The final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has found that "appalling levels of infant mortality" occurred in the 18 institutions under examination.

The institutions housed women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage.

The Government is to consider the report in the "weeks and months ahead", they said in a statement.

'We expect, as we have always expected, truth, justice, accountability resulting in prosecutions should they arise and restitution for survivors, ' she said earlier today.

"We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy, and young mothers and their sons and daughters were forced to pay a awful price for that dysfunction", he added.

"As a society we embraced judgementalism, moral certainty, a perverse religious morality and control which was so damaging. All of society was complicit in it".

Leader Martin is due to issue a formal apology to the victims on behalf of the state on Wednesday.

Over the course of the past two decades, state-ordered probes have documented abuse of women and children in mostly Catholic Church-run institutions.

The report sets out in stark detail the plight of mothers and children who passed through homes.

Births and admissions peaked in 1946 at 142, but thereafter maintained a downward trend until the home closed in 1961.

The Commission of Investigation was established after Galway based historian Catherine Corless discovered death certificates for nearly 800 infants at a home run by the Bon Secours Sisters in Tuam.

Investigators in 2017 found the remains of infants at the Tuam site, mostly dating back to the 1930s and 1940s, a time when infections and disease spread easily in the unheated and overcrowded buildings.

The government is expected to compensate some survivors of the homes, and also support work to exhume and identify remains of other children who died in them.

It is understood that up to 9,000 children died in 18 institutions between 1922 and the closure of the last such home in 1998.

"For any adoptee, birth parent or survivor of a Mother and Baby Home, this week is going to be traumatic". They received state funding and also acted as adoption agencies - with numerous children adopted to families in the United States.

The inquiry is part of a process of reckoning in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Ireland with a history of abuses in church-run institutions, including the shunning and shaming of unwed mothers, many of whom were pressured into giving up babies for adoption.

One in seven of all children born in the homes died, far above Ireland's nationwide infant mortality rate.

The mothers commonly were separated from their surviving children, who ended up as boarders in workhouse-style industrial schools or as farm laborers.

There were many references to the Tuam Home at the council's meetings - but none refer to the health or mortality of the children.

The Sunday Independent's coverage included an interview with the Taoiseach about the report.

She said that she had been haunted by childhood memories of skinny children from the home.

The commission has made 53 recommendations, including compensation and memorialisation.

He said that the Government had a considerable problem with the leaking of sensitive information.