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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast, the show that presents the latest science based strategies to help us live happier, more joyful lives. In the next season of the Happiness Live, we'll explore how to make friends happier parenting strategies, and why drinking the world's hottest hot sauce can be fun. Oh my God. Listen to the Happiness lab on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Boy, top of the morning until your listeners. This is behind the ******** a podcast by Roberto Evans talking about the worst people in all of Irish history. Oh, Chim Chim Cheroo bobs your uncle. That was my deary. Racist Irish accent. Wow. It looks like the unsubscribe numbers for Ireland are huge for those seven people in Ireland have stopped listening to our podcast. OK, and now those seven people have told another seven people and they have told another 70 people. And now and as a result. Everyone in Ireland hate, but our listenership in the UK has tripled. So. We do love the Irish, don't we? You know, it's funny because when we took the break, I went outside and I had to water my plants because it's 90 in Portland today and we needed to water them a second time. And most of what I'm growing is potatoes because I love growing the potatoes I'm, I'm working on. I don't have enough land right now because you got any sweet potatoes in that ***? No, I don't trust sweet potatoes. I like normal potatoes, though. I don't trust them. What do you think they're hiding? They're openly sweet. I know. And that's what I don't trust about them. OK, well, it's it's like done my wife, who are sweet, and I don't trust them. Going Yukon gold potatoes. Yes, that's one of the potatoes. I just got some proof. The gifts. I got you in the trash because you didn't trust. Good. Because I don't trust people who are nice to me. It's true. He doesn't. That's why I'm so mean. But, Robert, you love. Come on. Yeah, but I don't like being loved in return. Play the one who's responsible for your nickname podcast Daddy. Yes, I am. You are. Can you trust someone who was nicknamed you such you can? Would I ever steal a knife from you? No, I would not have enough that you could get away with. Well, I would solicit your listeners to send me my own. Nice. Yeah. Send Sophia knives. Just don't send Sophia knives in unlabeled packages. No. And also, remember our rule. If you send Sophie and Ives, you absolutely put a happy face. On the night. Yeah. Well, we know it's a friendly knife or a. This is not a death threat letter. That's always a nice thing to send. Isn't no love. This is not a death death threat letter. A sticker, you know, a catch anything. Yeah. This is not a death threat patch to put on your battle jacket. I would ******* love that. That would actually be rad. People think I'm disarming. And then I stabbed him in the heart. It's perfect. It's great. At the end of this episode, I will give you my yellow. Box number so you can send me your happy Face 9 Sophia. Some knives, some some some friendly knives. You deserve them so, Sophia. Last episode we talked a lot about a lot of horrible **** and we talked about the Magdalene laundries and how the Catholic Church was, you know, part of how this was justified. It was like the Irish government can't afford a lot of social services. The Catholic Church will provide them because it's just such a such a Gee. Shucks, good, good, good thing the Catholic Church and the poor, it's somehow cheaper to murder people than it is. Provide them with social services and rape them and I'm sorry and sell their babies. And force them to labor for you in a laundry room for profit and also sewing for profit. But that's not all they forced incarcerated women to do for profit, Sophia. And that brings me to a real fun story. We're going to have a good time with this one. We're going to get it. I want before I get into the store. I just want you to think about all everyone here, everyone who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, all the good time, good times you had, you know, playing, playing board games that you're going to be like. Playing on Uncle Bill Clinton's lap while he plays the saxophone. Remember the good days? Just remember the good days of play and playing mouse trap. You know, a little bit of monopoly, right? Playing, playing all those all those classics, those classic board games from your from the game of Life where you could afford a house in it. Yeah, like an actual life. Remember to think of all those positive board game memories you have as I read this story I found on the website little Adams as part of a series. Called dependence industry by JP O'Malley or an article called dependence Industry by JP O'Malley. Now the authors great aunt was a woman named Elsie who spent basically her entire life in service to the church. The initial crime for which she was incarcerated was having a child out of wedlock. Now Elsie was still basically a child herself when her own family sent her to a Magdalene laundry operated by the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford. This is how it often worked in Ireland, a profoundly Catholic population who were only too happy to report. Your daughters, nieces and cousins for getting pregnant out of wedlock, Elsie wound up spending the rest of her life in the custody of the church. She lived with them until her late 80s, JP O'Malley writes. Quote as far back as I can remember, Elsie would talk openly to us kids about the work she did at the convent. She and the other women she told us were made to assemble and package popular Hasbro board games. That's right, yeah, Hasbro new. I could smell the Hassenfeld brothers. Yeah, coming off the monopoly, man. Yeah, the ************* who made your GI Joes and major. I don't think those were made in these places, but their board games were. Uh, yes. The Hasbro Corporation profited off of the indentured labor of women who imprisoned for the crime of having a child. Or, as we noted last episode, of stealing an Apple. Now we're talking about, like, grow more like, how slave. Am I right? OK, yeah. I'll never come back to this show. This this sounds. Like some ******* 50s and 60s **** maybe, but this program with Hasbro started in the 1980s. There is a very good chance that some, if not most of the people listening to this podcast played with board games assembled by women who were basically slaves of the Catholic Church. According to Elsie's Mouse trap was apparently the worst board game to assay. This is probably more for our listeners who played board games that were, you know, they bought in Ireland or the UK or in Europe. I don't know how, like Hasbro sold a lot of board games now. A lot of them had other labor rights issues, but yeah, a lot of them were made by women incarcerated in the Magdalene laundries. And again, Mousetrap was the worst of them, JP O'Malley continues. Quote one Christmas when I was 12, someone gave me a present of a kerplunk set. I felt confused. Even at that age, I still felt there was something inherently sinister about deriving any kind of enjoyment from a gift that my great aunt could have packaged in the convent at Waterford. I knew from the stories Elsie told us at home every Christmas about how strict the nuns were. It wasn't so much the words Elsie would use when she talked about them. But her gaze would shift when she mentioned them. The warm smile would vanish. It was replaced by a look of petrification. All you had to do was look into Elsie's eyes when she mentioned the Good Shepherd Sisters to understand how prevalent the culture of fear was. The nuns were the masters, and the women, Elsie and thousands of others, were treated like small school children. So, yo, how dark is it when you're playing hungry hungry hippos? Your ******* game was assembled by Hungry, Hungry, actual ******* women. Yeah, being whipped by nuns forced to sleep in the cold outside the Irish winter because they didn't put together the operation board fast enough. Yeah, and you're putting together operation when for sure if you got sick, they would not pay for an operation. They just kill you in that mass grave you and put you in the mass grave, then sometimes deke you up and rebury you in another mass grave. So ******* nuns not even resting. Is for your ***. Just rest and wherever the **** they put you until they move you again. Yeah, we you. You shouldn't even be resting. You didn't do enough work for free for the Catholic Church to profit even though they were already worth most more than most nations. Honestly shocked they didn't sell the remains as like fertilizer. Another dollar. I'm not gonna say categorically that the Catholic Church never sold the corpses of people that they let die for fertilizer. I'm not willing to make that statement categorically because it's a cactus. Give us another, like, five years. Yeah, we're going to dig up some more mass graves, that's for damn sure. Now, in recent years, the Good Shepherd Order has admitted to running a board game sweatshop. During the Reagan years. They made a statement to The Sunday Times about it, quote, in the 1980s. Hasbro entered into an agreement with the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford to provide materials for packaging by our residents. The residents who participated in this activity were regularly given what was then known as their Hasbro money envelope. So. Put a pin in that money envelope comment, because we're going to circle back to that soon. Now, we don't know exactly how long this went on, but the most detail I found suggests that the arrangement between Hasbro and the Good Shepherd order continued for more than 30 years, which means well into the 2000s, some version of this was still happening. Now, I think it might have gotten better. It's hard to say exactly how long it went on, but Hasbro, who currently has a market cap of $8 billion, claims they had no direct commercial involvement with the order. They claimed that their business relationship was with a charity called Rehab, which purports to help disabled people. After the workplace, it seems odd, uh, defining incarcerated by a church for bearing a child as a disability. But you have to remember that a lot of disabled people were also incarcerated by the Catholic Church up until the 1990s. Really gives. I don't wanna go to rehab like a whole ***. Other meaning is like, yeah, you really shouldn't forcibly labor for the Hasbro Corporation. I don't want to make ******* mouse trap until I ******* die. Now, JP O'malley's reporting on this is the best that I found. He succeeded in talking to two other women who had worked in assembling board games. The Good Shepherd order I should note that one of these sources experiences predates the orders relationship with Hasbro. This first particular case she was incarcerated and was assembling board games through the mid 1960s to the late 1970s. We don't know what company they were making board games for, but they described the experiences of their time laboring. There is extremely traumatic quote. She had packaged games probably sometime in the 1970s. She admitted. This vagueness is a common theme with many of the survivors I interviewed. The past is so painful they try to erase it from their memory as best they can. The work involved, she said, literally PTSD symptom. That is like well known now, yeah, the work involved, she said, putting pieces in small bags. We received £0.50 for pocket money, the woman explained. We put all of our work into boxes quickly and then the nuns would have someone count them. If you didn't go fast enough, you had to stay longer. Sometimes men would come in and talk to the nuns and watch us do the work too, she added. Another woman, resident in the Good Shepherd convent in Waterford from 1963 to 1968, claimed she packaged games too. Where there any wages for the work? No money, just food, she told me. Now, you might define making people labor and just giving them food and not money, as I'm not, not, not paid labor. I don't know if there's another word for not paid labor that you can't choose not to do. Well, we'll put a pin in that. No, that doesn't seem right. Slavery. Slavery. Oh, good. Oh yeah, nailed it. Yeah, perfect. Look, really, really getting getting the good Irish music here. So I must again reiterate that none of those these either of these women were making board games during the Hasbro. I don't know what company they assembled games for, so Hasbro may be telling the truth when they say they're incarcerated. Single mother laborers were paid for their work, but JB O'Malley also talked to a source who he kept anonymous who claims to have been an employee of Hasbro Ireland for five years during the 1980s. Her mother had also been a resident of the Good Shepherd. Convent in Waterford and had previously worked at the Magdalene Laundries and this Hasbro employee told JB O'Malley quote I can assure you those women who worked in Hasbro Ireland from the convent, that was their life. They worked longer hours than the factory woman women, but the packaging work was always done on site and the Good Shepherd Convent, I presumed the women didn't have any work contracts because any money they got went through whoever was the mother superior in the convent at the time. She went on to clarify that whatever cash the women received was pocket money rather than wages. So again, some of these women almost certainly were not paid. It depended on whether or not the nuns wanted to give them money. You assume a lot of the nuns just took the money Hasbro gave them. But Hasbro can claim these women were paid for their labor because it's not their job to make sure these women get paid for their labor. Plaza Bowl deniability plausible deniability is the is the petrol that capitalism runs on. Didn't ask us about the things you needed. Why should we give them to you? Oh, wait, you did ask. It doesn't matter. We still won't. Yep. Corporations. That's where my upcoming musical corporation. Yeah, I'm excited for the tagline. Yeah, yeah. And you, you actually execute the Pope on stage during that, if I'm not mistaken. I sure do. I sure do. And then I hold up his head like Kathy Griffin did with Trump. And that is how I hope to get cancelled. So fingers crossed, fingers crossed that I'll start opening for Louis CK because that's how cancellation works. You just start being a right wing comedian. Oh yeah, no, I'm. I'm excited to. I hate that for you. Just so you know, I hate it. Hate it. I I'm. I'm. No. It'll be amazing. Did you cancelled? No one's been cancelled. I'm gonna. Doesn't exist for Cosby. It's perfect. Yeah. Oh my God, yeah. Where it's gonna be, it's gonna be a double act. Uh, me and Bill Cosby, his, his, his rejuvenation tour uncancelled with Bill Cosby is what we're going to call it. You know who wasn't cancelled was the Catholic Church. Yeah bro, Hasbro also not cancelled for any of this. Keep reading. Yeah, now this was controversial. The the unpaid labor forcibly managed by nuns was controversial among regular Hasbro Ireland employees because around the same time the company laid off a number of full time workers. The basic allegation is that Hasbro fired salaried employees to pay women being abused by the church pennies to do the same work. So basically they fired people getting fair wages and quote UN quote, hired incarcerated women and then bribed the nuns to force them to work, is the allegation. I'm sure Hasper would say we paid the nuns through this company a fair rate for the work. And what happened after that, if the nuns mistreated them, that's we we couldn't have known. But also hooked up when someone else makes you a scab. Yeah. You don't even have a child even know you're scabbing. Yeah, you're like, getting like, *******. Yeah, DP D by ******* like, truly like half of the Catholic Church. Yeah, you're double teaming yet. Yeah, that's *******. That's so ****** **. You're all. Everything's already so terrible for you. And again, as a matter of, like, legal **** we can't confirm or deny that Hasbro themselves did anything improper or knew about any improper. Working conditions. The fact that women weren't being paid. They may have dotted their legal eyes and crossed their legal Tees. But I should note while making this caveat, that in 2009 the Guardian reported on the fact that Hasbro has repeatedly been charged with human rights violations due to its inhumane factories in China. So not out of the question either. Not getting anything, but yeah, yeah. So I can't say to a point of certainty that the Hassenfeld Brothers Toy company knowingly and with great mellows aforethought, took advantage of a system of indentured servitude to force abused women to labour and board game making sweatshops well into the 21st century. But I can say maybe they did. So yeah, over here, playing hungry hungry single mother, if you want to support that. We we'll take your money, Hasbro. We'll take your money, but only in the form of a BearCat armored vehicle. Come on, Hasbro. Send me send me an armored vehicle and all is forgiven. Well, I feel like there's a lot more ways they could actually make it up to us. It doesn't just have to be an armored vehicle. Oh, that's the only thing that will work for me. But I'll do it for anybody. Like, if the British Government wants. Wants to wants to have me stop ******** on their their terrible, genocidal empire, send me a Saracen armoured vehicle. We can make a deal like a yes. And we're like, that's the minimum. But then we want. Oh yeah, I mean, I'll try to negotiate up if I can. Maybe get 2 Saracens, maybe get a leopard, you know? I think you need to take care of the animal, the armored vehicle train. Once you get one armored vehicle, I think you're all set. And then maybe getting **** about tzarist Russia if they send me an armored train like the Czar had. So that is the train that I would get off trains. Absolutely. I will take that amendment. Hell yeah, armored trains. Look, you can buy behind the ******** but it's going to cost you armored vehicles. When I worked at YouTube really quickly, I just want to say. Really quickly, I just want to say that when I worked for YouTube and I had to like, sort and rate YouTube videos, I mean when I worked for Google and I had to do that for YouTube videos, one of the things that was so popular for Russian YouTube was videos of trains. And it's just the camera steady and it's just the train going by for 12 minutes. And I have to say, it was one of the most soothing times of my day when I have to watch a 12 minute train video. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's it. Yeah. Trains are nice because absolutely no one was ever worked to death in huge numbers to allow them to exist. That's the best thing about trains. No one ever died for trains. Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to take a big sip of coffee and open my book of Chinese American history. It's API month is over. What's happening? You can go ahead and just forget about it right now. So you know who won't force thousands of laborers to work to death building train tracks and inhumane conditions? These goods and services. Goods and services. Unless it's literally any train company, in which case they did. Anyway, sorry about it. Other than Amtrak, I don't think Amtrak did. Probably not right Amtrak's fine ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle. The hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker. From iheart. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. His unspeakable crimes and the incompetence or unwillingness of the police to stop him brought the entire country of Belgium to the brink of revolution. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio this is la Monstra. The story of abomination and conspiracy that led to the demise of the entire institution of Belgian federal police and rattled the foundations of its government. The story about the man who simply become known as La Monster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back and we're talking about. Industrial abuse of women and children. So we've talked a bit about, you know, the Magdalene laundries, the industrial schools and the industrial schools had held a mix of children who were incarcerated for, you know, some, in some cases, behavioral issues, kids who were taken from single mothers, kids who couldn't be adopted. You know, the lucky kids got sent off to parents in foreign countries, mostly the United States, in a business that was very lucrative for the child, for the Catholic Church and is distinct from child trafficking. For reasons that are unclear to me. These were again the lucky. Because the children who were trafficked by the Catholic Church in many cases probably got treated like human beings by their families, probably in a lot of cases at least, more they they did better than the kids who remained in the Catholic churches custody because the children who stayed in these industrial schools were not as fortunate. I found the story of one young woman named Mary who was taken from her mother as a very small child. She was so tiny she had to stand on top of a pile of stacked pallets to reach the sink and do her job, which was washing dishes. Or sorry was which was washing sanitary napkins. That was the job they gave her. Yeah, now, because Mary was a Sinner. Please let her get her. *******. Before you make her wash. **** she probably thought it was just a bunch of women dying from their ******* vaginas. Everyone. There were a bunch of women dying, so that makes it better. It's true. Not for the reason she thought, but so the nuns did not respect Mary enough to refer to her by her name because she was a criminal. So, like all the other girls in the industrial school, she was given a number. Hers was 1346. Again, these are nuns, these are nuns. Doing this. She was beaten regularly for misbehaving. The worst beating she could recall when she was interviewed by the BBC was the time when she and another girl asked an older child who had just been put in the institution. What it was like to go to school and then overheard. They were told to go back to work. Later that night, Mary and the other girl who had dared to ask about school were called in by the nun and beaten with a stick and a leather strap quote. She lashed at me and told me you're not to talk to people. Now, some days Mary would be sent to work on a farm for the day. She was not fed on those days, and she was so hungry that she would often sneak chicken feet. As she grew older, the nuns forbade her from looking at her developing body. They forced her to wear a wrap around her chest to flatten her breasts, and she was made to wear a red petticoat while she bathed. As we've noted several times already, the mortality rate in these schools was extremely high. The most credible estimates suggest at least 9000. Children died in Catholic Church facilities as a result of neglect over the course of the 20th century. This is a mortality rate of roughly 15% of all children brought into the system. While a number of these deaths occurred at industrial schools in the Magdalene laundries, the deadliest of the church run institutions during this. Were probably the mother and baby homes. These are where single mothers were put while pregnant and while their infants were too young to be separated from them until the babies were old enough to be adopted off or sent to another institution. The very worst of these of these facilities in the county. Work reported that 75% of the children there died before their first birthday. This is in 1940. Three 75% of the kids in this facility die before they're one, which is. If you were just shooting at children, you would have a lower death rate than that. Like. Those are some ions that's group in numbers. Jesus, yeah, those those are those stats are not. You have to try to kill baby, stay at 75%. I'm gonna quote from Reuters here. Anonymous testimony from residents compared the institutions to prisons where they were verbally abused by nuns as sinners and spawn of Satan. Women suffered through traumatic labours without any pain relief, one recalled women screaming a woman who had lost her mind in a room with small white coffins. So that's good. Oh my God. Lost her mind in her room of small white coffins just surrounded by baby corpses. You know, cool new nature was hell, not a cell phone insight, living life, you know well death. But you know now very confusingly. And it's a good article, but it has a confusing phrase that it notes that by it. It opens by noting that alongside thousands of deaths and forced child separations quote, children were vaccinated without consent. This doesn't seem like it belongs with the rest of that because. Who would consider vaccinating a child, with or without consent, on the same plane as murdering children? Well, don't worry. People now, a lot of people now, but actually this is just kind of bad phrasing, weirdly bad phrasing at the start of the article. The vaccine story is actually super ****** ** and absolutely worthy of conclusion, because it wasn't that they were vaccinating children. What actually happened, and again, Reuters does go into this later, is that institutionalized children were used as Guinea pigs for experimental vaccines without their consent. There were, at least. It's ******* rad. There were at least 13 English. Oh yeah, now it doesn't have. It doesn't go as bad as mangle. Stuff. That is one of the things I have to say about this because I think they were testing actual vaccines as opposed to Mangala just doing murder nonsense. There were at least 13 separate child trials for diphtheria, polio, measles, rubella and other shots. Now none of the and again some of the children. Most of the children in these in these trials were children from general society whose parents consented to them being part of the vaccine trial. But also a bunch of the people in this were children in the mother and baby homes. Some who were just 15 years old, some of the mothers were just 15 years old, were not asked to give consent. This was generally justified by the fact that these mothers had mental health issues or psychiatric disorders. So normal moms have to consent to give have their parents part of this experiment. The children mothers and the mother and baby homes don't aren't, don't need to be asked for consent because they have mental problems, according to the nuns who are beating them now. Again, whether according to the non score beating them because it's an incredible sentence. We don't know if any of these women were diagnosed by an actual Doctor Who had any kind of credibility to have any kind of psychiatric issues. Not that that would have made it OK. I'm just making the point that these diagnosis seem to have been just handed out by nuns and priests, a large number of whom were child molesters, so documentation on these trials is notoriously sketchy, but just based on what I've sniffed around it as a definite whiff of **** being covered up. That said, there is no hard evidence of any serious harms due to these tests. There is one case of a child from one of these homes who died of cardiac and respiratory failure two weeks after receiving a vaccine. The Commission that investigated this said that the death did not appear to have been linked to the vaccines. And again, these facilities are killing babies left and right, so there's a good chance that it was the baby died just because of other mistreatment. And yeah, it's some. It's cool. It's really cool. So again, as I noted, about 43,000 children in total took part in these trials. Most of them were from the general population and their parents were reached out to for consent, and that consent was documented. This was not the case of children from the mother and baby homes. I'm going to quote from the Irish Examiner here. The Commission noted this is an investigation later noted that Doctor Hanley who did the the the vaccine tests emphasized the importance of obtaining written consent prior to treatment and provided a breakdown of the number of consent forms returned in each school. No child. Immunized and lesser written parental consent form was produced. However, Doctor Hanley made no mention of consent, written or otherwise, in respect to institutional children. So, again, like, why would you give a ****? Obviously consent matters. Unless you're one of these kids that the Catholic Church owns, then who cares? It's good. It's great. **** it's pretty dumb now. One of the articles I found on this noted that in the 40s and 50s it was common across Europe and the United States to use institutionalized children as Guinea pigs for vaccine trials in the US and Canada. This often meant indigenous children who had been separated by their families forcibly to be de Indianized. This is not the story we're telling today, but it's worth mentioning that that happened. We've talked about the residential schools before. This is a thing that happens outside of Ireland's two children who are forcibly incarcerated in. The institutions with similar death tolls to these homes in Ireland, and a lot of it, a lot of times in the US and Canada, it's indigenous kids. And yeah, it's it's interesting that because of how ****** ** this story is, the part where we're talking about using child slaves as medical Guinea pigs is the least dark part of the story. This is the least body count of anything we're talking about, including probably Hasbro. But now it's time to go back to the dead babies, specifically the mass graves of dead babies. Now the most. Thank God I really was. Wondering if you've been invited me for a reason and you you texted me the other day saying, Robert, my hands are shaking. I haven't talked about mass graves of dead children in months. What am I? How what do we got? I got to get a fix. That's what I said. And I showed you my dead baby track track Marks and I was like, look. I got to get back in the game. I got the need, the need for dead. I gotta baby chase the dead. Dead baby dragon. You gotta, you gotta chase the dragon. The Dragon is the baby's corpse, of course. Yeah. Now, the most infamous mass child grave covered up by the Catholic Church in Ireland is probably the one at Saint Mary's in the village of Twam, which is colloquially known as the home. This was a child and mother home run by the Bon Secour nuns from 1925 to 1961. In 1961, the home. Close down and its child inmates were sent to nearby industrial schools. The building was bulldozed and low income housing was put up on its site. In 1975, two children were playing on the site, the former site of the home. They found several concrete slabs loosely covering a hollow being young boys, they moved the slabs and discovered a hole underneath it. They crawled inside and realized, to their horror, that it was, quote, full of skeletons of children. Oh my God, Oh my God. Good **** right there. You know, like the kind of thing where your mom's like, OK, can you not do this **** you've been doing? Can you not go out? Can you not, like, go into caves that you see a shame as you go ******* around in caves and you're going to find dead babies? And then you go in The Cave and you find literal skeletons of other children that seems like your mom planted them to just, like, drive her point home about what you should not have been doing. That she is so creepy. Yeah. It might be one of those things where, like, as a child, you decide to stop exploring after that, like, you know, yeah, no ******* ****. You just sit in your room and become a ******* indoor kid, like, immediately. Yeah. They're like, I like computers now. I don't know how to learn how to code. I can't go outside anymore. It's full of skeletons. Dead children out there and I cannot. These boys find a hole full of baby skeletons and they go home to tell their families. Now the church immediately gets involved here and they do what they do best, which is hush things up. A priest does a mass at the burial site and the grave was covered again, more permanently. This time there was no investigation into what had happened or who was buried there, but the people of Twam didn't forget from Thejournal dot, IE quote. A local couple began to take care of the small patch of land. Erecting a grotto in the corner and maintaining it for 35 years, trimming the grass and planting flowers. Stories continue to spread about the bodies and the institution that put them there. Similar stories spread all around Ireland, dipping into the cultural unconsciousness like taproots into soil. Now, in 1976, the year after these kids find this mass grave, a pair of journalists from the Irish Times start making inquiries about the still ongoing programs like the industrial schools and the Magdalene Laundries. One of the journalists who started this investigation was inspired to do so because her husband. The psychiatrist had a young female patient who became hysterical the moment a nun entered the ward. The psychiatrist was savvy enough to be like, she starts screaming and freaking out the instant and nun walks in. There might be something here. Perhaps I should tell my journalist wife to look into this. I love that. That's like, sadly like our lowest, like expectation of anyone. The bar is so low. We're like, I don't know. I mean, kudos to he didn't should I do this? To go, he didn't have to be like this. Probably should be looked into a little bit. She's shrieking in agony at the sight of a nun. This might, might deserve an investigation. So. So he starts talking to him. He starts talking first before he goes to his wife. He starts talking to this young woman who's become hysterical at the sight of a nun, and he starts asking her like, why. And she, in his words, persistently described witnessing the savage, bloody beating of a little girl at the orphanage she was sent to this girl. Eventually disappeared and she believed the girl had been killed and buried in a mass grave after being beaten to death by the nuns from the Irish Times quote. By chance, my friend Mavis, also a journalist, this is the other journalist in this team, had a young woman from the same place living with her, waiting for the birth of a baby at 16. Like all the girls, she'd been sent away to work as a domestic, utterly ignorant of the world and vulnerable to male predation. She told Mavis about horrifying cruelty and deprivation at this institution, by then closed, it was often described as one of the good schools. Gradually, we discovered the context that Ireland had been infested with these places, all run by religious orders. We learned that some still existed and that they operated with state funding through the Department of Education. Under the 1908 Acts regulations, they were designed to protect, feed, clothe and educate children in state care. So these two journalists set out to investigate the scope of what was going on in these facilities. They made requests to the Department of Education to find examples of children's diet plans and punishments that had been recorded because the 1908 child protected. Had mandated you have to. If you're running one of these facilities, you have to document what you're feeding these kids and you have to document how you're punishing them so we know if you're violating human rights or not. So they go to the Department of Education and they go with these facilities that heard stories from and say, what were these kids being fed? How were they being punished? The documentation is legally required to exist and the Department of Education is like, oh, I'm sorry, there's no available documentation. Which, hmm? As a journalist? Hmm. So these journalists, who are great journalists, ask next for records of children sent out to work from the age of 10 on. They were told that these reports did not exist. They were asked by what process it was decided that girls would be sent to labor in the Magdalene Laundries. They were told by a representative of the Department of Education. Or we'd better not delve into that terrain. So I also feel like, yeah, I mean, I guess the Nazis kept kind of good records, but like, well, they did try to burn them all. But yeah, for a while, yeah. But I'm just saying, like, overall, we shouldn't really expect the perpetrator to have great, like, record of their crimes. I mean, yeah, sometimes. But generally when they know ***** about to, like, hit the fan, they're like bitter, make sure this doesn't exist. So it's. Kind of fun when people just, like, turn to a bad people and they're like, hey, could you give us evidence of you being bad? And they're like, no, sorry, somehow that evidence is gone. It's like, well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so the government stonewalling forced these women to dig and they uncovered a bunch of horrifying **** including the fact that in 1943 thirty five children had died in a fire at an industrial school in Cavan. Now they found transcripts from an inquiry into the fire that showed the government closing ranks to protect the nuns. Over and over again they found a quote, absence of accountability and casual law breaking at these facilities. They got documentary evidence of the late Minister of Education Brian Lenihan concurring with a Reverend Mother's demand that a girl be illegally imprisoned in an institution. So again, the government is entirely complicit in this. These reporters started working on a book about their findings, and they were heavily discouraged by basically everyone they knew. Here's a quote from them describing the reaction they got. For most people, it'll upset the good sisters. What's the point? Everything's different now. So again, it wasn't. Again, it was the 80s when the Hasbro company was using these women's labor. So their book was published in 1985, and that Simpsons quote about the Germans. They're like sure, they've made some mistakes in the past. That's why pencils have a resource racers. Exactly that, but. You know what else? Has erasers. You know we can't promise that. But yeah, probably. These goods and services don't need erasers? These goods and services. I will say at least a 70% chance we're not complicit in covering up crimes against humanity by them. That's the behind the ******** guarantee guarantee. All right, products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and. That meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy. At mintmobile.com/behind, my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. Always felt like an ambassador. For speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle. The hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker. From iheart. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. His unspeakable crimes and the incompetence or unwillingness of the police to stop him brought the entire country of Belgium to the brink of revolution. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio this is la Monstra. A story of abomination and conspiracy that led to the demise of the entire institution of Belgian federal police and rattled the foundations of its government. Story about the man who simply become known as La Monster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back having a great time. So these reporters published their book in 1985. It is poorly reviewed, slammed by everyone as an unfair and unhinged attack on the noble nuns and priests doing difficult work. We of course now know that every word of it was true, and it's probably worth drawing a line between how this book gets slammed by people and what happens to Sinead O'Connor when she tears up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. She's just universally attacked. They ******* everybody for being just an idiot. And, like, oh, you're she's just a crazy woman who's being disrespectful to this wonderful institution, these good holy men. And now we know that every single Pope who's ever been the Pope has been complicit, openly complicit in covering up the mass rape and murder of children, every single one of them, not one excluded, including the popes. You like? **** them all? **** the Pope is the is the motto of the behind the *******. Show that guy in Saint Petersburg. Shot John Paul the second. Not on the wrong side of things. That's my stance on shooting John Paul the 2nd. Also, there is some sort of wildly crazy mental gymnastics that you have to do to like be like an incredibly rich and closed city and we're like incredibly rich like fabrics and all this ******* **** when your whole thing is to be like humble and whatever. But yeah, ended to every second of your day. I just like the mental gymnastics you must do is a quote UN quote representative of God. To make that make sense is I'm like. All right. I'm ******* biles. I'm a humble servant of the Lord who happens to live in his own independent nations with billions of dollars in gold and riches buried secretly beneath it, guarded by Swiss mercenaries. What is the problem with that? How does that, how does that not say humble servant of God to you? For real? You listen to Swiss mercenaries. It's the Swiss mercenaries, isn't it? You truly live in some **** that sounds like a fairy tale, and yeah, no point. You're like. Ha. Is this something I'm perpetuating? That is precisely against what I pretend God is? Maybe I should take a knee and ******* renounce all this ********. Oh, wait, no. OK, cool. I'll just riding around in my weird bulletproof popemobile. A fun thing to do with the the high up leadership of the Catholic Church. I'm not saying this about necessarily every single priest, because there are definitely parishes and stuff where there weren't molestation and as we've talked about in episodes in the school of the Americas. There were heroic Catholic priests and nuns who fought against these right wing death squads and acts of genocide in places like Guatemala. And I don't mean that. Like I'm not saying every single Catholic Church official is complicit in this, but everyone at the highest level leadership of the church absolutely is. Everyone who is running the Vatican, every Pope knows about this **** and is complicit in covering up. And every year we get more evidence of that. Every high level Catholic official is a part of not just this, but the mass. God molestation. Every single one of them. And if you start to come up with defenses for them, replace the word Catholic Church with Nazi Germany and see if those defenses sound like things that defenders of the Vermont say when they're trying to claim that there were large chunks of the Nazis who weren't complicit in the genocide, it's the same. And also they ran the Catholic Church. They were part of it, and also Catholics were part of. I mean that's a complete the actual Holocaust and they weren't and genocide. That is part of World War 2IN fairness though, it doesn't matter how you slice it, you have to there. You have to separate the church in Rome from the Catholic Church, large parts of the Catholic Church in Germany who were a big part of the resistance to Hitler. And in fact the three groups that Reinhard Heidrich, the architect of the Holocaust, targeted in Germany were activist clerics, which were Catholic priests that were anti Nazi, the Jews obviously, and Freemasons. So I, I I don't wanna. Like, again, outside of Germany, yeah. But yes, in the with the Catholic, the Pope. At that point there's a bunch of ****** ** **** you can say. Yes. I just, I never want to be the Catholic. The part of the problem when you're trying to condemn the Catholic Church is inevitably people will be like, what about this heroic priest who gave his life protecting? It's like, yes. I'm not saying he helped cover up mass child rape. I'm talking about the popes. I'm talking about the bishops. I'm talking about the people in charge of talking about the organization itself and the way he conducted itself. And that is. Equivalent to a lot of other organizations. We're not we don't say every Israeli person, every Jewish person or whatever when we talk about US war crimes. I'm not saying that your uncle, who was drafted at age 18, is responsible for the deployment of Agent Orange on the jungles of Vietnam. In a lot of ways, he's a victim too. But like, yeah, it's it's the organization. Everyone running the organization of the Catholic Church is complicit in this. And that's cool and good, Sophia. It's not. I think it's incredibly devastating. And I'm glad I started drinking. Yeah, it's a good time to be drinking 2021 just the whole year. But with a big part of the reason why the horrors of this system are now widely known has to do with a single woman from the village of Tuam. And not to. Why not to wash out those brave journalists who did the important work of documenting this? But that got kind of covered up in the 80s. Twas again where that child mass grave was uncovered, and this woman's name is Catherine Corless. She grew up hearing the whispered stories about that mass grave, which had been so efficiently hushed up and covered up by the church. She started to investigate in the early aughts, and I'm going to quote from Thejournal dot, IE here cordless works on her family farm. She didn't have an academic institution behind her, instead she worked on it in her spare time. On a rainy day I'd really get down to it and go to work in the library, she said. She initially tried to contact the Bon Secour sisters at their Cork headquarters. Was told that they no longer had files or information about the home. She tried the Western Health Board, who told her there was no information available. When she tried to access information from Galway County Council, she says she was told that she wasn't allowed because she didn't have a university degree. That's exactly what I was told. I couldn't look at the records, but the Council would let her look at the information about the housing estate which had been built over the ruins of the old home. And from this, from this information about the housing estate, she was able to piece together data about the original site. She eventually hit upon the idea of going to the registry office in Galway to get death certificates for every child who had perished at the home. Her contact at the office called her a week later and said do you really want all these death certificates? Because you're going to be charged for each of them and there's a ******** of them. Corless was charged €4.00 for each death certificate she requested between 2011. When she started requesting them in 2013, she came up with 796 deaths. They ranged from newborns to 9 year old children. The death certificates gave causes ranging from malnutrition, neglect, measles, tuberculosis and pneumonia. The number of deaths and the time the home was operational mean that one child died there every 15 days. By overlaying a map of the site as it looks today with plans for the old building, she realized the mass grave discovered in 1975, had been built in the old location of the homes sewage tank. So when they demolished the building they stuck all the corpses in the sewage tank. That's good. Very respectful life matters. Catholic Church, famed advocates of the sanctity of human life. It wasn't sewage. **** pit, you babies that we didn't feed. It was the mass graves at Tuam that finally sparked widespread public outrage over what the church had been doing in Ireland for decades. This is not to say that the crimes of the residential school system were unknown prior to that point. There were obviously a lot of stories come in. That book had been written in 1985. There were stories of sexual abuse. There were stories of brutal punishment that had come out. Sinead O'Connor had done her thing. And in 2001, which is like a decade before she starts finding these death certificates, the Catholic Church had agreed to put €100 million into a special state fund for victims of abuse. Now, this was not because they recognized they've done bad and wanted to make it right. This was because in 2001 they were finally starting to get evidence out about all of the well documented rapes that Catholic priests had carried out. And so as part of this agreement about dealing hushing up the rapes, the church puts 100,000,000 into a fund. And they say, we're also saying this fund. Is going to go to people who were abused in our residential schools because they're going to start suing in a few years and in order to receive these funds, they have to be barred from suing the church directly. This is an agreement they make with the Irish Government. Is the Irish Government like, you guys were ****** a lot of kids? You need to do something about this. And like, OK, here's 100 million. Also, people are going to try to sue us for the other horrible **** we did. Make sure that if they take money from this fund, they agree to not sue us. That's ******* cool, right? Good **** Catholic Church. Now, the the part of the legal requirements around the funds ensured that only victims of sexual abuse, and not physical abuse, could receive funds. So we talked earlier about one of the women whose story inspired those journals to start their investigation, watched a little girl get beaten to death by nuns. If that girl had survived, she wouldn't have been she wouldn't have gotten any money. She would have been because she didn't get raped. Right again. Good **** from the Catholic Church. Real nice to be able to quantify abuse like that. Now, the fact that they tried to lock all this down and put the funding out in 2001 was very savvy of the church. Because of course they were well aware that as the stories of mass child sex abuse by priests had broken containment, so too would the whole story of the industrial schools, the Magdalene Laundries and the mother and baby homes. By making a deal in 2001, they protected themselves from the fallout win in 2013, a comprehensive government report on the horrors of the industrial. School system was finally released. 2013 is the year when the Irish President or whatever in the Kinney apologized for the state's role in the harbors. Church representatives also came out and expressed their horror at how bad the things they've done were. A new government scheme was announced to give out lump sum payments from €11,500 to €100,000, based on a woman's length of stay in an institution. This benefits package fell well short of what the 2013 report had recommended, and it also contained a ton of caveats, enough that many victims of the system. Did not qualify for funds. To date, only about €29.8 million has been paid out to just 770 applicants, most of whom got the full €100,000. Because that's how many people were profoundly abused by this system. And the Catholic Church is still let's look up. Let's look up the expected net worth of the Catholic Church. Let's all have this journey together. How much? How much is the temperature someone imaginary ******* numbers? Yeah, because we don't know, because they've hidden it all underground. Bankers best guess of the Vatican's wealth this is 1965. Put it at 10 billion to 15 billion. So that's 1965 is the estimate is 10 to 15 billion. Jesus Christ. So much more than that. Yeah. Here's the 2015 article. How Rich is the Catholic Church? It's impossible to tell. How much real estate does the Catholic Church hold? What are its equity holdings? We just don't ******* know. Welcome to the ******* imaginary numbers game. Oh, ****. This is fun. In the 1960s, Italian media uncovered evidence that the Vatican had tested had invested in entities that conflict directly with the churches holding Holy Mission, including Instituto Pharmalogical Serono, a fan, a pharmaceutical company that made birth control pills and you die in a military weapons manufacturer. There have also been unconfirmed rumors of church money and firearms manufacturer Beretta, and companies with activities and gambling and ***********. It has been linked with dealings with Nazi gold during World War Two as well. There you go. ******* red, baby. You love to hear it. Good **** yeah, but it's cool. They've attican passed its first law against money laundering and terrorist group funding in 2011. So they're 2011. So they've been on this for a long time. Obviously they care. This is important to them. Etcetera, etcetera. The part. Hypocrisy pays, baby. Yeah, it does. It does. I don't know. This has been a profoundly anti Catholic article or episode of my podcast. Yeah, I ever start being against like. **** that is like, profoundly. Immoral will you just, like, come to my house with your many knives and machetes and just ******* murder me? Yeah, let's even leave a note that says that's what I wanted. Hmm, it's like, holy ****. Yep, you know what isn't? Holy ****. Are these goods and services? No. Murder. Suicide pact related. It's your pup. It's your plugs. Your plugs. Your plugs. Sophia, you're beautiful. Perfect plugs if you wanna be murder. Suicided by my comedy. There we go. There we go. The smooth transition. Robert Evans Show is known for y'all. Should get my stand up album as a dead baby's head because it never got enough nutrition in order to grow. There and then it was buried in a mass grave, along with 795 other babies. You know what's the opposite of a soft spot? My comedy is hard as ****. It is hard as ****. You should download my album, buy it. It's called Father's Day. It was number one on iTunes. You can get it wherever you buy albums, but also Sophia alexandra.com. And you should check out my other two podcasts, 420 date Beyoncé with Miles Gray of the daily zeitgeist, where we talk about 90 day fiance. And private parts unknown, where me and Courtney talk about love and sexuality around the world and we just want to believe. So, Yep, yeah, Belize. A place where nothing bad was ever done by colonial powers. Yes, that is true. And it is in no way completely devastated by the lack of tourism because of COVID, because in no way is 40% of their GDP from. The forementioned tourism. Yep. Hey, buddy. Hi. Hey everybody, initially I was going to plug the go fund me for the sequel to my book after The Revolution, which you can find at atrbook.com. But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave, and it's causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people. A lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem. I mean people, people, activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks to do things to help people get their temperature down. I want to try and raise funds for the free fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem. So if you go to Venmo at free fridge Salem, that's Venmo at free fridge Salem and send them a couple of bucks, they could really use it. Local government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed a number of water. And cooling stations they've set out, it's, you know, we're not going to be in triple digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday but it's still going to be very hot people still need this. So please Venmo at Free fridge Salem, if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do so one more time. The Venmo is at free fridge Salem. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your Co host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast, in this special episode. You're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. The four whole months the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.