Childrens Home, Dublin Road, Tuam, Ireland circa 1950. (Courtesy of Catherine Corless/Tuam Historical Society)
In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, theres a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of fallen women and their illegitimate children passed through the Home, run
by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.
Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.
More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed where a housing development and childrens playground now stands what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massiveseptic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.
The bones are still there, local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. The children who died in the Home, this was them.
The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely, Corless said. Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.
According to documents Corless provided the Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high.
If you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but Im still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank ], Corless said. Couldnt they have afforded baby coffins?
Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were usually gone by school age either adopted or dead.
According to Irish Central , a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as emaciated, pot-bellied, fragile and with flesh hanging loosely on limbs.
Corless has a vivid recollection of the Home Babies. If you acted up in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies, she said. She said she recalled one instance in which an older schoolgirl wrapped a tiny stone in a bright candy wrapper and gave it to a Home Baby as a gift.
When the child opened it, she saw shed been fooled, Corless told Irish Central . Of course , I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time. Years after, I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them.
She said she first started investigating the Home, which most locals wanted to forget, when she started working on a local annual historical journal. She heard there was a little graveyard near what had been the Home, and that piqued her curiosity. How many children were there?
So she requested the records through the local registration house to find out. The attendant came back a couple of weeks later and said the number was staggering, just hundreds and hundreds, that it was nearly 800 dead children, Corless said.
Once, in 1995, Corless said in the phone interview, several boys had stumbled across the mass grave, which lay beneath a cracked piece of concrete: The boys told me it had been filled to the brim with human skulls and bones. They said even to this day they still have nightmares of finding the bodies.
Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. God knows who else is in the grave, one anonymous source told the Daily Mail . Its been lying there for years, and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.
Disgusting, but just one more of the atrocity by the Church.
It sure is.
Dear Friend Tzia: This is indeed a terrible remnant of some things which should never have happened in the first place.
May the souls of these poor innocent children be granted eternal repose and peace by the ultimate judge of all human misconduct.
Enoch.
May of these poor innocent be granted eternal repose and peace by the ultimate judge of all human misconduct My sentiments alsomy Friend Enoch.
Well said, Kavika.
To me, this makes their stance on abortion even MORE abominable. Have the babies, and then, we'll kill them
If I didn't feel they went straight to heaven, I don't think I could stand it.
I'm sure they did Dowser, they were innocent babies.
Absolutely. Therefore, they went straight to heaven, and are at peace!
Thanks for that info. Yes, it is just a little bit tool ate now.
I truly believe that.
Tragic and grim..
Run by Catholic nuns???? A new perspective on the heartless, in my humble opinion.
Thank goodness!
It may be late, but these girls, and the babies families, trusted the church to do right by them. If they have been unable to find their babies, it would come as a terrible predicament to learn that so many of them died, and were just discarded, not buried.
I feel very sorry for those that misplaced their trust in the church-- especially for those who had no choice.
Mother Theresa would have handled this differently. We need more like her.
Eventually I had the idea to contact the registry office in Galway. I remembered a law was enacted in 1932 to register every death in the country. My contact said give me a few weeks and Ill let you know.
A week later she got back to me and said do you really want all of these deaths? I said I do. She told me I would be charged for each record. Then she asked me did I realize the enormity of the numbers of deaths there?
The registrar came back with a list of 796 children. I could not believe it. I was dumbfounded and deeply upset, says Corless. There and then I said this isnt right. Theres nothing on the ground there to mark the grave , theres nothing to say its a massive childrens graveyard. Its laid abandoned like that since it was closed in 1961.
By a fluke in their laws these children didn't go unknown. 796 have been positively identified by the registry office in Galway. That doesn't lessen the tragedy that has happened at the hands of the church, people that were entrusted with the welfare of the indigent and unwed.
That's for sure Grump !!
I would call it sinful.
Barbaric!