:22):
nineteen sixties to the late nineteen seventies. We don't know
what company they were making board games for, but they
described the experiences of their time laboring. There is extremely traumatic. Quote.
She had packaged games, probably sometime in the nineteen seventies,
she admitted. This vagueness is a common theme with many
of the survivors I interviewed. The past is so painful
they tried to erase it from their memory as best
they can. The work involved, she's literally a PTSD symptom

(10:47):
that is like well known now, Yeah, the work involved,
she said, putting pieces in small bags. We received fifty
pence for pocket money. The woman explained. We put all
of our work into boxes quickly, and then the nuts
would have someone count them. If you didn't go fast enough,
you had to stay longer. Sometimes men would come in
and talk to the nuns and watch us do the
work too, she added. Another woman resident in the Good
Shepherd Convent in Waterford from Night claimed she packaged games too.

(11:11):
Were there any wages for the work, no money, just food,
she told me. Now you might define making people labor
and just giving them food and not money as um
not not not paid labor. Um. I don't know if
there's another word for not paid labor that you can't
choose not to do. Uh, we'll put a pin in that. No,

(11:34):
that doesn't seem right. Um slavery. Slavery? Oh good, oh yeah,
nailed it. Yeah, perfect, really really getting getting the good
Irish music here. So I must again reiterate that none
of those these either of these women were making board
games during the Hasbro period. I don't know what company

(11:55):
they assembled games for, so Hasbro maybe telling the truth
when they say they're incarcerated single mother laborers were paid
for their work. But JB. O'Malley also talked to a
source who he kept anonymous, who claims to have been
an employee of Hasbro Ireland for five years during the
nineteen eighties. Her mother had also been a resident of
the Good Shepherd Convent in Waterford and had previously worked
at the Magdalen Laundries, and this Hasbro employee told JB. Omalley, quote,

(12:18):
I can assure you those women who worked in Hasbro
Ireland from the convent that was their life. They worked
longer hours than the factory woman women, but the packaging
work was always done on site and the Good Shepherd convent.
I presume the women didn't have any work contracts because
any money they got went through whoever was the mother
superior in the convent at the time. She went on
to clarify that whatever cash the women received was pocket

(12:38):
money rather than wages. So again, some of these women
almost certainly were not paid. It depended on whether or
not the nuns wanted to give the money. You assume
a lot of the nuns just took the money Hasbro
gave them. But Hasbro can claim these women were paid
for their labor because it's not their job to make
sure these women get paid for their labor. I love

(12:58):
las bodnia be. Deniability is the is the petrol that
capitalism runs on. You didn't ask us about the things
you needed? Why should we give them to you? Oh wait,
you do ask It doesn't matter. We still won't corporations.

(13:19):
That's from my upcoming musical Corporation. Yeah. I'm excited for ye. Yeah,
and you you actually execute the pope on stage during that.
If I'm not mistakes. I sure do, I sure do,
and then I hold up his head like Kathy Griffin
did with Trump, and um, that is how I hope

(13:39):
to get canceled. So here's crossed fingers crossed, and I'll
start opening for Lui c K. Because that's how cancelation works.
You just start being a right wing comedian. Oh yeah, no,
I'm I'm excited to Um, I hate that for you,
just so you know I hate it. I thought you
hate it. It'll be amazing be canceled. No one's been canceled.

(14:01):
I'm gonna for Cosby. It's perfect. I'm going to start working. Yeah,
we're it's gonna be a it's gonna be a double act.
Me and Bill Cosby his his his rejuvenation tour. Uncanceled
with Bill Cosby is what we're going to call it.
You know who wasn't canceled was the Catholic Church. Um,

(14:22):
yeah Bro. Hasbro also not canceled for any of this, barely. Yeah, Now,
this was controversial. The unpaid labor forcibly managed by Nuns
was controversial among regular Hasbro Ireland employees because around the
same time the company laid off a number of full
time workers. The basic allegation is that Hasbro fired salaried

(14:45):
employees to pay women being abused by the church pennies
to do the same work. So basically they fired people
getting fair wages and quote unquote hired incarcerated women and
then bribed the nuns to force them to work, is
the allegation. I'm sure Hasbro would say, we paid the
nuns through this company a fair rate for the work,
and what happened after that, if the nuns mistreated them,

(15:07):
that's we couldn't have known. But also sucked up when
someone else makes you a scab, Yeah you don't even Yeah,
you're like getting like fucking dpid by fucking like truly
like Hasbro and the Catholic Church. Yeah yeah, that's fucking

(15:29):
that's so fucked up. You're all everything's already so terrible
for you. And again, as a matter of like legal shit, um,
we can't confirm or deny that Hasbro themselves did anything
improper or knew about any improper working conditions. The fact
that women weren't being paid, they may have dotted their
legal eyes and crossed their legal ties. But I should

(15:50):
note while making this caveat then in two thousand nine,
The Guardian reported on the fact that Hasbro has repeatedly
been charged with human rights violations due to its inhumane
factories in China. So not out of the question either. Yeah. Yeah,
So I can't say to a point of certainty that
the Hassan Felled Brothers Toy Company knowingly and with great

(16:12):
melos of forethought took advantage of a system of indentured
servitude to force abused women to labor in board game
making sweatshops well into the century. But I can say
maybe they did so. Yeah, paying hungry, hungry single mothers.
If you want to support the uh, we will take
your money, has Bro. We'll take your money, but only

(16:33):
in the form of a bearcat armored vehicle. Come on,
has Bro, send me, send me an armored vehicle, and
all is forgiven. Well, I feel like there's a lot
more ways they could actually make it up to us.
It doesn't just have to be an armored vehicle. Oh,
that's the only thing that will work for me, But
I'll do it for anybody. Like, if the British government

(16:54):
wants wants to wants to have me stop shipping on
their their terrible genocidal empire, send me a Saracen armored vehicle.
We can make it do like a yes and where
like that's the minimum. But then we want to oh yeah,
I mean I'll try to negotiate up if I can
maybe get to saracens um, maybe get a leopard. You know,
I think you need to get the armored vehicle train.

(17:17):
Once you get one armored vehicle, you're all set and
then taking ship about Czarist Russia. If they send me
an armored train like this our had so that is
the train that I will get all trains as I
will take that. Hell yeah, armored trains. Look, you can
buy behind the bastards, but it's going to cost you

(17:37):
armored vehicles. When I worked at YouTube, really quickly, I
just want to say, really quickly, I just want to
say that when I worked for YouTube and I had
to like sort and rate YouTube videos, I mean when
I worked for Google and I had to do that
for YouTube videos. One of the things that was so
popular for Russian YouTube was videos of trains and it's

(18:00):
just the camera study and it's just the train going
by for twelve minutes, and I have to say it
was one of the most soothing times of my day
and when I have to watch a twelve minute train
videos anyway, that's it. Yeah, trains are nice because absolutely
no one was ever worked to death in huge numbers
to allow them to exist. That's the best thing about trains.

(18:23):
No one ever died for trains. Now, if you excuse me,
I'm going to take a big sip of coffee and
open my book of Chinese American history. A p I
months over what's happening. You can go ahead and just
forget about anyway. You know, who won't force thousands of
laborers to work to death building train tracks and inhumane

(18:47):
conditions these goods and services, unless it's literally any train company,
in which case they did. Anyway, it is other than
am Track. I don't think Amtrak did, probably not right.
Am Track spine ads. Ah, we're back and we're talking

(19:13):
about industrial abuse of women and children. Um, so we've
talked a bit about you know, the Magdalene laundries, the
industrial schools, and the industrial schools held a mix of
children who were incarcerated for you know, some in some
cases behavioral issues, kids who were taken from single mothers,
kids who couldn't be adopted. Uh, you know, the lucky
kids got sent off to parents in foreign countries, mostly

(19:34):
the United States, in a business that was very lucrative
for the child for the Catholic Church um and is
distinct from child trafficking for reasons that are unclear to me.
These were again the lucky ones, because the children who
were trafficked by the Catholic Church in many cases probably
got treated like human beings by their families. Probably in
a lot of cases at least more, they did better

(19:56):
than the kids who remained in the Catholic Church's custody,
because the older who stayed in these industrial schools were
not as fortunate. I found the story of one young
woman named Mary who was taken from her mother as
a very small child. She was so tiny she had
to stand on top of a pile of stacked palettes
to reach the sink and do her job, which was
washing dishes, or sorry was which was washing sanitary napkins.

(20:17):
That was the job they gave me. Yeah, now, because
Mary was a set, please let her get her fucking
period before her washed period. Ship. She probably thought it
was just a bunch of women dying from their fucking
Vaginas everyone there were a bunch of women dying, So
that makes it better. It's true, not for the reason,

(20:39):
she thought, but so the nuns did not respect Mary
enough to refer to her by her name because she
was a criminal. So, like all the other girls in
the industrial school, she was given a number. Hers was
thirteen forty six. Again, these are nuns, These are nuns
doing this. She was beaten regularly for misbehaving. The worst

(21:00):
beating she could recall when she was interviewed by the
BBC was the time when she and another girl asked
an older child who had just been put in the
institution what it was like to go to school. A
nun overheard, they were told to go back to work.
Later that night, Mary and the other girl who had
dared to ask about school were called in by the
nun and beaten with a stick and a leather strap. Quote.

(21:21):
She lashed at me and told me, you're not to
talk to people now. Some days Mary would be sent
to work on a farm for the day. She was
not fed on those days, and she was so hungry
that she would often sneak chicken feet. As she grew older,
the nuns forbade her from looking at her developing body.
They forced her to wear a wrap around her chest
to flatten her breasts, and she was made to wear

(21:42):
a red petticoat while she bathed. As we've noted several
times already, the mortality rate in these schools was extremely high.
The most credible estimates suggest at least nine thousand children
died in Catholic Church facilities as a result of neglect
over the course of the twentieth century. This is a
mortality rate of roughly fifteen percent of all children brought

(22:05):
into the system. While a number of these deaths occurred
at industrial schools and the Magdalene laundries, the deadliest of
the church run institutions during this period were probably the
mother and baby homes. These are where single mothers were
put while pregnant and while their infants were too young
to be separated from them until the babies were old
enough to be adopted off or sent to another institution.
The very worst of these of these facilities in the

(22:25):
County Cork, reported that seventy five percent of the children
there died before their first birthday. This is seventy of
the kids in this facility die before there one, which
is if you were just shooting at children, you would
have a lower death rate than that, Like, those are

(22:46):
some insets, group and numbers. Jesus, those those are those
stats are not you have to try to kill babies
at seventy percent. I'm gonna quote from Reuter's here. Anonymous
testimony from residents compared the institutions to prisons, where they

(23:07):
were verbally abused by nuns as sinners and spawn of Satan.
Women suffered through traumatic labors without any pain relief. One
recalled women screaming a woman who had lost her mind
in a room with small white coffins. So that's good,
Oh my god, lost her mind and m white coffins. Yeah,
just surrounded by baby corpses. You know, cool new nights,

(23:31):
not a cell phone inside living life. You know, well death.
But you know now, very confusingly and it's a good article,
but it has a confusing phrase that it notes that by.
It opens by noting that, alongside thousands of deaths enforced
child separations, quote, children were vaccinated without consent. This doesn't
seem like it belongs with the rest of that, because

(23:52):
who would consider vaccinating a child with or without consent
on the same plane as murdering children? Um, we'll not
worry a lot of people. Now, but actually this is
just kind of bad phrasing, weirdly bad phrasing. At the
start of the article. The vaccine story is actually super
fucked up and absolutely worthy of conclusion because it wasn't
that they were vaccinating children. Um. What actually happened, and

(24:15):
again Reuters does go into this later, is that institutionalized
children were used as guinea pigs for experimental vaccines without
their consent. There were at least it's fucking rad there
were at least oh yeah, now it doesn't have it
doesn't go as bad as mangle and stuff. That is
one of the things I have to say about this,
because I think they were testing actual vaccines as opposed

(24:37):
to mangle is just doing murder nonsense. Um. There were
at least thirteen separate trials for the theory of polio, measles, rebella,
and other shots. Um. Now, none of the and against
some of the children. Most of the children in these
in these trials were children from general society whose parents
consented to them being part of the vaccine trial, but

(24:59):
also a bunch of the and this were children and
the mother and baby homes, some who were just fifteen
years old. Uh, Some of the mothers were just fifteen
years old. Um, we're not asked to give consent. This
was generally justified by the fact that these mothers had
mental health issues or psychiatric disorders. So normal moms have
to consent to give have their parents part of this experiment.
The children mothers and the mother and baby homes don't

(25:21):
aren't don't need to be asked for consent because they
have mental problems according to the nuns who are beating them. Um.
Now again, whether according to the nuns who are being
because of an incredible sentence, We don't know if any
of these women were diagnosed by an actual doctor who
had any kind of credibility to have any kind of
psychiatric issues. Not that would have made it okay. I'm

(25:42):
just making the point that these diagnoses seem to have
been just handed out by nuns and priests, a large
number of whom were child molesters. So documentation on these
trials is notoriously sketchy, but just based on what I've
sniffed around, it as a definite whiff of ship being
covered up. That said, there is no hard evidence of
any serious harms due to these tests. There is one
case of a child from one of these homes who

(26:02):
died of cardiac and respiratory failure two weeks after receiving
a vaccine. The commission that investigated this said that the
death did not appear to have been linked to the vaccines.
And again, these facilities are killing babies left and right,
so there's a good chance that it was the baby
died just because of other mistreatment. UM, and yeah, it's um,
it's cool. Uh, it's really cool. So again, as I noted,

(26:23):
about forty three thousand children in total took part in
these trials. Most of them were from the general population
and their parents were reached out to for consent, and
that consent was documented. This was not the case of
children from the mother in baby homes. I'm going to
quote from the Irish Examiner here. The commission noted, and
this is an investigation later noted that Dr Hanley, who
did the vaccine tests, emphasized the importance of obtaining written

(26:45):
consent prior to treatment and provided a breakdown of the
number of consent forms returned to each school. No child
was immunized unless a written parental consent form was produced. However,
doctor Hanley made no mention of consent written or otherwise
in respect to institutional children. So again, like, why would
you give a ship? Obviously consent matters unless you're one
of these kids that the Catholic Church owns, then who cares.

(27:06):
It's good, it's great ship. It's pretty enough now. One
of the articles I found on this noted that in
the forties and fifties it was common across Europe and
the United States to use institutionalized children as guinea pigs
for vaccine trials. In the U. S. And Canada, this
often meant Indigenous children who had been separated by their
families forcibly to be de indianized. This is not the

(27:27):
story we're telling today, but it's worth mentioning that that happened.
We've talked about the residential schools before. This is a
thing that happens outside of Ireland. Two children who are
forcibly incarcerated in institutions with similar death tolls to these
homes in Ireland. Um and a lot of it. A
lot of times in the U. S. And Canada, it's
indigenous kids, um And yeah, it's it's interesting that because
of how fucked up this story is the part where

(27:48):
we're talking about using child slaves as medical guinea pigs
is the least dark part of the story. This is
the least body count of anything we're talking about, including
probably has bro um. But now it's time to go
back to the dead babies, specifically the mass graves of
dead babies now the most Thank God. I was wondering
if you invited me for a reason you. You texted

(28:10):
me the other day saying, Robert, my hands are shaking.
I haven't talked about mass graves of dead children in months?
What am I? What are we gotta? I gotta get
a fix, That's what I said. And I showed you
my dead baby track track marks, and I was like, yep,
I gotta get back in the game. I got the need,
the need for dead baby, the dead baby dragon. You

(28:34):
gotta you gotta chase the dragon. The dragon is the
baby's corpse. Yeah. Now, the most infamous mass child grave
covered up by the Catholic Church in Ireland is probably
the one at St Mary's in the village of Twam,
which is colloquially known as the Home. This was a
child and mother home run by the bond Secour Nuns
from nineteen to nineteen sixty one in nineteen sixty one,

(28:55):
the home closed down and it's child inmates were sent
to nearby industrial schools. The bill then was bulldozed and
low wincome housing was put up on its site. In
two children were playing on the site the former site
of the home. They found several concrete slabs loosely covering
a hollow. Being young boys, they moved the slabs and
discovered a hole underneath it. They crawled inside and realized

(29:17):
to their horror that it was quote full of skeletons
of children. Oh my god, oh my god. Good ship
right there, Like the kind of thing where your mom's like, Okay,
can you not do this ship you've been doing? Can
you not go out? Can you not like go into
caves that you see a shamus? You go fucking around

(29:39):
in caves and you're gonna find dead babies. And then
you go in the cave and you find literal skeletons
of other children. That seems like your mom planted them
to just like drive her point home about what you
should not have been doing. That ship is so creepy. Yeah,

(29:59):
it might be one of those things were like as
a child, you decide to stop exploring after that, Like
you know, yeah, no fucking ship you and immediately yeah,
I like computers. Now I don't know how to code.
I can't go outside anymore. It's full of skeletons. It's

(30:20):
full of dead children out there, and I cannot. These
boys find a hole full of baby skeletons and they
go home to tell their families. Now the church immediately
gets involved here and they do what they do best,
which is hushed things up. A priest does a mass
at the burial site, and the grave was covered again
more permanently. This time, there was no investigation into what

(30:43):
had happened or who was buried there. But the people
of Tuam didn't forget from the journal dot I quote.
A local couple began to take care of the small
patch of land, erecting a grotto in the corner and
maintaining it for thirty five years, trimming the grass and
planting flowers. Stories continued to spread about the bodies and
the institution that put them there. Similar story spread all
around Ireland, dipping into the cultural unconsciousness like tap roots

(31:05):
into soil. Now, in nineteen seventy six, the year after
these kids find this mass grave, a pair of journalists
from the Irish time start making inquiries about the still
ongoing programs like the industrial schools and the Magdalen laundries.
One of the journalists who started this investigation was inspired
to do so because her husband, a psychiatrist, had a
young female patient who became hysterical the moment and none

(31:27):
entered the ward. The psychiatrist was savvy enough to be like,
she starts screaming and freaking out the instant, and none
walks in. There might be something here. Perhaps I should
tell my journalist wife to look into this. I love that.
That's like, sadly, like our lowest like expectation of anyone
the bars solo or like, I don't know. Kudos to

(31:50):
he didn't he let it go. He didn't have to
be like. This probably should be looked into a little bit.
She's shrieking in agony at the sight of a nun.
This might might deserve an investigation. So so he starts
talking to um. He starts talking first before he goes
to his wife. He starts talking to this young woman
who's become hysterical at the side of a nun. Uh,

(32:12):
And he starts asking her like why, and she, in
his words, persistently described witnessing the savage, bloody beating of
a little girl at the orphanage she was sent to.
This girl eventually disappeared, and she believed the girl had
been killed and buried in a mass grave after being
beaten to death by the nuns. From the Irish Times
quote by chance, my friend Mavis, also a journalist, this

(32:33):
is the other journalist in this team, had a young
woman from the same place living with her, waiting for
the birth of a baby. At sixteen, Like all the girls,
she'd been sent away to work as a domestic, Utterly
ignorant of the world and vulnerable to mail predation. She
told Mavis about horrifying cruelty and deprivation at this institution,
by then closed, It was often described as one of
the good schools. Gradually we discovered the context that Ireland

(32:55):
had been infested with these places, all run by religious orders.
We learned that some still existed and that they operated
with state funding through the Department of Education under the
nineteen o eight Acts regulations. They were designed to protect, feed,
clothe and educate children in state care. So these two
journalists set out to investigate the scoop of what was
going on in these facilities, they made requests to the

(33:16):
Department of Education to find examples of children's diet plans
and punishments that had been recorded, because the nineteeno ed
Child Protected Law had mandated you have to if you're
running one of these facilities, you have to document what
you're feeding these kids, and you have to document how
you're punishing them, so we know if you're violating human rights.
Are not. Um, So they go to the Department of
Education and they go with these facilities they heard stories

(33:37):
from and say, what were these kids being fed? How
were they being punished? The documentation is legally required to exist,
and the Department of Education is like, oh, I'm sorry,
there's no available documentation, which m M as a journalist. MM.
So these journalists, who are great journalists, asked next for
records of children sent out to work from the age

(33:57):
of ten on. They were told that these reports did
not exist. They were asked by what process it was
decided that girls would be sent to labor in the
Magdalene laundries. They were told by a representative of the
Department of Education, Oh, we'd better not delve into that terrain.
So I also feel like, um, yeah, I mean, I

(34:18):
guess the Nazis kept kind of good records, but like,
well they did try to burn them all, but yeah, yeah,
But I'm just saying, like overall, we shouldn't really expect
the perpetrator to have great like record of their crimes.
I mean sometimes, but generally when they know ships about
to like hit the fan, they're like, better make sure

(34:41):
this doesn't exist. So it's kind of fun when people
just like turn to a bad people and they're like, hey,
could you give evidence of you being bad and they're
like no, sorry, somehow that evidence is gone. Yeah, It's
like well yeah, yeah yeah. So the government stonewalling forced

(35:02):
these women to dig and they uncovered a bunch of
horrifying ship including the fact that in nine thirty five
children had died in a fire at an industrial school
in Kavan Now. They found transcripts from an inquiry into
the fire that showed the government closing ranks to protect
the nuns over and over again. They found a quote
absence of accountability and casual law breaking at these facilities.

(35:23):
They got documentary evidence of the late Minister of Education,
Brian Lenihan, concurring with a referend mother's demand that a
girl will be illegally imprisoned in an institution. So again,
the government is entirely complicit in this. These reporters started
working on a book about their findings, and they were
heavily discouraged by basically everyone they knew. Here's a quote
from them describing the reaction they got. For most people.

(35:46):
It'll upset the good sisters. What's the point? Everything's different now?
So again it wasn't um Again, it was the eighties
when the Hasbro company was using these women's labor. So
their book was published in nineteen eighties. That's Simpson's quote
about the Germans were like, sure they've made some mistakes

(36:07):
sevens ex uh you know what else has racers? You know,
well we can't promise that, but yeah, probably these goods
and services don't need eracers. These goods and services, I

(36:30):
will say at least a seventy percent chance we're not
complicit and covering up crimes against humanity by them. That's
the behind the bastards guarantee garonte bah blah by them.
All right, products ah, we're back having a great time.

(36:55):
So these reporters published their book in nine It is
poorly reviewed, slammed by everyone is an unfair and unhinged
attack on the noble nuns and priests doing difficult work.
We of course, now know that every word of it
was true, and it's probably worth drawing a line between
how this book gets slammed by people and what happens
to Senat O'Connor when she tears up a picture of
the Pope on Saturday Night Live. Um, she's just universally

(37:18):
attacked by fucking everybody for being just an idiot, and like,
oh you're She's just a crazy woman who's being disrespectful
to this wonderful institution, these good holy men. And now
we know that every single pope who's ever been the
pope has been complicit, openly complicit in covering up the
mass rape and murder of children, every single one of them,
not one excluded, and including the popes you like, fuck

(37:41):
them all. Um, suck the Pope is the is the
motto of the behind the Bastard show. Um that guy
in St. Petersburg who shot John Paul the Second not
on the wrong side of things. That's my stance on
shooting John Paul the Second. Also, there is some sort
of wildly crazy mental gymnastics that you have to do

(38:02):
to like be like an incredibly rich and closed city
and incredibly rich like fabrics and all this fucking ship
when your whole thing is to be like humble and whatever,
but to every second of your day. I just, yeah,
the mental gymnastics you must do is a quote unquote

(38:22):
representative of God. To make that makes sense, is I'm like,
all right, some own fucking biles, I'm a humble servant
of the Lord who happens to live in his own
independent nations with billions of dollars in golden riches buried
secretly beneath it, guarded by Swiss mercenaries. What is the

(38:43):
problem with that? How does that? How does that not
say humble servant of God to you? For real? You
live the Swiss mercenaries. It's the Swiss mercenaries, isn't it.
You truly live in some ship that sounds like a
fairy tale And no point You're like, huh, is this
something I'm perpetuating that is precisely against what I pretend

(39:07):
God is. Maybe I should take a knee and fucking
renounce all this bullshit. Oh wait, now, okay, cool, I'll
just riding around in my weird bulletproof Pope mobile a
fun thing to do with the the high up leadership
of the Catholic Church. I'm not saying this about necessarily
every single priest, because they're there are definitely parishes and
stuff where there weren't molestation. And as we've talked about

(39:28):
in the episodes in the School of the America's, there
were heroic Catholic priests and nuns who fought against these
right wing death squads and acts of genocide in places
like Guatemala. And I don't mean that like I'm not
saying every single Catholic Church official um is complicit in this,
but everyone at the highest level leadership of the church
absolutely is. Everyone who is running the Vatican, every pope

(39:51):
knows about this ship and is complicit and covering up.
And every year we get more evidence of that. Every
high level Catholic official is a part of not just
this but the mass child molestation, every single one of them.
And if you start to come up with defenses for them,
replace the word Catholic Church with Nazi Germany and see
if those defenses sound like things that defenders of the

(40:13):
Wehrmacht say when they're trying to claim that there were
large chunks of the Nazis who weren't complicit in the genocide.
It's the same ship they ran the Catholic Church. They
were part of it. And also Catholics were part of Uh. Yeah,
that's I mean, that's a complete the actual Holocaust and
they were in genocide. That is part of World Wine two.

(40:34):
In fairness though, you have to there you have to
separate the Church in Rome from the Catholic Church, large
parts of the Chatholic Church in Germany who were a
big part of the resistance to Hitler, and in fact,
the three groups that Ryanhardt Hydrick, the architect of the Holocaust,
targeted in Germany were activist clerics, which were Catholic priests
that were anti Nazi. Uh, the Jews obviously in freemasons.

(40:57):
Um so I I don't want to like again in Germany. Yeah,
but yes, and with the Catholic the pope at that
point there's a bunch of fucked up ship. You can say, yes, um,
I just I never want to be the Catholic. The
part of the problem when you're trying to condemn the
Catholic church's inneviatively to people will be like, well, what
about this heroic priest who gave his life protecting It's like, yes,
I'm not saying he helped cover up mass child rape.

(41:18):
I'm talking about the popes. I'm talking about the bishops.
I'm talking about the people in charge of talking about
the organization in the way conducted itself, and that is
equivalent to a lot of other organizations. We're not We
don't say every is really person, every person or whatever.
Just like when we talk about US war crimes. I'm
not saying that your uncle who was drafted at age

(41:39):
eighteen is responsible for the deployment of age and Orange
on the jungles of Vietnam. In a lot of ways,
he's a victim too, But like, yeah, it's it's the organization.
Everyone running the organization of the Catholic Church is complicit
in this um and that's cool and good Sophia, it's not.
I think it's incredibly devastating and I'm glad I started drinking. Yeah,

(42:02):
it's a good time to be drinking, just the whole year. UM.
So a big part of the reason why the horrors
of this system are now widely known has to do
with a single woman from the village of Tuam and
not to white, not to wash out those brave journalists
who did the important work of documenting this. But that
got kind of covered up in the eighties. Um tuamas

(42:22):
again where that child mass grave was uncovered? Uh. And
this woman's name is Katherine Cordless. She grew up hearing
the whispered stories about that mass grave which had been
so efficiently hushed up and covered up by the church.
She started to investigate in the early aughts. And I'm
gonna quote from the journal dot I E here. Cordless
works on her family farm. She didn't have an academic
institution behind her. Instead, she worked on it in her

(42:44):
spare time. On a rainy day, I'd really get down
to it and go to work in the library. She said.
She initially tried to contact the Bond Succors sisters at
their Cork headquarters and was told that they no longer
had files or information about the home. She tried the
Western Health Board, who told her there was no information available.
When she tried to access information from Galway County Council,
she says she was told that she wasn't allowed because

(43:05):
she didn't have a university degree. That's exactly what I
was told I couldn't look at the records, but the
council would let her look at the information about the
housing estate which had been built over the ruins of
the old home, and from this, from this information about
the housing estate, she was able to piece together data
about the original site. She eventually hit upon the idea
of going to the registry office in Galway to get

(43:27):
death certificates for every child who had perished at the home.
Her contact at the office called her a week later
and said, do you really want all these death certificates
because you're going to be charged for each of them,
and there's a funkload of them. Corless was charged four
euros for each death certificate she requested between two thousand eleven.

(43:49):
When she started requesting them in two thousand thirteen, she
came up with seven hundred and nineties six deaths. They
ranged from newborns to nine year old children. The death
certificates gave causes raging from malnutrition, neglect, measles, tuberculosis and pneumonia.
The number of deaths and the time the home was
operational mean that one child died there every fifteen days.

(44:12):
By overlaying a map of the site as it looks
today with plans for the old building. She realized that
the mass grave discovered in nineteen seventy five had been
built in the old location of the homes sewage tank.
So when they demolished the building, they stuck all the
corpses in the sewage tank. That's good, very respectful, life matters.

(44:32):
Catholic Church, famed advocates of the sanctity of human life
se literal ship pit you babies that we didn't feed.
It was the mass graves at Tuam that finally sparked
widespread public outrage over what the Church had been doing
in Ireland for decades. This is not to say that

(44:53):
the crimes of the residential school system were unknown prior
to that point. There were obviously a lot of stories
come in that book had been written. There were stories
of sexual abuse, there were stories of brutal's punishment that
had come out. Sneed O'Connor had done her thing um
and in two thousand one, which is like a decade
before she starts finding these death certificates, the Catholic Church
had agreed to put a hundred million euros into a

(45:13):
special state fund for victims of abuse. Now this was
not because they recognized they'd done bad and wanted to
make it right. This was because in two thousand one
they were finally starting to get evidence out about all
of the well documented rapes that Catholic priests had carried out.
And so as part of this agreement about dealing hushing
up the rapes, the church puts a hundred million into

(45:33):
a fund and they say, we're also saying this fund
is going to go to people who were abused in
our residential schools because they're going to start suing in
a few years UM. And in order to receive these funds,
they have to be barred from suing the church directly.
This is an agreement they make with the Irish government.
Is the Irish Government's like, you guys were raping a
lot of kids. You need to do something about this.

(45:54):
And they're like, okay, here's a hundred million. Also, people
are gonna try to sue us for the other horrible ship.
We did make sure that if they take money from
this fund, they agree to not sue us. That's fucking cool, right,
good ship Catholic Church. UM. Now, the part of the
legal requirements around the funds ensured that only victims of
sexual abuse and not physical abuse could receive funds. So

(46:15):
we talked earlier about one of the women whose story
inspired those journals to start their investigation. Watched a little
girl get beaten to death by nuns. If that girl
had survived, she wouldn't have been she wouldn't have gotten
any money. She wouldn't have been because she didn't get raped.
Right again, good ship from the Catholic Church. Real nice

(46:36):
to be able to quantify abuse like that. Now. The
fact that they tried to lock all this down and
put the funding out in two thousand one was very
savvy of the church because of course they were well
aware that as the stories of mass child sex abuse
by priests had broken containment, so too with the whole
story of the industrial schools, the Magdalen laundries, and the
mother in baby homes. By making a deal in two

(46:56):
thousand one, they protected themselves from the fallout win In
two thousand and thirteen, a comprehensive government report on the
horrors of the industrial school system was finally released. Two
thousand thirteen is the year when the Irish President or whatever,
Indo Kinney apologized for the state's role in the horrors.
Church representatives also came out and expressed their horror at
how bad the things they've done were. A new government

(47:18):
scheme was announced to give out lump some payments from
eleven thousand, five hundred euro to one hundred thousand euro
based on a woman's length of stay in an institution.
This benefits package fell well short of what the two
thousand thirteen report had recommended, and it also contained a
ton of caveats, enough that many victims of the system
did not qualify for funds. To date, only about twenty
nine eight million euro has been paid out to just

(47:40):
seven hundred and seventy applicants, most of whom got the
full hundred thousand euro. Because that's how many people were
profoundly abused by this system. Um, and the Catholic Church
is still let's look up, let's look up the expected
net worth of the Catholic Church that's all on this
journey together. Uh, how much? How much the Catholic Church?
I fucking numbers? Yeah, because we don't know because they've

(48:04):
hidden it all underground. Um. Banker's best guest of the
Vaticans wealth this is nineteen sixty five put it at
ten billion to fifteen billion. So that's nineteen sixty five.
Is the estimate is ten to fifteen billion ums, much
more than Yeah, here's a twist article. How rich is

(48:25):
the Catholic Church. It's impossible to stell. How much real
estate does the Catholic Church hold? What are its equity holdings?
We just don't fucking no. Welcome to the fucking imaginary
numbers game. Yeah, oh fuck, this is fun. In the
nineteen sixties, Italian media uncovered evidence that the Vatican had
intested had invested in entities that conflict directly with the
Church's holy holy mission, including Instituto Pharma Logico Sarroono, a

(48:50):
pharmaceutical company that made birth control pills, and You Die In,
a military weapons manufacturer. There have also been unconfirmed rumors
of Church money and firearms manufacturer and companies with activities
and gambling in pornography. It has been linked with dealings
with Nazi gold during World War Two as well. There
you go, fucking red baby. Uh you love to hear it.

(49:14):
Good ship. Yeah, but it's cool. They've Attican passed its
first law against money laundering and terrorist group funding in
two thousand eleven, so so they've been on this for
a long time. Honestly they care, this is important to them, etcetera, etcetera. Um,

(49:35):
hypocricy pays baby, Yeah it does, it does. Um. I
don't know this has been a profoundly anti Catholic article
or episode of my podcast. I ever start being against
like ship that is like profoundly immral. Will you just

(49:57):
like come to my house with or many knives and
machetes and just fucking murder me? Yeah? Well you leave
a note that says that's what I wanted? Mm hmmm,
because like, holy fuck, yep, you know what isn't totally fuck?

(50:20):
Are these goods and services? Murder was sidepack related. It's
your pup, it's your plugs, your plugs, Your plugs, Sophia,
You're beautiful, perfect plugs. If you want to be murdered
suicided by my comedy, there we go, There we go,
the smooth transition. Robert Evans show is known for y'all

(50:42):
should get as a dead baby's head because it never
got enough nutrition in order to grow hair, and then
it was buried in a mass grave along with seven
other babies. The opposite of a soft spot. My comedy

(51:03):
It's hard as fun, as hard as you should download
my album by it it's called Father's Day. It was
number one on iTunes. You can get it wherever you
buy albums. But also Sophia Alexandro dot com. And you
should check out my other two podcasts, for Fiance with
Miles Gray of The Daily Bugeys where we talked about

(51:27):
nine Fiance and Private Parts Unknown, where me and Courtney
talk about love and sexuality around the world and we
just want to believe. So yep, check it. Yeah, believes
a place where nothing bad was ever done by colonial powers. Yes,
that is true, and it is in no way completely

(51:47):
devastated by the lack of tourism because of COVID, because
in no way is their g d P from the
fforementioned tourism. I'm hey, hey everybody. Initially I was going

(52:10):
to plug the go fund made for the sequel to
my book Um After the Revolution, which you can find
at a t r book dot com. But um, here
in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave
and it's causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a
lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning. UM,
particularly in the city of Salem. UM. I mean people,

(52:32):
people activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try
and um mitigate set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks,
to do things to help people get their temperature down. UM.
I want to try and raise funds for the Free
Fridge of Salem, UM, which are doing cooling stations in
the capital of Oregon, Salem. So if you go to
venmo At Free Fridge Salem, that's venmo At Free Fridge

(52:54):
Salem and send them a couple of bucks, they could
really use it. Um. Local government has destroyed a number,
like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and
cooling stations they've set out. Um it's you know, we're
not going to be in triple digit heats for the
next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday,
but it's still going to be very hot. People still
need this, So please venmo At Free Fridge Salem if

(53:16):
you have the wherewithal in the financial resources to do so.
One more time. The vinemo is at Free Fridge Salem.