It begins with a forbidden fruit.
It was the 1970s in this small town in the west of Ireland when an orchard owner chased off two boys stealing his apples.
The youngsters avoided being caught by clambering over the stone wall of the derelict Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home.
When they landed, they discovered a dark secret that has grown to haunt Ireland.
One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound as his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney pushed back some briars to reveal a concrete slab they pried open.
“There was just a jumble of bones,” Hopkins said. “We didn’t know if we’d found a treasure or a nightmare.”
Hopkins
didn’t realise they’d found a mass unmarked baby grave in a former septic tank — in a town whose name is derived from the Irish word meaning burial place.
It took four decades and a persistent local historian to unearth a more troubling truth that led this month to the start of an excavation that could exhume the remains of almost 800 infants and young children.
The Tuam grave has compelled a broader reckoning that extends to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican.
Ireland and the Catholic Church,
once central to its identity, are grappling with the legacy of
ostracising unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and
separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system.
A map of Tuam:
Word
of Hopkins’ discovery may never have traveled beyond what is left of
the home’s walls if not for the work of Catherine Corless, a homemaker
with an interest in history.
Corless,
who grew up in town and vividly remembers children from the home being
shunned at school, set out to write an article about the site for the
local historical society.
But she soon found herself chasing ghosts of lost children.
“I thought I was doing a nice story about orphans and all that, and the more I dug, the worse it was getting,” she said.
Mother
and baby homes were not unique to Ireland, but the church’s influence
on social values magnified the stigma on women and girls who became
pregnant outside marriage.
The homes were opened in the 1920s after Ireland won its independence from Britain. Most were run by Catholic nuns.
In
Tuam’s case, the mother and baby home opened in a former workhouse
built in the 1840s for poor Irish where many famine victims died.
It had been taken over by British troops during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Six members of an Irish Republican Army faction that opposed the treaty ending the war were executed there in 1923.
Two
years later, the imposing three-story gray buildings on the outskirts
of town reopened as a home for expectant and young mothers and orphans.
It was run for County Galway by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic
order of nuns.
The buildings were primitive, poorly heated with
running water only in the kitchen and maternity ward. Large dormitories
housed upward of 200 children and 100 mothers at a time.
Corless
found a dearth of information in her local library but was horrified to
learn that women banished by their families were essentially
incarcerated there. They worked for up to a year before being cast out —
most of them forever separated from their children.
So deep was the shame of being pregnant outside marriage that women were often brought there surreptitiously.
Peter
Mulryan, who grew up in the home, learned decades later that his mother
was six months pregnant when she was taken by bicycle from her home
under the cover of darkness. The local priest arranged it after telling
her father she was “causing a scandal in the parish.”
Mothers and their children carried that stigma most of their lives.
But there was no accountability for the men who got them pregnant, whether by romantic encounter, rape or incest.
More shocking, though, was the high number of deaths Corless found.
When she searched the local cemetery for a plot for the home's babies, she found nothing.
Around the time Corless was unearthing the sad history, Anna Corrigan was in Dublin discovering a secret of her own.
Corrigan,
raised as an only child, vaguely remembered a time as a girl when her
uncle was angry at her mother and blurted out that she had given birth
to two sons. To this day, she’s unsure if it’s a memory or dream.
While
researching her late father’s traumatic childhood confined in an
industrial school for abandoned, orphaned or troubled children, she
asked a woman helping her for any records about her deceased mom.
Corrigan was devastated when she got the news: before she was born, her mother had two boys in the Tuam home.
“I cried for brothers I didn’t know, because now I had siblings, but I never knew them,” she said.
Her mother never spoke a word about it.
A 1947 inspection record provided insights to a crowded and deadly environment.
Twelve
of 31 infants in a nursery were emaciated. Other children were
described as “delicate,” “wasted,” or with “wizened limbs.”
Corrigan’s
brother, John Dolan, weighed almost 9 pounds when he was born but was
described as “a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and
no control over his bodily functions, probably mental defective.” He
died two months later in a measles outbreak.
Despite a high death rate, the report said infants were well cared for and diets were excellent.
Corrigan’s
brother, William, was born in May 1950 and listed as dying about eight
months later.
There was no death certificate, though, and his date of
birth was altered on the ledger, which was sometimes done to mask
adoptions, Corrigan said.
Ireland
was very poor at the time and infant mortality rates were high. Some
9,000 babies — or 15% — died in 18 mother and baby homes that were open
as late as 1998, a government commission found.
In the 1930s and 1940s, more than 40% of children died some years in the homes before their first birthday.
Tuam recorded the highest death percentage before closing in 1961. Nearly a third of the children died there.
In
a hunt for graves, the cemetery caretaker led Corless across the street
to the neighborhood and playground where the home once stood.
A well-tended garden with flowers, a grotto and Virgin Mary
statue was walled off in the corner.
It was created by a couple living
next door to memorialise the place Hopkins found the bones.
Some
were thought to be famine remains. But that was before Corless
discovered the garden sat atop the septic tank installed after the
famine.
She wondered if the nuns had used the tank as a
convenient burial place after it went out of service in 1937, hidden
behind the home's 10-foot-high walls.
“It saved them admitting that so, so many babies were dying,” she said. “Nobody knew what they were doing.”
When
she published her article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society in
2012, she braced for outrage. Instead, she heard almost nothing.
That
changed, though, after Corrigan, who had been busy pursuing records and
contacting officials from the prime minister to the police, found
Corless.
Corrigan connected her with journalist Alison O’Reilly
and the international media took notice after her May 25, 2014, article
on the Sunday front page of the Irish Mail with the headline: “A Mass
Grave of 800 Babies.”
The article caused a firestorm, followed by
some blowback. Some news outlets, including The Associated Press,
highlighted sensational reporting and questioned whether a septic tank
could have been used as a grave.
The Bon Secours sisters hired public relations consultant Terry Prone, who tried to steer journalists away.
“If
you come here you’ll find no mass grave,” she said in an email to a
French TV company. “No evidence that children were ever so buried and a
local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, ‘Yeah a few
bones were found — but this was an area where famine victims were
buried. So?’”
Despite the doubters, there was widespread outrage.
Corless was inundated by people looking for relatives on the list of 796 deaths she compiled.
Those reared with the stain of being “illegitimate” found their voice.
Mulryan,
who lived in the home until he was 4½, spoke about being abused as a
foster child working on a farm, shoeless for much of the year, barely
schooled, underfed and starved for kindness.
“We were afraid to
open our mouths, you know, we were told to mind our own business,”
Mulryan said. “It’s a disgrace. This church and the state had so much
power, they could do what they liked and there was nobody to question
them.”
Then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny said the children were treated as an “inferior subspecies” as he announced an investigation into mother and baby homes.
When
a test excavation confirmed in 2017 that skeletons of babies and
toddlers were in the old septic tank, Kenny dubbed it a “chamber of
horrors.”
Pope Francis acknowledged the scandal during his 2018
visit to Ireland when he apologised for church “crimes” that included
child abuse and forcing unmarried mothers to give up their children.
It
took five years before the government probe primarily blamed the
children’s fathers and women’s families in its expansive 2021 report.
The state and churches played a supporting role in the harsh treatment,
but it noted the institutions, despite their failings, provided a refuge
when families would not.
Some survivors saw the report as a damning vindication while others branded it a whitewash.
Prime Minister Micheál Martin apologised, saying mothers and children paid a terrible price for the nation’s “perverse religious morality.”
“The shame was not theirs — it was ours,” Martin said.
The Bon Secours sisters offered a profound apology and acknowledged children were disrespectfully buried.
“We
failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children,”
Sister Eileen O’Connor said. “We failed to offer them the compassion
that they so badly needed.”
The dig
When
a crew including forensic scientists and archaeologists began digging
at the site two weeks ago, Corless was “on a different planet,” amazed
the work was underway after so many years.
It is expected to take two years to collect bones, many of which are commingled, sort them and use DNA to try to identify them with relatives like Corrigan.
Dig
director Daniel MacSweeney, who previously worked for the International
Committee of Red Cross to identify missing persons in conflict zones in
Afghanistan and Lebanon, said it is a uniquely difficult undertaking.
“We
cannot underestimate the complexity of the task before us, the
challenging nature of the site as you will see, the age of the remains,
the location of the burials, the dearth of information about these
children and their lives,” MacSweeney said.
Nearly 100 people,
some from the U.S., Britain, Australia, and Canada, have either provided
DNA or contacted them about doing so.
Some people in town believe the remains should be left undisturbed.
Patrick
McDonagh, who grew up in the neighborhood, said a priest had blessed
the ground after Hopkins’ discovery and Masses were held there
regularly.
“It should be left as it is,” McDonagh said. “It was always a graveyard.”
A
week before ground was broken, a bus delivered a group of the home’s
aging survivors and relatives of mothers who toiled there to the
neighborhood of rowhouses that ring the playground and memorial garden.
A
passageway between two homes led them through a gate in metal fencing
erected to hide the site that has taken on an industrial look.
Beyond
grass where children once played — and beneath which children may be
buried — were storage containers, a dumpster and an excavator poised for
digging.
It would be their last chance to see it before it’s
torn up and — maybe — the bones of their kin recovered so they can be
properly buried.
Corrigan, who likes to say that justice delayed
Irish-style is “delay, deny ’til we all go home and die,” hopes each
child is found.
“They were denied dignity in life, and they were
denied dignity and respect in death,” she said. “So we’re hoping that
today maybe will be the start of hearing them because I think they’ve
been crying for an awful long time to be heard.”
A timeline of developments related to Ireland’s network of mother and baby homes.
1800s
1846 — The Tuam workhouse opens on six acres to house 800 “inmates” who were destitute.
1900s
1921
— County Galway opens a mother and baby home in a former workhouse in
Glenamaddy that is run by Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic religious
order.
1922-23 — The home is occupied by British
troops during the Irish Civil War. Six members of an Irish Republican
Army faction that opposed the treaty ending the war were executed there
in 1923.
1925 — The Children's Home in Glenamaddy closes and reopens in the converted Tuam workhouse as a home for.
1961 — The Tuam home closes.
1970s
— Two boys discover bones in an underground chamber on the grounds of
the derelict home. Locals believe the grave includes victims of the
Irish famine and create a memorial garden.
2000s
2012
— Local historian Catherine Corless publishes an article in the Journal
of the Old Tuam Society that reveals many children died in the home.
She later finds records of 796 deaths with no burial records. She
reveals that the bones found in the 1970s were in the location of a
defunct septic tank.
May 2014 — The Irish Mail publishes a story
about nearly 800 unaccounted dead babies at the home and the possibility
some are buried in the sewage tank. International news coverage leads
to a public outcry.
June 2014 — The Irish government announces it will investigate mother and baby homes across Ireland, including Tuam.
February 2015 — The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes is formally established.
March
2017 — A test excavation by the commission confirms “significant
quantities” of human remains of infants in underground chambers at the
Tuam site. Tests show they ranged from 35 weeks to three years old.
2018
— The Irish government pledges to carry out a full forensic excavation
and enact legislation to allow for the recovery and potential
identification of remains.
October 2018 — Government officially
approves a full forensic excavation of the Tuam site. The cost is
estimated at 6—13 million ($7-15 million) euros.
January 2021 —
The Commission’s final report finds that about 9,000 children died in 18
institutions, including Tuam, from 1922 to 1998. Prime Minister Micheál Martin issues a state apology.
2022
— Ireland passes the Institutional Burials Act, giving legal authority
to excavate, recover, and identify remains from sites such as Tuam.
2023 — The Director of Authorised Intervention is established to oversee the Tuam excavation.
June 11, 2025 — The site is secured, and pre-excavation work begins.
July 14, 2025 — The excavation team begins its dig to recover remains.
