Bill Donohue comments on the accuracy of Irish Central:
Irish Central employs dunces. Here’s the latest proof.
Cahir O’Doherty likes to write boilerplate stories, and as a result his ability to get facts straight is seriously compromised. He, like many others, is experiencing apoplexy over my analysis of the fake news story about a “mass grave” containing the bodies of 800 children in Tuam, Ireland.
He says that Catherine Corless, the person peddling the hoax, “never spoke of” a mass grave. Wrong. On May 25, 2014, Alison O’Reilly of the Irish Daily Mail quoted Corless saying, “I am certain there are 796 children in the mass grave.”
He says “Donohue informs us that at most the two children [Barry Sweeney and Frannie Hopkins] found between 15 and 20 small skeletons” when playing in Tuam in 1975. “Donohue informs”? Sounds as if I made it up. In fact, I quoted what Sweeney said—embarrassingly, he is Corless’ key source—from an article written by Douglas Dalby of the New York Times on June 10, 2014.
He also takes issue with my comments on the McAleese Report on the Magdalene Laundries which did not substantiate the horror stories attributed to the nuns. Maybe O’Doherty will find time to read it.
O’Doherty is a dunce. But he gives his boss, Niall O’Dowd, what he wants to believe. O’Dowd licks his lips at any bad news coming from traditional Irish Catholic individuals or institutions.
For example, O’Dowd would have us believe that “Children died needlessly by the thousands” at homes run by the nuns in the early twentieth century. Really? So the evil nuns made the kids sick—they did not acquire sick children. What is really sick is the appetite to believe the worst about the Catholic Church.
O’Dowd would benefit from reading the story by Caroline Farrow posted yesterday on mercatornet.com. She speaks about the health conditions of children at the time the nuns were running the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.
Farrow writes about “children subject to measles, influenza and gastroenteritis in crowded conditions, a time before antibiotics as well as poor diet and perennial low temperatures. An analysis of the death certificates indicates that the causes of death were rarely from one single determining factor—a lot of the children had had underlying ill-health or conditions since birth and some had been born with abnormalities.” I guess the evil nuns made that happen, too.
Don’t look for Irish Central to mention any of this. It would get in the way of its narrative.
Contact O’Dowd: niall@irishcentral.com
