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The bodies of hundreds of infants who died in an Irish mother and baby home are to be recovered from a septic tank where they lay hidden in an unmarked grave for decades.
It is hoped some of the remains will be identified before they are given a proper burial, as excavation work starts at the mass grave for 796 babies.
The painstaking process, expected to last two years, comes more than 10 years after historian Catherine Corless first uncovered the shocking secrets of St Mary’s mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway.
In 2014, she found there were no burial records for hundreds of infants and young children who died between 1925 and 1961 at the home for unmarried mothers run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns.
When she visited the site, now a housing estate, she learned how two boys had lifted a broken concrete slab near a children’s playground in the 1970s and seen bones inside.
Mary Moriarty, who lived in a house near the site, told the BBC before her death that she had gone to see what they found and “fell in a hole”.
Inside, she saw hundreds of “little bundles”, wrapped in cloths that had gone black from rot and damp, and were “packed one after the other, in rows up to the ceiling”.
The authorities initially believed the remains were from the Irish Famine in the 1840s, when the site was a workhouse where many people died, and the spot was covered back up.
However, Ms Corless’s suspicions about the missing children were officially confirmed in 2017 when an Irish government investigation found “significant quantities of human remains” in a test excavation of the site. The bones were not from the famine and were children aged from about 35 foetal weeks to two or three years.
A baby had died at Tuam every two weeks on average. They were buried, without coffins, one on top of the other in the 9ft-deep underground septic tank.
On Monday, after a decade of tireless campaigning for the infants, digging will finally begin to give them a proper burial.
“There was no will to do anything for those babies except leave them there and put a monument over them,” Ms Corless said as families and survivors visited the site last week.
“But this was a sewer system, and I couldn’t give up on them. They were all baptised; they deserve to be in consecrated ground.”
A major commission prompted by Ms Corless’ work found that 9,000 children died in similar homes across Ireland in the 20th century.
In 2021, Irish premier Micheal Martin apologised, saying: “The most striking thing is the shame felt by women who became pregnant outside of marriage and the stigma that was so cruelly attached to their children.
“I apologise for the profound generational wrong visited upon Irish mothers and their children who ended up in a mother and baby home or a county home. As the commission says plainly, ‘They should not have been there.’”
The Bon Secours Sisters also offered a “profound apology” after acknowledging the order had “failed to protect the inherent dignity” of women and children in the Tuam home.
Anna Corrigan, 68, who discovered that she had two older brothers who were born while her mother was a resident at the Tuam home, was among those to visit the site before excavation begins.
“These children were denied every human right in their lifetime, as were their mothers,” she said.
“They were denied dignity – and they were denied dignity and respect in death.
“So I’m 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.”
After researching her family history, she found her mother gave birth to two sons at the home: John Desmond Dolan in February 1946, and William Joseph Dolan in May 1950.
At his birth, John was recorded as weighing 8lb 9oz and healthy. When he died at just 14 months old, the cause of death was given as measles, with his notes also claiming he was a “congenital idiot” and “emaciated”. John is listed as one of the 796 babies uncovered by Ms Corless’s research.
William lacks even a death certificate – merely a note in the nun’s files from the time which reads: “Dead 3rd February 1951.”
“I just want truth or answers or closure, if they are in that pit, at least I can tool on my mother’s headstones, ‘pre-deceased by her two sons John and William’. It’s truth, closure, finality, answers,” Ms Corrigan told The Sunday Times.
PJ Haverty, 73, who was separated from his birth mother aged one and raised at the home until he was seven, described it as a “prison”.
He said those linked to the home were shunned and treated like “dirt”.
“We had to go 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early, because they didn’t want us talking to the other kids,” he recalled.
“Even at break-time in the school, we weren’t allowed to play with them – we were cordoned off. You were dirt from the street.”
The work at the burial site, which is being undertaken by the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (ODAIT), will involve exhumation, analysis, identification if possible and re-interment of the remains at the site.
ODAIT leader Daniel MacSweeney said the excavation will work to international best practices when it comes to forensic standards.
The work will involve a long, complex process of recovering all the remains within the site and then separating the “mixed up” skeletal specimens by sorting them by age and using processes to assess sex.
It is hoped that identification of some of those buried can take place with the assistance of DNA provided by families, as well as other records. The team will also attempt to establish the cause of death where possible.
