Off The Record
Forensic Excavation Begins At Former Catholic Home As Search For 800 Infant Graves Continues
In a desperate attempt to find the remains of nearly 800 infants and children, a forensic team is excavating a former residence.
In Tuam, Ireland, a’mother and baby home’ that shuttered more than 60 years ago is finally being excavated at a historic location.
Up to 798 children died in the home for unmarried mothers between 1925 and its closure in 1961, according to the meticulous research of Catherine Corless, a local historian in County Galway.
According to Corless, a large number of the children who perished at the institution are thought to have been dumped into “the pit,” an old sewage tank.
Only two of the 798 children who perished were formally buried in a nearby cemetery; the other children are thought to have been interred in a mass grave at the location without a coffin or gravestone.
Her 2014 discoveries rocked the nation and the world, bringing to light a dark period in mid-century Ireland when Catholicism prohibited ‘illegitimate’ births and refused to baptise or bury the children in a Christian cemetery.
The site’s investigation began in 1975 when two 12-year-old boys found a septic tank that was allegedly filled to overflowing with human remains. However, they dismissed the remains as being from the 1840s Irish famine.
“I’m feeling very relieved,” Corless said to Sky News before to the dig, which might take up to two years to finish.
“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.”
Catholic nuns operated St. Mary’s home, which housed women who were struggling with the “shame” of bearing an unmarried child at the time.
During the decades when mothers were frequently separated from their children or their children were forcibly placed for adoption, Ireland had at least eleven of these facilities, housing about 35,000 single women.
An investigation conducted in 2021 revealed a “appalling level of infant mortality” in such homes across the nation, with approximately 9,000 children dying across 18 institutions. Death records at the Tuam Centre indicate that many of the children died from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis, which were common at the time.
Taoiseach Michael Martin said that “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” in response to the investigation, which caused the Irish government to issue a formal national apology.
Additional ‘deep apologies’ and financial compensation were made by the Sisters of Bon Secours, a religious order of Catholic nuns that ran the Tuam facility.
Additionally, they acknowledged that children were ‘buried in a rude and unacceptable way’ at the location.
Corless added: “The church preached to look after the vulnerable, the old and the orphaned, but they never included illegitimate children for some reason or another in their own psyche.”
“I never, ever understand how they could do that to little babies, little toddlers. Beautiful little vulnerable children.”
The goal now is to provide each child with a respectable funeral and to use DNA testing to identify as many of the remains as possible.
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