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I think the article's title should be the name of the institution. The discovery of the mass grave has shed light on it, but the story is much deeper than just the grave. As the investigation continues more will be reported on the institution itself and its history.
I am not sure what it is actually called however. Was "The Home" its formal title? Or was it just what it was informally referred to? -- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 07:21, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
See the section below. It seems this article uses text directly from news stories. The articles should be merged, and none of the text from this article re-used. It should be re-written. -- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 07:51, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
What was the correct title of the institution: St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home? Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home? Other? Simplicius ( talk) 15:08, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
While reading this article, I happened to notice that this passage:
is pretty similar to the wording in the cited Guardian article:
I checked two more sentences at random, and found them to be almost identical to the cited sources. Compare this from the article:
to this from the Irish Times:
Article:
I only checked these three passages; someone needs to go through the whole article to ensure the wording of each sentence is original. DoctorKubla ( talk) 07:26, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
This article will likely become a redirect and merged with Bon Secours Mother and Baby home, Tuam. So when merged make sure to not copy over any of the text from this article. Keep the references and make new text.-- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 07:48, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
But no one has actually seen this grave since 1975. Did either of the boys guess at how many people were buried there? Did the Priest happen to be a forensic scientist who guessed at the age of the interned? We know that there are the remains of 800 children in that pit how?
Its worth noting that there is a large grave on the property but we can't claim to know who is in it. There could be the remains of 8 bodies or of 8,000 bodies in there. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 18:41, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
(I did not mean to offen, but to drive home a point. I apologize if I came off as crass) This language remains incredibly problematic and not especially supported. We cant state these claims categorically. We have to be precise in who is assuming these things. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 21:49, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Corless didn't "discover" a grave, those two boys in '75 did. Corless didn't "discover" the deaths, they were recorded by the Nuns and a matter of public record.
I, for one, like "concluded". Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 21:59, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
It was discovered by accident in 1975 and then watched by a local couple for 35 years or until 2010. What happened in 2010? Did the site get bulldozed?
Also, the article says "when two boys smashed a concrete slab". The first source says "two 12-year-old boys, Francis Hopkins and Barry Sweeney, peered into a hole in a concrete slab while they were playing. According to their accounts, it was “filled to the brim with bones.”" [1] This source is ambiguous on if the septic tank still exists. None of the sourced I looked at claimed the boys smashed a concrete slab.
The second citation is unabiguous and says "The bodies of 796 children, between the ages of two days and nine years old, have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. They died between 1925 and 1961 in a mother and baby home under the care of the Bon Secours nuns." [2]
The Wikipedia article is also wrong in how is reports the research by the historian. The article strongly implies that all 796 children whose death was reported were checked for in local graveyards. That was not the case. The historian only checked 100 of the 796 children. [3]
Other sources are ambiguous on if the septic tank has been opened and the bodies counted. [4] This article implies the septic tank has not been opened. "“We can safely assume that they’re all in that plot,” Corless told TheJournal.ie." [5] -- Marc Kupper| talk 08:33, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Should any use be made of this source? On pages 48-49 there are some more details of the building's use as a workhouse, with a plan, and some information about Sister Hortense McNamara on p.55. Ghmyrtle ( talk) 10:38, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
796 children between 1925 and 1961 is 796 / ((1961 - 1925 + 1) * 12) = a death rate of 1.793 children per month. p.s. corrected.
No, you've ended up with the terms backwards: it's 1.793 deaths per month, for 37 years, that is, one death every two weeks or so. Without comparing to the number of live births at the same institution, it's hard to make a definitive statement, but that looks like a shockingly high mortality rate for what was essentially a maternity ward. What was the mortality rate for actual hospitals over the same period? My guess was that it was much much lower, meaning the people running The Home were either un-skilled or un-caring; probably both. How many of the nuns working there had actual training in (what today we call) neonatal care? The only parallel I can think of are the baby "farms" of earlier centuries, where unwanted kids were left and were not expected to thrive, and indeed were often "looked after" by older children, and given no significant health care. Theonemacduff ( talk) 00:33, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
That is a post birth abortion clinic. Andrew Swallow ( talk) 00:18, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
See List of countries by infant mortality rate. The infant mortality rate (died in their first year) in Ireland in the early 50's was 41.42 per 1000. If they had more than 45 births a month (doubtful), then they are just average for the time period. But that assumes the children all died in their first year. I believe I read the Home kept children until they were 7. "That was then, This is now" from the Government of Ireland Central Statistics Office mentions "in 1949, one child in 16 did not live to see his or her fifth birthday ...". So to be average they would need maybe 30 births per month (still doubtful). Of course this is all original research ( WP:OR), but gives us perspective when writing this article. It was incredibly bad by today's standards, but merely bad by the standards back then. Richard-of-Earth ( talk) 06:00, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Several of the sources directly contradict this. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 14:57, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I don't think that The Home was, at least officially speaking, a Magdalene asylum. For example, as a "mother and baby home", former residents are not covered by the Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme. "Women who spent time in mother and baby homes are not eligible to apply." (See [6]).
I'm not sure what the exact distinction is, but I think that people were sent to the asylums by the courts, for prostitution offences and the like, whereas women entered mother and baby homes 'voluntarily'. In addition, the Magdalene Asylum entry indicates that no births took place in those institutions.
Thoughts? jxm ( talk) 16:59, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
What's it being called in the media? -- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 10:22, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Would agree, does not seem to be oriented around providing women a long-term employment alternative to prostitution. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 15:01, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I highly recommend that one of your "reporters" work on bringing all the pieces of this "story" together in one comprehensive article. More about this horror needs to be brought to the world's attention.
See e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magdalene_Sisters
http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/new-film-philomena-has-lessons-worthy-gospel
184.56.247.71 ( talk) 18:44, 9 June 2014 (UTC)tghavener@havenerlaw.com 184.56.247.71 ( talk) 18:44, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
A tabloid is not a good source for an encyclopaedia article. We should hold off including this material until a better source becomes available. -- John ( talk) 17:16, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
The Washington Post article states:
However the TheJournal.ie article states:
I noticed the Washington Post article after I made this change. However I still do not see how real penance could be forced. So I am reluctant to change it back. We should be careful what goes in this article as the press in sensationalizing this. Richard-of-Earth ( talk) 06:22, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
The statement "Thousands of unwed pregnant women were sent there to give birth and forced to work without pay as penance." does not match the source "Some of the poorer women who gave birth were forced to work for the nuns in the institution after they had their child as a way to pay for the service which had been provided to them." I'm changing it to match the source. I'd also like to remind people that Wikipedia has a NPOV and is not a place to advance agendas. User:Philip72 ( talk) 09:35, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
You recently pointed out on the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home talk page that tabloids (specifically the "Irish Daily Mail") were a poor source of information; so I wanted to ask for your help bringing some additional sanity to the "Bon Secours..." article. If you look at the nominally reputable media outlets that have covered this story and trace their sources step by step, you'll find that most of the information originally came from another tabloid, the "Irish Mail", which is so cheesy that I don't think we could call it a "reliable source". But the "Washington Post" quoted it while kicking off the current scandal coverage, and other news outlets quoted the "Post", and so on until CNN, NBC, ABC, etc were all screaming about "800 dead babies in the septic tank" - a claim which the "Irish Mail" had initiated, as far as I can tell. Then the alleged source of the allegations - Catherine Corless - began complaining that the media was distorting her comments and distorting the entire issue beyond all recognition. In other words: most of this is nonsense. Corless never claimed she found "800 babies in the septic tank" - a tabloid made that up - and everything else since then has been the result of layer after layer of embellishment as the original lie has been recycled over and over, with the tale growing more outrageous with each retelling. Wikipedia shouldn't be perpetuating tabloid trash - even if "reliable" news sources are unprincipled enough to repeat the tabloid trash - especially since it entails serious allegations against living people.
Yes, regular news media outlets would usually be considered "reliable sources"; but if a specific news article is ultimately based on information from a tabloid that we would never consider reliable, then that specific news article should also be considered unreliable and should not be used. I won't have much luck convincing most of the current people editing the "Bon Secours..." article - I've had to struggle just to include some tiny degree of balance - so I was hoping that since you're an admin you could help solve this problem. Ryn78 ( talk) 19:13, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Editors and admins here need to be aware of the media spin involved in discrediting this story. The "reputable" newspapers didn't cover this story at all' for almost two weeks. Then the first Irish Times article on it was about the media coverage, rather than the actual fact of the unreported burial of 796 babies or mother and baby home mortality rates. The printed version of the Rosita Boland Irish Times article contradicts the videoed interview with Corless on the very same page.
Corless has not retracted her allegations. Please see the @AdrienneJoCo twitter account and http://kettleontherange.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/an-international-publicity-frenzy-and-my-mother/ - both maintained by Corless' daughter. On another issue. Ryn78, that's not how carbon dating works... Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 22:08, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
Also worth noting - http://izzykamikaze.tumblr.com/post/89770303451/vaults-under-tuambabies-site-are-part-of-sewage-system and the various links from it. Bottom line - there was a mass grave found - by two boys, in the 1970s. We don't know how many bodies are buried in that grave, or how many more are on the rest of the site. But the fact is 796 children died in that nursing home. Sorry, Ryn. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 22:15, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
I'm seeing a lot of OR and synthesis in your reply.
I'm on holiday at the moment and am not going to try to edit an article from a smartphone. I will address the article properly on my return.
In the meantime, could an editor please restore the full Corless quote where she says she did not use the word 'dumped' and also re-insert 'malnutrition' as a cause of death? If someone dies from diarrhea, you record the disease or infection as cause of death on a cert, not malnutrition. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 12:05, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
And to clarify... multiple reliable sources state that some of the children did indeed die from malnutrition, and this is recorded on their death certs. Putting some other interpretation on that is OR. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 20:11, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
Bastun:
I've reinserted Corless' entire quote, as you asked. But to include malnutrition as a cause of death requires a source - Corless never listed malnutrition, as far as I remember (correct me if I'm wrong). Asarlai added a source from thejournal.ie but that article initially says the deaths were from disease, then farther down it says disease "or malnutrition" but doesn't include an actual quote from Corless to back it up. The other sources I've seen only list diseases, I think.
Re: the related claim that deliberate starvation was a cause of death (you reject the idea of disease-induced malnutrition): what evidence is there for that? I don't remember Corless accusing the nuns of starving anyone to death, nor did the 1944 government inspection report. That report described children who were malnourished but still alive, not children who had died from it; and it didn't accuse the nuns of wrongdoing. If any of these sources meant deliberate starvation rather than disease-induced malnutrition, I think they would say so explicitly, especially since it would qualify as a potential crime; and unless they do state it explicitly, we can't claim it was deliberate. Now THAT would be OR or synthesis. Sure, some media articles have been making the claim of deliberate starvation, but some of them have been directly refuted by the person they were (mis)quoting (Philip Boucher-Hayes), and others are just basing it on their interpretation of a single word. You seem to think that I'm guilty of OR for evaluating these sources like that, but we are supposed to pass over sources which are promoting stuff that might qualify as nonsense. If we were working on an article about the D-Day Landings during WWII and I said I didn't want to use a source which claims the Japanese were manning the machine guns overlooking the beaches, would I be guilty of OR or am I just pointing out that the source is patently wrong on a basic point? Wikipedia has a rule against patent nonsense. So when the media uses a medical term like "marasmus" to justify its claim that nuns were starving children to death, I think we can use a little common sense and go by what medical dictionaries actually say about that term, rather than mindlessly accepting what the media says without using any judgement. If a media source doesn't back up allegations of serious crimes with any evidence aside from a dubious interpretation of a single word, I think we need to evaluate whether that source is spouting ridiculous claims. Nothing obligates us to use any given media article, and we are currently leaving out most of them anyway. We already select them based on our judgement.
Enjoy your vacation. Ryn78 ( talk) 00:12, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
On the issue of recent edits and why I've made the edits I have, I'm going to try to cover as many points as I can, as briefly as feasible:
- Asarlai stripped the intro of all criticism except one brief, very minor point. That's not remotely balanced. If my version has too many critical quotes then we can scale those down a bit, but we need to have something other than just a brief remark about the "800" figure. That was never the main point, not when you've got so many lurid allegations from the media that have been refuted (such as Philip Boucher-Hayes' comment that he never actually claimed children had been deliberately starved to death).
- The media sources which have been cited to back up the claim that the Tuam Home had a "higher death rate than the general population" are doing the following things which Wikipedia is not supposed to repeat: the "Explainer..." article from thejournal.ie compares the Tuam Home's overall child death rate to the general population's rate for only "infants" (babies up to maybe age one?), which is a classic case of comparing "apples to oranges". The rate for all children will always be a lot higher than the rate only for babies alone, so how on earth do we justify using such a dishonest comparison in Wikipedia's article? And it gets worse, because these news sources are also refusing to acknowledge the obvious fact that all orphanages had a higher death rate than the general population because disease spreads more rapidly when large numbers of children are in close proximity; which is why you need to compare the Tuam Home to other orphanages, not to the general population. These news sources don't do that. Is Wikipedia obligated to repeat sources that aren't even bothering to make logical comparisons? Would we repeat similar faulty comparisons if they were being used to make allegations against Muslims, Jews, or Hindus? I don't think we would, in fact irrational stuff like this is really patent nonsense, and Wikipedia has a rule against that. I think we should be able to agree on this, especially since Asarlai himself has been avoiding some of the really bad media claims, such as the erroneous claims that "nuns starved children to death"; so apparently Asarlai agrees that we can't just repeat stark falsehoods, right? I think the same principle needs to apply to the false "death rate" claims being made, unless you can find a source which actually makes a logical and legitimate comparison. In other words, patent nonsense doesn't belong here.
- I'd make similar points for the "death by malnutrition" issue. The "Explainer...." article initially says the deaths were from disease, then farther down it says disease "or malnutrition" but doesn't include an actual quote from Corless to back it up. The 1944 report doesn't accuse the nuns themselves of doing anything wrong, which means two things: the report doesn't actually back up the media's claim of wrongdoing, so we've got another case of evidence being misrepresented; and if the inspectors didn't blame the nuns for the malnutrition cases then we're presumably just dealing with the routine case of malnutrition caused by diseases which induce vomiting, diarrhea or other gastrointestinal problems. Although we can't state that without a source, neither can we use the 1944 report as justification for the "deliberate starvation" theory. If we were writing an article about a modern hospital, would we mention that it contains malnourished patients who are suffering from stomach ailments or undergoing chemotherapy or afflicted with AIDS (or other conditions which make it difficult to keep food down), and would we repeat this fact as if it were something unusual or darkly ominous about that particular hospital? That would be grossly misleading or maliciously dishonest, would it not, even if some media sources were using that type of tactic against the hospital? So what's the purpose of doing something similar here, and how do we justify it?
- Re: the archaeological dig which found bones near the site: The "Explainer..." article claims that the Gardai mistook a "nearby" archaeological dig site for the Tuam home site, but the source which that article references to "prove" its point - an archaeological journal article - actually says that the bones came from the same workhouse which used to occupy the building that later housed the Children's Home. When the "Explainer..." article claims that these are two different sites, that's just patent nonsense because it's the same building - it has the same name as the Union Workhouse that had been there before the Home. And by the way, this archaeological investigation is precisely why the Gardai said any bones found in that area were 19th century famine victims: that was the verdict of the archaeologists. Sure, it's possible that there may be other, more sinister, bones there (somewhere, yet to be verified) which were from children killed by fiendish nuns; but that is nothing but speculation at this point. Why don't we stick to media sources which actually present confirmed evidence? Isn't that what Wikipedia is supposed to do?
Bottom line: we need to keep in mind that the entire reason for the media's coverage, and the entire point of our article's coverage of the media's coverage, is the claim that the nuns were doing something unethical or criminal, otherwise none of this stuff would be mentioned at all. Therefore, the media sources we cite need to actually prove this claim, otherwise there's no reason to quote them. We shouldn't just be in the business of repeating every bit of salacious speculation about the Tuam Home, since that makes Wikipedia into a tabloid; nor would it make any sense to describe commonplace conditions (like diseases in orphanages) which were in fact routine in that era. We don't mention how many of the nuns themselves died of diseases contracted while working in the Home, because orphanage workers often contracted diseases. To be relevant for inclusion, it needs to be noteworthy.
One of the good things about Wikipedia is that its articles are often more balanced - and more sober - than the sensational media. I think this trend needs to continue, rather than mindlessly repeating sensationalism just because the media has stooped to that level. If they present actual verified evidence which is relevant to the allegations, then we can include it. Ryn78 ( talk) 00:12, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for re-inserting the quote. How3ver, you are now using Boucher-Hayes' blog as a source; either that (and his statement) has to go, or re-insert the quotes from Adrienne Corless' blog. Either all blogs are RS, or none are. You can't have it both ways. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 18:26, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
This must be the "main article" I was told about.
I removed the "thejournal.ie" citation because it doesn't prove the claim that it's supposed to prove. In fact it's bloody daffy. It cites "one year" of deaths from the Mother and Baby Home and then compares this to the national average. That's comparing apples to oranges, because "one year" (presumably their worst year during a really bad epidemic) is not an "average" and should not be compared to genuine averages. An average means adding the stats from all the years and then dividing by the number of years. A single year will often be a lot worse than the overall average, so it doesn't prove anything.
Are there any valid analyses to back up this claim? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cookncrem ( talk • contribs) 01:03, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Rather than supposition, we use what the references say, without guessing if something was "their worst year during a really bad epidemic". It does not compare the death rate to the national average, it compares it to the death rate in other mother and baby homes. Please do not remove referenced material. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 16:47, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Bastun: that doesn't change the fact that the source you've chosen - out of all the sources on the subject - is comparing a single year to an average, which is obvious manipulation of the statistics. It's not even subtle. We can choose which source to use rather than being stuck with this one specific journal.ie article. There's a good reason Wikipedia is edited by humans rather than using an automated news aggregator : it's to allow human logic to choose content. So I ask again: is there a source which uses honest methods? Jxm's edit is an improvement, but we shouldn't be using that source at all, and we shouldn't be making that type of comparison. Cookncrem ( talk) 22:42, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it wasn't a hospital. But at one time in history childhood was a very dangerous period of life. Large percentages of children used to die very young from disease.
Does anyone have a pointer to the original Corless piece? 20% of our citations use it, but I haven't found any links online for review/verification. It seems a little odd that the reference page numbers used (pp 5 to 16) are different than the table of contents in the cited source here (pp 75 to 83). Furthermore, this disparity also implies a different article length. Given the plethora of controversial and unreliable reporting, I believe a decent verification cycle is warranted. Comments? jxm ( talk) 13:53, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
I think the article's title should be the name of the institution. The discovery of the mass grave has shed light on it, but the story is much deeper than just the grave. As the investigation continues more will be reported on the institution itself and its history.
I am not sure what it is actually called however. Was "The Home" its formal title? Or was it just what it was informally referred to? -- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 07:21, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
See the section below. It seems this article uses text directly from news stories. The articles should be merged, and none of the text from this article re-used. It should be re-written. -- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 07:51, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
What was the correct title of the institution: St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home? Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home? Other? Simplicius ( talk) 15:08, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
While reading this article, I happened to notice that this passage:
is pretty similar to the wording in the cited Guardian article:
I checked two more sentences at random, and found them to be almost identical to the cited sources. Compare this from the article:
to this from the Irish Times:
Article:
I only checked these three passages; someone needs to go through the whole article to ensure the wording of each sentence is original. DoctorKubla ( talk) 07:26, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
This article will likely become a redirect and merged with Bon Secours Mother and Baby home, Tuam. So when merged make sure to not copy over any of the text from this article. Keep the references and make new text.-- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 07:48, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
But no one has actually seen this grave since 1975. Did either of the boys guess at how many people were buried there? Did the Priest happen to be a forensic scientist who guessed at the age of the interned? We know that there are the remains of 800 children in that pit how?
Its worth noting that there is a large grave on the property but we can't claim to know who is in it. There could be the remains of 8 bodies or of 8,000 bodies in there. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 18:41, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
(I did not mean to offen, but to drive home a point. I apologize if I came off as crass) This language remains incredibly problematic and not especially supported. We cant state these claims categorically. We have to be precise in who is assuming these things. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 21:49, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
Corless didn't "discover" a grave, those two boys in '75 did. Corless didn't "discover" the deaths, they were recorded by the Nuns and a matter of public record.
I, for one, like "concluded". Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 21:59, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
It was discovered by accident in 1975 and then watched by a local couple for 35 years or until 2010. What happened in 2010? Did the site get bulldozed?
Also, the article says "when two boys smashed a concrete slab". The first source says "two 12-year-old boys, Francis Hopkins and Barry Sweeney, peered into a hole in a concrete slab while they were playing. According to their accounts, it was “filled to the brim with bones.”" [1] This source is ambiguous on if the septic tank still exists. None of the sourced I looked at claimed the boys smashed a concrete slab.
The second citation is unabiguous and says "The bodies of 796 children, between the ages of two days and nine years old, have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. They died between 1925 and 1961 in a mother and baby home under the care of the Bon Secours nuns." [2]
The Wikipedia article is also wrong in how is reports the research by the historian. The article strongly implies that all 796 children whose death was reported were checked for in local graveyards. That was not the case. The historian only checked 100 of the 796 children. [3]
Other sources are ambiguous on if the septic tank has been opened and the bodies counted. [4] This article implies the septic tank has not been opened. "“We can safely assume that they’re all in that plot,” Corless told TheJournal.ie." [5] -- Marc Kupper| talk 08:33, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
Should any use be made of this source? On pages 48-49 there are some more details of the building's use as a workhouse, with a plan, and some information about Sister Hortense McNamara on p.55. Ghmyrtle ( talk) 10:38, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
796 children between 1925 and 1961 is 796 / ((1961 - 1925 + 1) * 12) = a death rate of 1.793 children per month. p.s. corrected.
No, you've ended up with the terms backwards: it's 1.793 deaths per month, for 37 years, that is, one death every two weeks or so. Without comparing to the number of live births at the same institution, it's hard to make a definitive statement, but that looks like a shockingly high mortality rate for what was essentially a maternity ward. What was the mortality rate for actual hospitals over the same period? My guess was that it was much much lower, meaning the people running The Home were either un-skilled or un-caring; probably both. How many of the nuns working there had actual training in (what today we call) neonatal care? The only parallel I can think of are the baby "farms" of earlier centuries, where unwanted kids were left and were not expected to thrive, and indeed were often "looked after" by older children, and given no significant health care. Theonemacduff ( talk) 00:33, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
That is a post birth abortion clinic. Andrew Swallow ( talk) 00:18, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
See List of countries by infant mortality rate. The infant mortality rate (died in their first year) in Ireland in the early 50's was 41.42 per 1000. If they had more than 45 births a month (doubtful), then they are just average for the time period. But that assumes the children all died in their first year. I believe I read the Home kept children until they were 7. "That was then, This is now" from the Government of Ireland Central Statistics Office mentions "in 1949, one child in 16 did not live to see his or her fifth birthday ...". So to be average they would need maybe 30 births per month (still doubtful). Of course this is all original research ( WP:OR), but gives us perspective when writing this article. It was incredibly bad by today's standards, but merely bad by the standards back then. Richard-of-Earth ( talk) 06:00, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Several of the sources directly contradict this. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 14:57, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I don't think that The Home was, at least officially speaking, a Magdalene asylum. For example, as a "mother and baby home", former residents are not covered by the Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme. "Women who spent time in mother and baby homes are not eligible to apply." (See [6]).
I'm not sure what the exact distinction is, but I think that people were sent to the asylums by the courts, for prostitution offences and the like, whereas women entered mother and baby homes 'voluntarily'. In addition, the Magdalene Asylum entry indicates that no births took place in those institutions.
Thoughts? jxm ( talk) 16:59, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
What's it being called in the media? -- Harizotoh9 ( talk) 10:22, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
Would agree, does not seem to be oriented around providing women a long-term employment alternative to prostitution. Cosmiccoffee ( talk) 15:01, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
I highly recommend that one of your "reporters" work on bringing all the pieces of this "story" together in one comprehensive article. More about this horror needs to be brought to the world's attention.
See e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magdalene_Sisters
http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/new-film-philomena-has-lessons-worthy-gospel
184.56.247.71 ( talk) 18:44, 9 June 2014 (UTC)tghavener@havenerlaw.com 184.56.247.71 ( talk) 18:44, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
A tabloid is not a good source for an encyclopaedia article. We should hold off including this material until a better source becomes available. -- John ( talk) 17:16, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
The Washington Post article states:
However the TheJournal.ie article states:
I noticed the Washington Post article after I made this change. However I still do not see how real penance could be forced. So I am reluctant to change it back. We should be careful what goes in this article as the press in sensationalizing this. Richard-of-Earth ( talk) 06:22, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
The statement "Thousands of unwed pregnant women were sent there to give birth and forced to work without pay as penance." does not match the source "Some of the poorer women who gave birth were forced to work for the nuns in the institution after they had their child as a way to pay for the service which had been provided to them." I'm changing it to match the source. I'd also like to remind people that Wikipedia has a NPOV and is not a place to advance agendas. User:Philip72 ( talk) 09:35, 22 June 2014 (UTC)
You recently pointed out on the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home talk page that tabloids (specifically the "Irish Daily Mail") were a poor source of information; so I wanted to ask for your help bringing some additional sanity to the "Bon Secours..." article. If you look at the nominally reputable media outlets that have covered this story and trace their sources step by step, you'll find that most of the information originally came from another tabloid, the "Irish Mail", which is so cheesy that I don't think we could call it a "reliable source". But the "Washington Post" quoted it while kicking off the current scandal coverage, and other news outlets quoted the "Post", and so on until CNN, NBC, ABC, etc were all screaming about "800 dead babies in the septic tank" - a claim which the "Irish Mail" had initiated, as far as I can tell. Then the alleged source of the allegations - Catherine Corless - began complaining that the media was distorting her comments and distorting the entire issue beyond all recognition. In other words: most of this is nonsense. Corless never claimed she found "800 babies in the septic tank" - a tabloid made that up - and everything else since then has been the result of layer after layer of embellishment as the original lie has been recycled over and over, with the tale growing more outrageous with each retelling. Wikipedia shouldn't be perpetuating tabloid trash - even if "reliable" news sources are unprincipled enough to repeat the tabloid trash - especially since it entails serious allegations against living people.
Yes, regular news media outlets would usually be considered "reliable sources"; but if a specific news article is ultimately based on information from a tabloid that we would never consider reliable, then that specific news article should also be considered unreliable and should not be used. I won't have much luck convincing most of the current people editing the "Bon Secours..." article - I've had to struggle just to include some tiny degree of balance - so I was hoping that since you're an admin you could help solve this problem. Ryn78 ( talk) 19:13, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
Editors and admins here need to be aware of the media spin involved in discrediting this story. The "reputable" newspapers didn't cover this story at all' for almost two weeks. Then the first Irish Times article on it was about the media coverage, rather than the actual fact of the unreported burial of 796 babies or mother and baby home mortality rates. The printed version of the Rosita Boland Irish Times article contradicts the videoed interview with Corless on the very same page.
Corless has not retracted her allegations. Please see the @AdrienneJoCo twitter account and http://kettleontherange.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/an-international-publicity-frenzy-and-my-mother/ - both maintained by Corless' daughter. On another issue. Ryn78, that's not how carbon dating works... Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 22:08, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
Also worth noting - http://izzykamikaze.tumblr.com/post/89770303451/vaults-under-tuambabies-site-are-part-of-sewage-system and the various links from it. Bottom line - there was a mass grave found - by two boys, in the 1970s. We don't know how many bodies are buried in that grave, or how many more are on the rest of the site. But the fact is 796 children died in that nursing home. Sorry, Ryn. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 22:15, 30 June 2014 (UTC)
I'm seeing a lot of OR and synthesis in your reply.
I'm on holiday at the moment and am not going to try to edit an article from a smartphone. I will address the article properly on my return.
In the meantime, could an editor please restore the full Corless quote where she says she did not use the word 'dumped' and also re-insert 'malnutrition' as a cause of death? If someone dies from diarrhea, you record the disease or infection as cause of death on a cert, not malnutrition. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 12:05, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
And to clarify... multiple reliable sources state that some of the children did indeed die from malnutrition, and this is recorded on their death certs. Putting some other interpretation on that is OR. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 20:11, 5 July 2014 (UTC)
Bastun:
I've reinserted Corless' entire quote, as you asked. But to include malnutrition as a cause of death requires a source - Corless never listed malnutrition, as far as I remember (correct me if I'm wrong). Asarlai added a source from thejournal.ie but that article initially says the deaths were from disease, then farther down it says disease "or malnutrition" but doesn't include an actual quote from Corless to back it up. The other sources I've seen only list diseases, I think.
Re: the related claim that deliberate starvation was a cause of death (you reject the idea of disease-induced malnutrition): what evidence is there for that? I don't remember Corless accusing the nuns of starving anyone to death, nor did the 1944 government inspection report. That report described children who were malnourished but still alive, not children who had died from it; and it didn't accuse the nuns of wrongdoing. If any of these sources meant deliberate starvation rather than disease-induced malnutrition, I think they would say so explicitly, especially since it would qualify as a potential crime; and unless they do state it explicitly, we can't claim it was deliberate. Now THAT would be OR or synthesis. Sure, some media articles have been making the claim of deliberate starvation, but some of them have been directly refuted by the person they were (mis)quoting (Philip Boucher-Hayes), and others are just basing it on their interpretation of a single word. You seem to think that I'm guilty of OR for evaluating these sources like that, but we are supposed to pass over sources which are promoting stuff that might qualify as nonsense. If we were working on an article about the D-Day Landings during WWII and I said I didn't want to use a source which claims the Japanese were manning the machine guns overlooking the beaches, would I be guilty of OR or am I just pointing out that the source is patently wrong on a basic point? Wikipedia has a rule against patent nonsense. So when the media uses a medical term like "marasmus" to justify its claim that nuns were starving children to death, I think we can use a little common sense and go by what medical dictionaries actually say about that term, rather than mindlessly accepting what the media says without using any judgement. If a media source doesn't back up allegations of serious crimes with any evidence aside from a dubious interpretation of a single word, I think we need to evaluate whether that source is spouting ridiculous claims. Nothing obligates us to use any given media article, and we are currently leaving out most of them anyway. We already select them based on our judgement.
Enjoy your vacation. Ryn78 ( talk) 00:12, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
On the issue of recent edits and why I've made the edits I have, I'm going to try to cover as many points as I can, as briefly as feasible:
- Asarlai stripped the intro of all criticism except one brief, very minor point. That's not remotely balanced. If my version has too many critical quotes then we can scale those down a bit, but we need to have something other than just a brief remark about the "800" figure. That was never the main point, not when you've got so many lurid allegations from the media that have been refuted (such as Philip Boucher-Hayes' comment that he never actually claimed children had been deliberately starved to death).
- The media sources which have been cited to back up the claim that the Tuam Home had a "higher death rate than the general population" are doing the following things which Wikipedia is not supposed to repeat: the "Explainer..." article from thejournal.ie compares the Tuam Home's overall child death rate to the general population's rate for only "infants" (babies up to maybe age one?), which is a classic case of comparing "apples to oranges". The rate for all children will always be a lot higher than the rate only for babies alone, so how on earth do we justify using such a dishonest comparison in Wikipedia's article? And it gets worse, because these news sources are also refusing to acknowledge the obvious fact that all orphanages had a higher death rate than the general population because disease spreads more rapidly when large numbers of children are in close proximity; which is why you need to compare the Tuam Home to other orphanages, not to the general population. These news sources don't do that. Is Wikipedia obligated to repeat sources that aren't even bothering to make logical comparisons? Would we repeat similar faulty comparisons if they were being used to make allegations against Muslims, Jews, or Hindus? I don't think we would, in fact irrational stuff like this is really patent nonsense, and Wikipedia has a rule against that. I think we should be able to agree on this, especially since Asarlai himself has been avoiding some of the really bad media claims, such as the erroneous claims that "nuns starved children to death"; so apparently Asarlai agrees that we can't just repeat stark falsehoods, right? I think the same principle needs to apply to the false "death rate" claims being made, unless you can find a source which actually makes a logical and legitimate comparison. In other words, patent nonsense doesn't belong here.
- I'd make similar points for the "death by malnutrition" issue. The "Explainer...." article initially says the deaths were from disease, then farther down it says disease "or malnutrition" but doesn't include an actual quote from Corless to back it up. The 1944 report doesn't accuse the nuns themselves of doing anything wrong, which means two things: the report doesn't actually back up the media's claim of wrongdoing, so we've got another case of evidence being misrepresented; and if the inspectors didn't blame the nuns for the malnutrition cases then we're presumably just dealing with the routine case of malnutrition caused by diseases which induce vomiting, diarrhea or other gastrointestinal problems. Although we can't state that without a source, neither can we use the 1944 report as justification for the "deliberate starvation" theory. If we were writing an article about a modern hospital, would we mention that it contains malnourished patients who are suffering from stomach ailments or undergoing chemotherapy or afflicted with AIDS (or other conditions which make it difficult to keep food down), and would we repeat this fact as if it were something unusual or darkly ominous about that particular hospital? That would be grossly misleading or maliciously dishonest, would it not, even if some media sources were using that type of tactic against the hospital? So what's the purpose of doing something similar here, and how do we justify it?
- Re: the archaeological dig which found bones near the site: The "Explainer..." article claims that the Gardai mistook a "nearby" archaeological dig site for the Tuam home site, but the source which that article references to "prove" its point - an archaeological journal article - actually says that the bones came from the same workhouse which used to occupy the building that later housed the Children's Home. When the "Explainer..." article claims that these are two different sites, that's just patent nonsense because it's the same building - it has the same name as the Union Workhouse that had been there before the Home. And by the way, this archaeological investigation is precisely why the Gardai said any bones found in that area were 19th century famine victims: that was the verdict of the archaeologists. Sure, it's possible that there may be other, more sinister, bones there (somewhere, yet to be verified) which were from children killed by fiendish nuns; but that is nothing but speculation at this point. Why don't we stick to media sources which actually present confirmed evidence? Isn't that what Wikipedia is supposed to do?
Bottom line: we need to keep in mind that the entire reason for the media's coverage, and the entire point of our article's coverage of the media's coverage, is the claim that the nuns were doing something unethical or criminal, otherwise none of this stuff would be mentioned at all. Therefore, the media sources we cite need to actually prove this claim, otherwise there's no reason to quote them. We shouldn't just be in the business of repeating every bit of salacious speculation about the Tuam Home, since that makes Wikipedia into a tabloid; nor would it make any sense to describe commonplace conditions (like diseases in orphanages) which were in fact routine in that era. We don't mention how many of the nuns themselves died of diseases contracted while working in the Home, because orphanage workers often contracted diseases. To be relevant for inclusion, it needs to be noteworthy.
One of the good things about Wikipedia is that its articles are often more balanced - and more sober - than the sensational media. I think this trend needs to continue, rather than mindlessly repeating sensationalism just because the media has stooped to that level. If they present actual verified evidence which is relevant to the allegations, then we can include it. Ryn78 ( talk) 00:12, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for re-inserting the quote. How3ver, you are now using Boucher-Hayes' blog as a source; either that (and his statement) has to go, or re-insert the quotes from Adrienne Corless' blog. Either all blogs are RS, or none are. You can't have it both ways. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 18:26, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
This must be the "main article" I was told about.
I removed the "thejournal.ie" citation because it doesn't prove the claim that it's supposed to prove. In fact it's bloody daffy. It cites "one year" of deaths from the Mother and Baby Home and then compares this to the national average. That's comparing apples to oranges, because "one year" (presumably their worst year during a really bad epidemic) is not an "average" and should not be compared to genuine averages. An average means adding the stats from all the years and then dividing by the number of years. A single year will often be a lot worse than the overall average, so it doesn't prove anything.
Are there any valid analyses to back up this claim? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cookncrem ( talk • contribs) 01:03, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Rather than supposition, we use what the references say, without guessing if something was "their worst year during a really bad epidemic". It does not compare the death rate to the national average, it compares it to the death rate in other mother and baby homes. Please do not remove referenced material. Bastun Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ! 16:47, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Bastun: that doesn't change the fact that the source you've chosen - out of all the sources on the subject - is comparing a single year to an average, which is obvious manipulation of the statistics. It's not even subtle. We can choose which source to use rather than being stuck with this one specific journal.ie article. There's a good reason Wikipedia is edited by humans rather than using an automated news aggregator : it's to allow human logic to choose content. So I ask again: is there a source which uses honest methods? Jxm's edit is an improvement, but we shouldn't be using that source at all, and we shouldn't be making that type of comparison. Cookncrem ( talk) 22:42, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it wasn't a hospital. But at one time in history childhood was a very dangerous period of life. Large percentages of children used to die very young from disease.
Does anyone have a pointer to the original Corless piece? 20% of our citations use it, but I haven't found any links online for review/verification. It seems a little odd that the reference page numbers used (pp 5 to 16) are different than the table of contents in the cited source here (pp 75 to 83). Furthermore, this disparity also implies a different article length. Given the plethora of controversial and unreliable reporting, I believe a decent verification cycle is warranted. Comments? jxm ( talk) 13:53, 2 October 2014 (UTC)