The Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home (also known as St Mary's Mother and Baby Home) operated between 1925 and 1961 in the town of Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. It was a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children and run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns, that also operated the Grove Hospital in Tuam. Unmarried pregnant women were sent to there to give birth and interned for a year doing unpaid work. In 2012, the Health Service Executive (HSE) raised concerns that up to 1,000 children from the Home might have been sent to the United States for the purpose of illegal adoptions, without their mothers' consent. Subsequent research discovered files relating to a lower number of 36 illegal foreign adoptions from the home and concluded that allegations of foreign adoptions for money were "impossible to prove and impossible to disprove". Local historian Catherine Corless published an article documenting the history of the home in 2012

Sophie Toscan du Plantier, a 39-year-old French woman, was killed outside her holiday home at Toormore, Goleen, County Cork, Ireland, on the night of 23rd December 1996. Her badly beaten body, still dressed in white nightwear and outdoor boots, was discovered by a neighbour the following morning close to an entrance gate at the bottom of her holiday home driveway. British journalist Ian Bailey, who lived several kilometres from Toscan du Plantier's home in Ireland, was a suspect arrested twice by the Garda Síochána, yet no charges were laid as the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) found there was insufficient evidence to proceed to trial. Bailey lost a libel case against six newspapers in 2003. He also lost a wrongful arrest case against the Gardaí, Minister for Justice, and Attorney General in 2015. In 2019, Bailey was convicted of murder by the Cour d'Assises in Paris, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was tried in absentia in France after winning a legal battle aga