Digging up the past

Maybe if the Western Health and Social Care Trust were involved in the peace process in the north of Ireland, then peace, love and harmony would have broken out decades ago.
You see the Trust has managed to unite the DUP, Sinn Féin, the SDLP and the UUP and give them common purpose. And what, pray tell, has the Trust done to bring about this mini miracle?
It plans to exhume the bodies of up to 400 psychiatric patients in Omagh to make way for a new Tyrone County Hospital.

The Derry-based Trust came up with the bright idea even though, according to local politicians, there is plenty of other land on which to build the proposed hospital.
You see the new hospital will be built on a site that includes the Moore’s Hill cemetery, which contains the remains of patients of the former Omagh District Asylum and Omagh Mental Hospital, who were buried there between 1853 and the mid 1940′s.
What’s more the Trust plans to put the unidentified remains of former patients into sacks and move them to a communal grave elsewhere.
Is it just me, or does anybody else think that this would not be happening if the people buried there were not former psychiatric patients? Thankfully, though, despite the fact that these psychiatric patients were buried between 60 and 150 years ago; local politicians have been going ballistic about the not at all ghoulish plans.
These patients would have been socially stigmatised in their day. Also, as the treatment of psychiatric patients wasn’t as advanced as it is today, their lives in these institutions would probably have been awful. Even if the doctors and nurses treating them were understanding, the suffering these patients would have undergone would have been dreadful.
Is it too much to ask for their remains to be allowed to rest in peace where they are, with a little dignity? If an atheist like myself is disgusted at the proposals, what must anybody who is at all religious think of these proposed mass exhumations?
One more thing. As journalists, we should say fair play to The Irish News, a nationalist, Belfast-based daily newspaper, which broke the story this week. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have received much, or indeed any exposure, south of the border. Make of that what you will!