‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland

Winnipeg Free Press

6 days ago

TUAM, Ireland (AP) — This story 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 realize 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 ostracizing unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system.
An unlikely investigator
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.
Long-lost brothers
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 memorialize 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.'
A sensational story
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 4 1/2, 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 apologized 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 apologized, 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.
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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.'
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