A local recounts her visit to the site of the former Mother and Baby home in Tuam, where she partially fell into a hole caused by subsidence.
She spotted little bundles wrapped in cloth.
Unfortunately, you can guess the rest.
This was a babies’ graveyard, unmarked and unloved. Children died in these institutions at a rate that was five times the national average.
Thousands were separated from their birth mothers and fostered or adopted. Their sin, as it was seen by church and state in mid-20th century Ireland, is that they were born out of wedlock.
That sad little graveyard in Tuam turned the Mother and Baby story into an international story.
If anyone from outside Ireland wants to know what happened, point them to this documentary.
And if they think it’s over now, point them to Anna Corrigan, who appears here talking about her ongoing efforts to locate two brothers, William and John, who may or may not have died in Tuam.
Anna believes their death certs might have been falsified and has no closure until she knows for sure what happened.
Stolen uses a few avenues to tell the story.
The most powerful are first-person testaments from women like Anna Corrigan and Teresa Collins, who met her father in his eighties and found acceptance rather than anger, declining to ask him where he’d been all her life.
These human stories show how the vicious misogyny of the Irish State and Catholic Church ruined so many lives.
Another contributor, Noelle Brown argues that the church has been given an easy ride by successive governments, considering the horrors that mothers and children suffered under their guardianship.
Marie Arbuckle tells a Handmaid’s Tale style story about not being allowed to bond with her baby during feeding time at a home in Armagh, the nuns telling Marie the baby wasn’t ‘hers’.
Separated from her son for years, she got call a few years ago from social services saying they’d found him but it would take months before she could get in touch. That night, she got a Facebook request from a stranger. Her 40-year-old son.
Colleen Anderson was adopted from one these homes and sent to a niece of the nun who handled adoptions, in the United States.
Years later she found the nun, who told Colleen that her birth mother had been raped at the age of 15.
This is the story of misogyny at a national level and even now, there is solid evidence that the official inquiry published in 2021 failed to capture its full extent.
The final contributor, does a brilliant story of bringing the whole story into the light.