Excavation Begins to Find Nearly 800 Infant Remains Believed to Be Buried at Former Mother and Baby Home Run by Nuns

Years after years of popular agitation, journalistic campaigning and scientific probing, the soil is at last turned over at an Irish location that has long been suspected of hiding a grim history.

On the following Tuesday a forensic excavation is commencing at a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway, where babies and children are believed to be buried in almost 800 remains.

Owned by the Sisters of Bon Secours, the institution housed the unmarried mothers and the children and remained open between the years 1925 to its closure in 1961.

It is reported in the wake of a decade-long campaign by a local historian Catherine Corless whose research unearthed death records of 798 children.

Only two of these children have their burial in a cemetery confirmed. The others, it is assumed, may be found in the grounds of the old institution, some of them thrown away in an abandoned sewage tank, known to the natives as the pit.

According to Ms. Corless, she was relieved as she said to Sky News, “I am really relieved… It has been a long long way. Uncertainty of what is going to happen, whether it is just going to fall a part or it is really going to happen.”

Her finding in 2014 stunned both Ireland and the world as it exposed the abusive way single mothers and their children had to face the higher-conservative catholic driven society.

The children were illegitimate and had no basic rights and dignity given to others. The pregnant women who were mostly victims of rape or incest or violence were locked away and put into strict regimes of nuns.

According to Ms. Corless, babies died almost once every fortnight hence the cause of the large burial site. The location was first found during 1975 when the bones in septic tank were discovered by two 12-year-old boys.

The community of that time held the belief, that the remains belonged to the Irish famine victims of the 1840s. Later, however, Ms. Corless confirmed the truth by the careful checking of death certificates.

The causes of deaths on file include malnutrition, measles, and tuberculosis among others which were prevalent during that period. These children were dumped in the ground without coffins or markers. Residents did not clear the site and people continued to remember it by keeping the ground with a plaque and statue of Virgin Mary.

Annette McKay, a former woman who now resides in Manchester, is among thousands who are rooting that the dig may come up with answers. In 1942, her mother, Margaret, or Maggie O Connor, gave birth to a baby girl named Mary Margaret after she was raped at only 17 in Tuam home.

The child succumbed to death after a period of 6 months. McKay reported the story that her mother would have been doing laundry when people informed her about the death of her daughter. This is how a nun came behind her and told her, the child of your sin is dead. Ms. McKay now also wants to bring her dead mother and sister back together.

It does not matter whether it is a thimbleful or not, they tell me there would not be much remains; being only six months old, it is mostly cartilage than bone. It does not matter to me whether it is thimbleful, so that I can pop Mary Margaret with Maggie. This is appropriate,” she said.

She also made reference to the larger share of injustices perpetrated at home as she said, “We jailed the women who were raped, we jailed the women who were incested, we jailed the women who were the victims of violence, we sent them to the laundries, we took away their children, and we entrusted them to the Church to do as it pleased.”

She added, My mother when heavily pregnant was cleaning up the floors, a nun came past and kicked my mother on the stomach. In 2021 the Irish government made a formal state apology since an investigation revealed that approximately 9,000 children succumbed in 18 identical institutions.

Then Taoiseach Micheal Martin explained that, “We were totally distorted in our (nationwide) approach to sex and intimacy and young mothers and their boys and girls had to pay the most dreadful penalty of that dysfunction.”

The Sisters of Bon Secours formally acknowledged that the children were interred in a way that was disrespectful and unacceptable and they apologized with a statement saying that they were deeply sorry and they are ready and willing to give financial compensation.

With the forensics team, headed by Daniel MacSweeney, going to work, there is a shared feeling that peace would be returned to the dead children.

Ms. Corless is haunted with the question how a religious order that is supposed to take care of the vulnerable people might neglect the children in such a way.

And she still did not know how to do so, she added. I mean, these was a nursing congregation. The church taught that they should treat the weak, the elderly, and the orphan, but in their psyche, somehow or other they left out the illegitimate child. I just can never understand how they can do that to babies like little babies, little toddlers. pretty little defenseless children.”

The Tuam home is part of ten sister-and-baby homes that were found in Ireland and collectively accommodated about 35000 unmarried females. Most of their children are through force made to be adopted or segregated in schools.

There have been calls over the years to have an official police investigation and that there be a memorial made by the state and include the names and ages of the children reputed to be hidden in Tuam and which is believed to number 800.

When excavation commences, people and loved ones of the dead await closure. To them, the sight of Tuam no longer is an embarrassing incident that should be kept under wraps it is an account of a dark past of Ireland that can never be forgotten.