NI baby graves inquiry call by woman who found remains of 429 children in Belfast bogland

That is an astonishing 25 children per year, or one death every fortnight. All of them were buried at the Bog Meadows nature reserve in west Belfast next to the M1 motorway.

Toni has carried out extensive work at the site, finding on one occasion a mass grave with the bones of 429 children inside.

Other worrying research she has been involved in centres on the Marian Vale home in Newry where expectant mothers from the south were brought to give birth to babies which were immediately put up for adoption.

Last night Toni added her voice to those calling for an inquiry into mother and baby homes in Northern Ireland.

Human rights organisation Amnesty International is championing the demand, which comes after the Irish government apologised for the "appalling levels of infant mortality" in its mother and baby homes.

Around 9,000 children died in 18 institutions that were investigated. Similar deaths were recorded in Northern Ireland, an issue that Toni Maguire believes has been ignored until now.

She said: "I've been calling for years for a commission to be set up in the north to investigate this. It needs to happen."

Seven years ago this newspaper was the first to reveal the scandal, detailing the large infant mortality rate at the Nazareth Lodge and Nazareth House care homes in south Belfast. For most of their history the House was for girls and the Lodge for boys.

Babies were taken at birth from unmarried mothers staying at the Marian Vale Mother and Baby Home on the Ormeau Road. The unit was run by nuns from the Good Shepherd convent, who were linked to an orphanage opposite run by the Sisters of Nazareth.

A baby born to a mother at Marian Vale was immediately moved to the nearby Nazareth House and Nazareth Lodge homes, which were 200 yards apart, if adoptive parents could not be found. The homes suffered huge infant mortality rates as the childless Sisters of Nazareth nuns struggled to cope.

Milltown Cemetery burial records, viewed by Sunday Life at the Public Records Office, show the worrying mortality rates among infants at Nazareth Lodge and Nazareth House.

Between 1940 and 1951 a total of 244 babies, with an average age of just three months, passed away at the homes. The youngest to die during this perijuod was two-week-old Aloysius O'Hagan, who was buried in 1941. The eldest was two-year-old Anne Callaghan who lost her life in 1947.

But these deaths are just the tip of the iceberg, hundreds of other babies died at the Nazareth homes in the decades that preceded and followed these dates.

A trawl of other documents at the Public Records Office show the deaths of a further 52 babies at the homes between 1934 and 1939 - an average of 10 per year. Most of the children were buried in mass graves at the Bog Meadows nature reserve next to Milltown Cemetery.

Archaeologist Toni Maguire, who has excavated the site, said: "The burial records show the nuns were totally incapable of looking after these babies. Malnutrition was rife, the high mortality rates show that.

"I've been fighting for years for a commission to be set up in the north to investigate this because we had exactly the same system as the south."

Another issue Toni's work uncovered was the transfer by the Catholic Church of expectant mothers from the south to the Marian Vale care home in Newry. They would give birth there, and their babies taken from them, before being moved back across the border.

Toni explained: "There were a number of reasons for the move -to take the mother away from her friends and place her in an unfamiliar environment where she was more vulnerable.

"This would mean she was less resistant to having the baby taken off her by the regime for adoption. It totally undermined her, it was a ploy to weaken her."

Babies born in Northern Ireland also had a greater chance of being adopted as they could have British passports.

Toni explained: "These were the tactics the church used. It was like a game of chess, the more they moved the pieces, the more confusing it became and the easier it was for it to have its way.

"It also gave the church a defence of plausible deniability. If an adopted baby, as an adult, comes looking for records of its birth they usually approach the church with details of the home where there mother had been sent.

"But because she had given birth at Marian Vale in Newry the church could say, 'We've no record of you being born at this home', which is technically true but morally so wrong."

Trawling documentation detailing how young unmarried mothers were separated from their newborns is "heartbreaking", according to Toni.

She revealed how the priests and nuns based in Newry broke their own religious doctrine by not recording the baptisms of babies so the adoptive parents could have their own ceremonies and put their names on the certificates.

"This goes against Catholic doctrine because within the Catholic faith you cannot be baptised twice," added Toni.

"Yet the priests and nuns were knowingly arranging this - they were breaking their own rules. I have seen one document which states the baptism of a newborn was not to be recorded because the baby was being sent to America for adoption and its adoptive parents wanted to have their own ceremony."

It was originally estimated that 7,500 women in Northern Ireland went through mother and baby homes but Amnesty International director Patrick Corrigan says he has "no doubt the figure will be significantly greater".

Judith Gillespie, chairwoman of the inter-departmental working group on mother and baby homes, said a research report by academics will make recommendations to Stormont ministers before the end of the month.

Ms Gillespie's group was set up in 2017 to look at mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland, after they fell outside of the terms of reference of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry.