Catholic institutions in Ireland neglected infants, 796 bodies expected to be inside a septic tank of former ‘home’ for unwed mothers run by nuns
As Ireland struggles with the horrific legacy of its mother and baby homes crisis, preliminary work to identify the remains of nearly 800 infants is set to begin at the site in Tuam, County Galway. The remains of the 796 kids are reportedly underneath the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, which was shut down decades back and now sits amidst a contemporary apartment building.
A religious order of Catholic nuns ran Bon Secours, also referred locally as The Home, as a maternity home for single mothers and their offspring. Pregnant unmarried women used to be interned for a year and were made to perform unpaid labor after giving birth there. They were separated from their infants who, frequently without the permission of the families, would be fostered by the nuns until they were adopted.
Local historian Catherine Corless, who initially raised concerns about the institution’s sinister history under the Bon Secours order, discovered the names of 796 newborns who are believed to have been interred there between 1925 and 1961. There were no burial records.
Corless stated that it is believed that many of the infants who died at the Tuam institution were thrown into “the pit,” an old sewage tank while only two were buried in a nearby cemetery, according to her research. According to investigators, “significant quantities of human remains” were uncovered in underground chambers at the Tuam site in County Galway in 2016.
“I’m feeling very relieved. It’s been a long, long journey. Not knowing what’s going to happen, if it’s just going to fall apart or if it’s really going to happen,” she expressed in an interview to Sky News. Due to her efforts, an Irish commission was established to look into the so-called mother and baby homes, where young women and girls were sent for decades to give birth instead of at home or in a hospital.
The ugly face of such Catholic institutions
The facilities, which were administered by religious organizations with governmental approval and ignored destitution, misogyny, stigma and high infant death rates, acted as adoption agency and orphanages for a large portion of the 20th century. The country was taken aback by the 2014 findings, which garnered international attention.
It revealed the sinister side of an Ireland in the middle of the 20th century that was strongly influenced by Catholicism and its harsh views on illegitimate children and the mothers who gave birth to them. They were frequently sent to mother and baby homes before being split from their newborns.
Ten years later, a group of detectives under the direction of Daniel MacSweeney are starting a potentially two-year forensic excavation. The purpose is to ascertain as many of the remains as possible via DNA testing and to provide a dignified reburial for each.
Bon Secours represented merely one part within a broader network of oppression in Ireland, the full scope of which has only come to light in recent years. Mothers at Bon Secours who had additional children out of wedlock, deemed as having “reoffended,” would find themselves sent to Magdalene laundries, notorious Irish institutions for alleged “fallen women,” operated by Catholic orders and discreetly backed by the state.
The phrase “fallen women” was originally used primarily to refer to sex workers, but the Magdalene laundries would eventually take in “seduced” women, rape and incest victims along with female orphans or children who had been abused or abandoned by their families. It was not until the 1990s that the last Magdalene laundromats closed.
Shocking number of child deaths
An investigation into Ireland’s mother and baby homes unveiled an “appalling level of infant mortality” and concluded that about 9,000 children had passed away in the 18 facilities under investigation. The commission report was followed in 2021 by an official state apology from the government. A compensation plan was established in 2022 and 814 survivors have received payments totaling $32.7 million thus far.
“We had a completely warped attitude to sexuality and intimacy, and young mothers and their sons and daughters were forced to pay a terrible price for that dysfunction,” Taoiseach (Ireland’s prime minister or head of the government) Michael Martin conveyed at the time. The children were “buried in a disrespectful and unacceptable way,” and the Sisters of Bon Secours, who had operated the Tuam home, offered their “profound apologies” and monetary compensation.
The Office of the Director of Authorized Intervention (ODAIT), an independent office created under the Irish Institutional Burials Act 2022, isin charge of supervising the excavation activity at the location. Its goal is to “recover and forensically analyse, and to memorialise and bury with respect and dignity, human remains recovered from the site.”
In the upcoming weeks, the institution’s survivors and family members will have the chance to observe the perimeter of the “forensically controlled site” and witness the construction. Only employees performing the work will be able to access the entire property, including the memorial garden, and there will be round-the-clock security surveillance.
The excavation site at Tuam, which is currently in the center of a housing subdivision, has hoarding around it. After four weeks of preparatory work, a full-scale excavation is scheduled to start on 14th July. The location was formerly a workhouse and it is speculated that victims of the Great Famine of the 19th century are also buried there, which could complicate the search for the remains of the babies.
“It’s an incredibly complex challenge because of the size of the site and the fact that we are dealing with infant remains that we know, at least in the case of the memorial gardens (on the site), are co-mingled,” stated MacSweeney. “The final timetable will depend on many variables, some of which may only become fully clear as the work progresses,” he added.
Irish society has been characterized as being darkly stained by the existence of mother and baby institutions. Enda Kenny, the taoiseach at the time, called the revelations on Tuam “a chamber of horrors” in 2017.
“No nuns broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up maybe to spare them the savagery of gossip, the wink and the elbow language of delight in which the holier-than-thous were particularly fluent. We gave them up because of our perverse, in fact, morbid relationship with what is called respectability,” he pointed out while addressing the country’s parliament.
Desparate efforts to conceal the reality
Corless was described as obsessive and delusional, as she spent years meticulously examining death certificates and church records from the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home and she disclosed her alarming report in May 2014 through the Irish Mail. Prematurity, convulsions, whooping cough, tuberculosis, meningitis and diphtheria were among the most frequently identified causes of death, according to official death records that she cited. Malnutrition was cited for a relatively small percentage of deaths.
After her tenacious persistence and heavy public scrutiny, a government-ordered test excavation in 2017 proved her suspicions that the children’s bodies had been put in what had been a septic tank beneath the property. The children’s bodies had been put in what had been a septic tank beneath the house. Unmarried pregnant women were sent to give birth in secret at the Bon Secours home, one of many similar institutions in Ireland.
Many were compelled to work for no pay and their kids frequently succumbed to malnourishment, illness or neglect. The survivors were often adopted, unlawfully. The bones found in Tuam were eventually confirmed by forensic investigation to belong to infants and toddlers between the ages of three and about 35 weeks gestation.
At first, the Catholic Church, as well as politicians and even the general public, were skeptical of the fears voiced by Corless. She and her family faced harassment while some press headlines questioned the number of bodies involved and international publications such as Reuters and The Guardian mocked her painstaking documentation, referring to her as an “amateur historian.”
Her efforts, however, eventually generated awareness around the world, which resulted in a state investigation and a formal apology from the government.
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