Tuam mother and baby home excavation to begin on Monday with search for remains of 796 children who died there
Galway
is set to go ahead from Monday.
The excavation will take place 11 years after local historian
Catherine Corless
's original research revealed that
796 children
died at the Bon Secours
Mother and Baby Home
between 1924 and 1961.
A lack of burial records indicated the children could be buried on the site. Just two children were buried in local graveyards.
The families involved were invited to visit the site over the last few weeks, as from next week there will be a 2.4-metre hoarding around the perimeter and 24-hour security.
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The families will have an opportunity to view the site works as part of a Family and Survivors Day that the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (ODAIT) is holding on Monday.
The director of the exhumation, Daniel MacSweeney, said the process is likely to take two years and will be a 'unique and incredibly complex excavation'.
In 2015, the then-government established the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes to examine what happened to women and children in those institutions from 1922 to 1998.
A test excavation carried out in Tuam in 2017 discovered a significant amount of human remains in what appeared to be a decommissioned sewage chamber.
Tests conducted on the bodies revealed that those who died were between 35 foetal weeks and three years of age, and their deaths dated from the time that the mother and baby home existed.
The commission concluded: 'The combination of an institutional boarding home and commingled interments of juvenile remains in a sewage treatment system is a unique situation, with no directly comparable domestic or international cases.'
In October 2018 the government announced that it would introduce legislation to facilitate a full excavation of the site.
As part of the upcoming excavation process, a multidisciplinary forensic team was recruited.
The Sisters of the Bon Secours have offered to give
€12.97 million
to the Government's redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby institutions.
In 2021 it issued an apology stating that the children involved were buried in a 'disrespectful and unacceptable way'.
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The congregation's area leader, Sr Eileen O'Connor, acknowledged the order were 'part of the system in which they suffered hardship, loneliness and terrible hurt. We acknowledge in particular that infants and children who died at the home were buried in a disrespectful and unacceptable way. For all that, we are deeply sorry'.
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