The final report on Ireland's cruel system of mother and baby homes will be given to a government minister today. Thousands of pages will shed light on inaccessible records and an excavation. But there is no timeline for when it will be public. How long will survivors wait?

In 2017, I spoke with survivors of the mother and baby institutions at this protest and started #RepublicofShame. The final report was due within months. They had been fighting a culture of silence for years. Survivors I met have died waiting for answers. https://www.bookdepository.com/Republic-Shame-Caelainn-Hogan/9780241984123

I went to Tuam the year results of the test excavation were made public. The remains of children are still there in sewage chambers on the grounds of the "home". The state already promised they would exhume and identify them. But the grass has grown back. Families still wait.

The burials report took weeks to be made public. When it was, a woman named Bridget found out through anonymised details that her baby, born in Bessborough, was buried in a famine grave. The nuns had lied to her. She and daughter @ctcantwell still had to fight for the records.

This is not some distant past. I found there was a #motherandbabyhome operating til 2006 that coordinated with anti-abortion crisis pregnancy agencies set up by Catholic hierarchy. There are young people only beginning to search for answers. #RepealTheSeal https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/caelinn-hogan-the-castle-5178051-Aug2020/

Karl holds a photo of Ireland's largest #motherandbabyhome where he was born. We spoke to a nun who worked as a midwife in St Patrick's and remembers everything about it. Another nun he went to for information compared his mother to a burnt piece of puzzle. #RepublicofShame