Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes are a stain on the Catholic church - but this latest refusal to atone is a new low | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

The reluctance of religious organisations to offer recompense for the lives ruined fits a pattern of denial and evasionThere are some stories so horrifying that their details embed themselves in your flesh and haunt you for the rest of your days. The suffering of the women and babies – an estimated 170,000 of them – who were incarcerated and abused in the Magdalene laundries and mother-and-baby homes that housed “fallen women” is one such story. It is a scandal that is di