Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on Irish Central vilifying a speaker who questions the Tuam “mass grave” hoax:
John Waters is an Irish author and journalist. He has been invited to speak this weekend at the University of Notre Dame’s annual fall conference. His topic involves the dangers of false stories going viral in cyberspace. And his focus, “the Hoax of the ‘Holocaust of Tuam'” has Irish Central going ballistic.
Waters is not new to this subject. In a lecture in Spain last April, he pointed out that there is no conclusive evidence of a mass grave containing 800 babies on the grounds of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland—as repeatedly claimed, without any such evidence, by Irish Central among others.
“No news, no facts, no change in the evidence and yet this story has gone around the world for the second time in three years as though it were true, as though it were proven,” Waters accurately observed.
Irish Central quotes an “orphan survivor” who is a graduate of Notre Dame to raise the question of why the conference is not “offering a balanced presentation on this.” That is rich coming from Irish Central. Its head, Niall O’Dowd, has made it his mission—through overwhelmingly one-sided stories and commentary—to perpetrate the “mass grave” hoax. We have repeatedly challenged him to produce the pictures that surely would have been taken of a mass grave, had one been found. He has never done so.
Instead, he and his staff resort to personal attacks against anyone who dares to question their false assertions. O’Dowd has called me “The head of the Catholic League for bigoted Catholics.” Now his reporter dismisses Waters as a “right-wing journalist,” and David Quinn, chair of the Waters’ session at the conference, as “head of the right-wing Catholic think tank the Iona Institute in Dublin.”
Such childish name-calling is a poor substitute for the facts they do not have.
