Home: Part One
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The theatrics could not be more minimal. For almost three hours, a couple of dozen women take turns in a pool of light on the fore stage of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Each is dressed in black and reads from a sheet of white foolscap.

The impact could not be more maximal. Their words are verbatim extracts from the report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, published in January this year, which found that from 1922 to 1998 56,000 Irish women – mainly teenagers who had become pregnant ­unmarried – were detained at 14 mother and baby institutions and four county homes in Ireland, where 57,000 children were forcibly adopted or died while in “care” and were buried in the grounds of the houses.