"A chamber of horrors": How 796 babies died in an Irish unwed mothers' home.

Inside one of the homes run by nuns. Image via Brian Lockier/www.adoptionrightsalliance.com

The inspector's report made sure not to blame the nuns running the home, insisting they were "careful and attentive".

But historian Catherine Corless sees it differently. She describes the death rate as "scandalous".

"Pot-bellied is a sign of hunger. You can't hide the truth of it," she told the Sunday Independent.

"You can't excuse that, no matter what the times were like. The nuns were getting well paid for those children. They were getting a pound a head for each mother and child from the government, which was quite a bit of money at the time."

For some children, "marasmus", or child malnutrition, was listed as the official cause of death. Bridget Kenny was one of those. She was just two months old when she died of starvation in 1947. The tiny girl was described as being "mentally defective".

Meanwhile, Michael Dwyer from Cork University's School of History searched old medical records and discovered that children in the homes were secretly being used as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies. In the 1930s, more than 2000 children were given an experimental diptheria vaccine. There is no record of how many children may have suffered serious side effects or even died as a result.

The testing continued for decades. At one point, 80 children became ill after accidentally being injected with a vaccine intended for cattle.

Not all children who died at the homes were buried. Some homes "donated" hundreds of babies' bodies to medical schools so that students could use them for dissection practice.

So why were these children so badly treated? Simply because they were born out of wedlock, sometimes to girls and women who had been raped, in a devoutly religious society.

A photo of some of the children at "the Home" in 1924 (Connaught Tribune, 21st June 1924) pic.twitter.com/foGFqAKJ8m

— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) May 27, 2014

“A great many people are always asking what is the good of keeping these children alive?" Dr Ella Webb said in the Irish Times in 1924.

"I quite agree that it would be a great deal kinder to strangle these children at birth than to put them out to nurse.”

There was no outcry about her comments at the time, but the people of Ireland see things differently now. Taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenny has spoken out about the "chamber of horrors" at Tuam.

"No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children," he said on Tuesday. "We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip, the wink and the elbow language of delight in which the holier than thous were particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what is called respectability. Indeed, for a while it seemed as if in Ireland our women had the amazing capacity to self-impregnate.

"For their trouble, we took their babies and gifted them, sold them, trafficked them, starved them, neglected them or denied them to the point of their disappearance from our hearts, our sight, our country and, in the case of Tuam and possibly other places, from life itself."

Maybe now there will be some justice for babies like Marian Mulryan and Bridget Kenny.