Brendan O'Neill is the editor of Spiked Online. His 2014 article that we discussed is here, and the interim report of the Mother And Baby Homes Commission Of Investigations is here.
The second part of my coverage of this topic will be published next week.
The global infant mortality statistics that I mentioned are here, and the historical Irish data is here.
Terry Prone runs the profitable media consultancy the Communications Clinic, with many high-profile clients. Prone wrote to French TV journalist Saskia Weber, on behalf of her clients the Bon Secours Sisters who ran the Tuam home, explicitly denying that any children were buried there, and pouring scorn on the work of the local historian, Catherine Corless.
A year earlier, Sr Marie Ryan, leader of the Bon Secours in Ireland wrote to the relative of a child who died at the home saying that there was 'a very good possibility that his remains were buried at the small cemetery located at the back of the home that was operated as a general grave'. Terry Prone has refused to return calls from the podcast seeking an explanation of this, or to claify whether she contacted other journalists to discourage coverage of the story, or encourage stories that were hostile to Catherine Corless.
Rosita Boland wrote an article for the Irish Times under the title Tuam mother and baby home: the trouble with the septic tank story that appears to refute the original story, although in fact a close reading reveals that it largely focusses on semantic quibbles. Catherine Corless' daughter Adrienne Corless wrote a long blog post taking issue with Bloand's article. The Irish Times published a long letter by Boland defending her coverage.
Eamon Fingleton wrote a piece for the well-known Forbes Magazine under the title Why That Story About Irish Babies "Dumped In A Septic Tank" Is A Hoax in which he explicitly accused unnamed elements of the press of promoting a hoax story. I had an email exchange with Fingleton, in which he agreed, and later declined to do an interview, so I sent him these written questions:

* Around the time you were writing the Forbes story, did you have any contact with Terry Prone? Or her firm The Communications Clinic? Or any other spokespeople for the Bon Secours nuns?
* In 2014, Terry Prone claimed that the Bon Secours nuns had positive knowledge that there was “no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried” on the grounds of the...