Thousands of unmarried women and their children born out of wedlock who were shunned by Irish society and sought refuge in state-owned homes — where many were then abused by nuns and officials of the Roman Catholic Church — will be eligible for compensation from a new multimillion-dollar initiative the Irish government has established “in acknowledgment of suffering experienced.”
Known as “mother and baby homes,” the controversial institutions were widespread in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1990s. They housed mostly young women who were cast out by their families for bearing children deemed illegitimate in a largely conservative religious society.