Irish care home scandal grows amid allegations of vaccine testing on children

Ireland's "mother and baby homes" scandal - revelations about mass graves where hundreds of infants were dumped - grows with separate allegations that children were used as guinea pigs for vaccinations

Schoolchildren arrive at a shrine in Tuam, County Galway which was erected in memory of up to 800 children who were allegedly buried at the site of the former home for unmarried mothers run by nuns Photo: Paul Faith/ Getty

By Harriet Alexander

6:33PM BST 09 Jun 2014

The Irish government was facing mounting calls for a full investigation into its care homes last night, as the scandal over the deaths of 800 children at a residence in County Galway was compounded by allegations that hundreds of children had also been used for testing of vaccinations.

The country's ten care homes were said to have participated in the trials, which took place between 1960 and 1976, and involved 298 children. In one of the trials, 80 children became ill after they were accidentally administered a vaccine intended for cattle.

No documentation about the trials has ever been published, but an Irish radio programme on Monday alleged wide-scale testing on children.

"My arms and legs were very badly scarred. But when I asked my Mum why she basically said when you arrived your arms were very sore and they were bandaged," said Christy, who was adopted from one of the homes – Bessborough House, in County Cork.

"I didn't know anything about vaccination trials. I've since been to a few doctors and they said they'd never seen anything like it – with so many injections."

Sister Sarto, a former social worker at Bessborough House, admitted that the vaccination testing took place at the home – but told Newstalk radio that parental consent was sought there for the trials.
"The doctor would come here and say could they carry out this experiment, and the mothers would bring the child into the doctor's. You couldn't do it without the mother's permission," she said.
GlaxoSmithKline, which took over the drug firm that ran the trials, Burroughs Welcome, said the activities, if true, were "very distressing" and that it would cooperate with any investigation. There were no laws on medical testing in Ireland until 1987.

In June 2001 an inquiry was ordered into trials on 58 children in 1960 and 1961, at six homes – including Bessborough. Results of those trials were published in the British Medical Journal in 1962. But that inquiry was halted when Professor Patrick Meenan, one of six authors of the study and then aged 86, said he should not have to appear on grounds of his age and ill health. A subsequent inquiry was blocked by Irene Hillary, a former professor of microbiology, in 2004.

The news of the vaccination testing came four days after an amateur historian, Catherine Corless, sent shock waves through Irish society by publishing research into the deaths of children in a "mother and baby home" for unwed mothers in County Galway.

Ms Corless's research highlighted a mortality rate among "illegitimate" infants that academics describe as "staggering". Government records show that throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the rate was often more than five times that of children born to married parents. On average, more than one in four children born out of wedlock died.

The home in Tuam, County Galway, saw 800 children buried in a mass grave.

"If something happened in Tuam, it probably happened in other mother-and-baby homes around the country," said Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, on Sunday.

"All the indications are that those who were running the institutions didn't understand or did not want to understand how you looked after children and how you examined the special care children needed at that early stage."

And former residents of Bessborough – the largest mother and baby home in Ireland – are calling for an investigation into whether there were an unnatural number of deaths at their home.

"I have been saying for years that we need answers about what exactly happened at places like Bessborough," said John Barrett, who was born there in 1952.

He told The Irish Independent: "There were always rumours about burials and the (Bessborough) graveyard. There could well be thousands of babies buried there. This was the largest mothers-and-baby home in Ireland so who knows?

"I think we now need to find out whether these were just rumours, or whether just like Tuam in Galway, there was something tragic going on."

Helen Murphy, born at the same home a decade after Mr Barrett, said that the only way of knowing how many babies are buried in Bessborough is by digging up the site.

"The nuns said, and there was a statement from the Sacred Heart Sisters at the weekend, and they said they didn't know whether the babies were buried in a coffins or shrouds," she told a local radio station.

"They were the people running the home. How are we going to know how many babies are buried there unless they actually go in and see how many bodies [there are]?"

The government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny, which has had rocky relations with the Vatican since taking power in 2011, already has authorised police and government record-trawling efforts into the Tuam home. It may now recommend a wider inquiry.