A local historian whose research led to last week’s Tuam babies announcement says she believes there are “many mass graves” at former mother and baby homes throughout Ireland.
Catherine Corless
said further remains of infants are likely to be found within the
grounds of the Tuam home, and called on investigators to explore other
sites.
“I think there are many mass
graves around Ireland in the mother and baby homes. Tuam is the little
bit worse, the fact that it was a sewage area,” she said.
The so-called “kitchen table
historian” said that her interest in the topic began from an early age
when “miserable”, raggedly-dressed children from the home attended her
school.
She explained on the Late Late
Show interview on Friday how she remembered wondering what was inside
the home’s 10 foot high walls when passing them as a child, and her
curiosity was peaked when local children stumbled across human remains
piled up in a tank when the site was cleared in the 1970s.
The conventional knowledge at the
time was that the bones belonged to famine victims who lived in a
workhouse originally built nearby in the 1840s.
However, she suspected this might
not have been the case and asked the Bons Secours sisters who ran the
home for burial records as well as Galway County Council.
She eventually obtained the death certificates of almost 800 children who died at the home from a registry office.
Her work ultimately led to an
announcement by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission that “significant
quantities” of remains had been discovered in structures designed to
contain sewage.
Ms Corless said she knew of other
children who were buried in individual coffins on the grounds, and that
she anticipates other similar finds on sites of mother and baby homes
throughout the country.
“It’s absolutely wonderful that
the truth has come out. Every scrap of research I had was indicating
that those children had to be on the home grounds,” she said.
Ms Corless received a spontaneous and prolonged standing ovation from the in-studio audience at the end of the interview.
She concluded by saying the find
in Tuam presents a great chance for the State, Government and religious
orders to do the right thing in regards to the treatment of mothers and
babies during the 20th Century.