Start of excavation work 'momentous', says Tuam relative
Annette McKay's mother Maggie O'Connor was sent to an industrial school when her mother died in 1936.
While there, she became pregnant after she was raped by a caretaker when she was 17.
She was then moved to Tuam Mother and Baby Home.
Ms O'Connor was separated from her child after the birth and was moved to St Anne's in Loughrea.
It was there where she was told that her baby, Mary Margaret, had died in Tuam.
Ms McKay spoke to RTÉ's News at One programme about her mother's experiences and the subsequent investigations and inquiries into the deaths at the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.
"Even a thimble full of Mary Margaret, to place that baby with her mum, would mean everything," Ms McKay said.
She explained that her mother did not speak about her experiences in the home until she was 70.
"It was the birth of my first grandchild that upset her very much, which was not the case for my mum loved babies and it brought out this harrowing tale about her baby; her bonnie baby, Mary Margaret," she said.
"It was just unreal, how could we have lived all our lives, and she get to be 70 and we didn't know about this terrible, terrible thing that had happened to her?"
Ms McKay said that her mother had been moved from Tuam to St Anne's in Loughrea, and she had been told that it was the women who the nuns regarded as "troublesome" or "wanting to spend too much time with their babies" who were moved from Tuam.
"There was no bonding with that child to be allowed," she explained.
"So mum was pegging washing out in Loughrea, and the nun came behind her and just said 'the child of your sin is dead' and they threw her out the same day - that's all she ever knew about that baby."
She said that her mother was traumatised by her experiences in the Mother and Baby Home.
"I always tell people the nuns lived in our home because the nuns were always present - all the trauma, all the damage, all the pain, all the stories.
"I can recall now, the names of the sisters who abused my mother, so for her to keep that secret for 50 years, was a tremendous stigma and shame visited on those women."
After leaving the home, Ms O'Connor moved to Belfast, where she met Ms McKay's father.
"She had my older brother in Belfast, but (the father) deserted her... she wrote to her sister in Bury and her brother-in-law came to rescue Maggie and my older brother.
"My father reappeared again, then there were two more children, and then he deserted her for good.
"So, Bury is where she remained and always described living in our town as a sanctuary."
Ms McKay said that her mother had always referred to English people as "very welcoming" and had helped her though "traumatic episodes".
"They had no idea about how deep the trauma was and how terrible the experience she's lived through."
In 2015, the Government set up an investigation into 14 Mother and Baby homes and four county homes, which found "significant quantities" of human remains on the Tuam site.
The inquiry found an "appalling level of infant mortality" in the institutions and said that no alarm was raised by the state over them, even though it was "known to local and national authorities".
The State inquiry led to a formal government apology in 2021, the announcement of a redress scheme and an apology from the Sisters of Bon Secours.
Ms McKay said that her mother had not been very interested in the redress scheme and had asked her daughter to deal with the proceedings.
"A solicitor came and said she would take the case on and suddenly all this paperwork appeared - the baby's death certificate, the birth certificate and this place called Tuam.
"Years later, in a story in an English newspaper: 'A terrible discovery in the West of Ireland of a grave containing a septic tank containing the bodies of 796 children'.
"I knew she was on that list. And she was."
A team of Irish and international forensic experts have today broken ground at the site of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.
The excavation will take two years and will try to identify the remains of the infants who died between 1925 and 1961, more than 11 years after Catherine Corless first drew attention to the burial site.
Ms McKay described as "absolutely momentous" the beginning of the work at the site today.
"We were there last week, and the team gave us a chance to see what the site looks like now. It's forensically sealed and they were preparing to work.
"I describe that journey as a chance to say goodbye for now."
Ms McKay said that the day also feels "very hard and emotional".
"I've had my DNA taken because I'm in the group described as old and vulnerable," she said.
"Because I'm on the advisory board, I do have this bird's eye view of the discussions around DNA techniques, what's possible, what's not possible, the ages of the babies.
"The way they've been lying in the water table, commingled remains; it is technically very, very difficult, but I have to have hope.
"Even a thimble full of Mary Margaret, to place that baby with her mum, would mean everything."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
RTÉ News
10 hours ago
- RTÉ News
'I have to have hope,' says Tuam relative as excavation works begin
The daughter of a woman whose child died in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home has described as "absolutely momentous" the beginning of excavation work at the site in Co Galway. Annette McKay's mother Maggie O'Connor was sent to an industrial school when her mother died in 1936. While there, Ms O'Connor became pregnant after she was raped by a caretaker when she was 17. She was then moved to Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Ms O'Connor was separated from her child after the birth and was moved to St Anne's in Loughrea. It was there where she was told that her baby, Mary Margaret, had died in Tuam. "Even a thimble full of Mary Margaret, to place that baby with her mum, would mean everything" Ms McKay spoke to RTÉ's News at One about her mother's experiences and the subsequent investigations and inquiries into the deaths at the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. She explained that her mother did not speak about her experiences in the home until she was 70. "It was the birth of my first grandchild that upset her very much, which was not the case for my mum loved babies and it brought out this harrowing tale about her baby; her bonnie baby, Mary Margaret," she said. "It was just unreal, how could we have lived all our lives, and she get to be 70 and we didn't know about this terrible, terrible thing that had happened to her?" Ms McKay said that it also feels "very hard and emotional". "I've had my DNA taken because I'm in the group described as old and vulnerable," she said. "Because I'm on the advisory board, I do have this bird's eye view of the discussions around DNA techniques, what's possible, what's not possible, the ages of the babies. "The way they've been lying in the water table, commingled remains; it is technically very, very difficult, but I have to have hope." "Even a thimble full of Mary Margaret, to place that baby with her mum, would mean everything," Ms McKay said. Ms McKay said that her mother had been moved from Tuam to St Anne's in Loughrea, and she had been told that it was the women who the nuns regarded as "troublesome" or "wanting to spend too much time with their babies" who were moved from Tuam. "There was no bonding with that child to be allowed," she explained. "So mum was pegging washing out in Loughrea, and the nun came behind her and just said 'the child of your sin is dead' and they threw her out the same day - that's all she ever knew about that baby." She said that her mother was traumatised by her experiences in the Mother and Baby Home. "I always tell people the nuns lived in our home because the nuns were always present - all the trauma, all the damage, all the pain, all the stories. "I can recall now, the names of the sisters who abused my mother, so for her to keep that secret for 50 years, was a tremendous stigma and shame visited on those women." "They had no idea about how deep the trauma was and how terrible the experience she's lived through" After leaving the home, Ms O'Connor moved to Belfast, where she met Ms McKay's father. "She had my older brother in Belfast, but (the father) deserted her... she wrote to her sister in Bury and her brother-in-law came to rescue Maggie and my older brother. "My father reappeared again, then there were two more children, and then he deserted her for good. "So, Bury is where she remained and always described living in our town as a sanctuary." Ms McKay said that her mother had always referred to English people as "very welcoming" and had helped her though "traumatic episodes". "They had no idea about how deep the trauma was and how terrible the experience she's lived through." In 2015, the Government set up an investigation into 14 Mother and Baby homes and four county homes, which found "significant quantities" of human remains on the Tuam site. The inquiry found an "appalling level of infant mortality" in the institutions and said that no alarm was raised by the state over them, even though it was "known to local and national authorities". The State inquiry led to a formal government apology in 2021, the announcement of a redress scheme and an apology from the Sisters of Bon Secours. Ms McKay said that her mother had not been very interested in the redress scheme and had asked her daughter to deal with the proceedings. "A solicitor came and said she would take the case on and suddenly all this paperwork appeared - the baby's death certificate, the birth certificate and this place called Tuam. "Years later, in a story in an English newspaper: 'A terrible discovery in the West of Ireland of a grave containing a septic tank containing the bodies of 796 children'. "I knew she was on that list. And she was." A team of Irish and international forensic experts have broken ground at the site of the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. The excavation will take two years and will try to identify the remains of the infants who died between 1925 and 1961, more than 11 years after Catherine Corless first drew attention to the burial site. Ms McKay described as "absolutely momentous" the beginning of the work at the site. "We were there last week, and the team gave us a chance to see what the site looks like now. It's forensically sealed and they were preparing to work. "I describe that journey as a chance to say goodbye for now."
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Tuam is a microcosm for Ireland's history of discarded bones
Ireland often seems surreal. But it is also, if I may be permitted to coin a word, subreal. We share the island, not just with what is above ground but what it under it. Our reality is not just experienced – it is exhumed. As Seamus Heaney put it in Bogland, it keeps 'striking/ Inwards and downwards,/ Every layer they strip/Seems camped on before'. The subsoil of the grounds of the former Bons Secours Mother and Baby home in Tuam is described as a 'yellow-grey silty gritty layer'. And it is being stripped now , down to where, between 1925 and 1961, perhaps 796 tiny human beings were stuffed in a disused sewage system. This non-resting place is, as the technical report published in 2017 has it, 'an elongated structure, comprising 20 chambers, with juvenile human remains identified in 17 of those chambers'. These chambers of horror are 'deep and narrow'. Indeed – this is a kind of reality that has been buried very deep and confined to a very narrow strip of Irish consciousness. It is weirdly apt that Tuam in its original form is Tuaim, a tumulus or burial mound. It has become a microcosm for all that has been interred with Irish history's discarded bones. In the grounds of the home, there are many layers of yellow-grey oblivion. There have been, in modern times, three distinct cycles of shameful burial and exhumation just in this small patch of Irish earth. READ MORE Family members of children believed to be buried at the former mother and baby institution in Tuam have spoken to the media ahead of the excavation of the site Before it was the Mother and Baby home, the complex was the Tuam workhouse. It opened in 1846, which meant that it was immediately overwhelmed by desperate victims of the Great Famine who died, not just of disease and hunger, but as Eavan Boland put it in her poem Quarantine, 'Of the toxins of a whole history.' They were initially buried just beside the workhouse, until the authorities objected that the 'burying ground ... is in such a state as to be injurious to the health of the occupiers of premises in ... the entire town of Tuam'. [ Tuam families can see 'light at the end of a very long tunnel' Opens in new window ] In 2012, during works on the town water scheme, 18 pits containing 48 bodies of famine victims were uncovered. It seems probable that many more bodies lie in and around the grounds. Interestingly, even in the midst of that unspeakable catastrophe, these people had at least been buried in coffins – a dignity not afforded to the children who later died in the care of the nuns. The second episode of burial and exhumation on this same patch of land occurred during and immediately after the Civil War. Between its periods as a workhouse and a Mother and Baby home, the Tuam complex had another brief life that also involved hidden burials. It was occupied during the Civil War by the Free State Army. In March 1923, six anti-Treaty prisoners were executed in the workhouse and buried in the grounds. In May, two more prisoners suffered the same fate. These bodies were exhumed and reburied in 1924. It again seems interesting that these dead men were given a memorial on the site: there is a commemorative plaque on the only preserved section of the wall of the Mother and Baby home. The famine and the Troubles at least occupied enough space in official memory for coffins and commemorations to be afforded to their victims. The children who died in the Mother and Baby home were not part of history until the extraordinary Catherine Corless made them so – thus they got neither coffins nor memorials. The operation to identify so many now-jumbled bones of infants using DNA analysis and other cutting-edge techniques will, if successful, set a new benchmark for the rescue of the unwanted dead from the contempt of silence and anonymity What makes the forensic excavation that began in Tuam yesterday even stranger is that it fuses an old Ireland with a new. It is both deeply atavistic and startlingly innovative. It is something that seems never to have happened before in human history. There have been thousands of archaeological explorations of tombs and burial chambers. There have been numerous grim excavations of bodies dumped in mass graves after massacres or battles. (Daniel MacSweeney, who is heading the Tuam operation, gained his expertise in the Lebanon and the Caucasus. Oran Finegan, its leading forensic scientist, worked on 'large-scale post conflict identification programmes' in the Balkans and Cyprus.) There are also many cases of babies and other inmates being buried in unmarked or poorly recorded graves on the grounds of institutions – at, for example, the Smyllum Park boarding home in Scotland , the Haut de la Garenne boarding home on Jersey , the Ballarat Orphanage in Australia, and the Duplessis Orphans' home in Canada . Here in Ireland, we had the hideous exhumation in 1993 of the graves of women buried at the High Park Magdalene home in Dublin – so that the nuns could sell the land for property development. But the situation of the remains in Tuam – neither a grave nor a tomb – has, according to the technical group, 'no national or international comparisons that the group is aware of'. And the operation to identify so many now-jumbled bones of infants using DNA analysis and other cutting-edge techniques will, if successful, set a new benchmark for the rescue of the unwanted dead from the contempt of silence and anonymity. This is making history in a double sense – doing something that has never been done before while simultaneously reshaping a country's understanding of its own recent past. [ Tuam mother and baby home: 80 people come forward to give DNA to identify buried children Opens in new window ] And, hopefully, of its present. The digging up of the bodies of people disappeared by the IRA has helped us to grasp the truth that the Troubles themselves cannot simply be buried. Revenants like Jean McConville return, not just to remind us of the past but to warn us of what it means when people become, even after death, disposable. While the Tuam excavation continues, we have, in the corner of our eyes, a peripheral awareness of the undead. Since they were not allowed properly to rest in peace, we cannot do so either. Since they were so contemptuously consigned to oblivion, we are obliged to remember. Since they were sacrificed to a monolithic tunnel vision, we must tunnel down to bring buried truths to light and hidden histories to consciousness.
Irish Examiner
16 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Terry Prone: When it comes to woodlice, I'm Albert Pierrepoint — fast and efficient
If you found the weekend a bit hot, you get a sympathy vote. But I put it to you that you did not have to deal with indoor wildlife, a growling toilet, or an upchucking cat while facing the prospect of strangers walking through your bedroom. As I did. If you live in a Martello tower, you do not have air conditioning. You can't afford it, for starters, because old buildings are always trying to fall down or apart, and prevention is costly. But, even if you had the cash, how would you even begin to manage the air inside walls that are nine feet thick? The fact that a tower is circular, though, does provide advantages. The main one being in high summer, that you can open windows on all sides, thereby providing enough of a draught to prevent dwellers from keeling over. Opening the windows does complicate things, though. You get ghettoblaster hard rock from the beach at such volume it makes you wonder if you're going to get palpitations synchronous with the beat. You also get daddy long legs, which are the certified eejits of the insect kingdom. They don't do anything useful, but because they're so self-evidently harmless, you feel guilty about killing them. One of the lesser-known consequences of climate change is that I become a killer during the summer months. Always pretty ruthless about bluebottles and wasps, this year I've added in woodlice. I'd need to confirm it with Éanna Ní Lamhna, but I am convinced that we have an unprecedented outbreak of them currently. If my home were occupied only by me and the woodlice, co-living would be a happy option, but during the summer months, visitors come for the tour, and you don't want tourists trying to compete with woodlice for floor space. Early on in her career, Specs, my cat, used to hunt woodlice, giving them pokes with her front paws to make them go faster and be worth pursuing. Other wildlife, including big spiders, can put on an impressive turn of speed if cat-nudged, and that speed speaks to a primeval feline need. Woodlice don't seem to be capable of increased speed, and so Specs gave up on hunting them. Instead, I have to stamp on them and then vacuum up the corpses. You might interpret 'stamp' as vicious, on my part, but you would be wrong. If I have to kill wildlife, I am committed to being the Albert Pierrepoint of insect execution: it is going to be fast and flawless. Albert, you will remember, was an English hangman who did away with 600 criminals (a handful of whom may have been innocent, but let's not go there). He did nixers in this country. In fact, he did nixers here frequently enough to become, effectively, our locum executioner. He prided himself, did Albert, on the science he brought to his trade. He weighed and measured and timed to ensure that the condemned human fell through a trapdoor and had their neck simultaneously broken by the rope. This obviated the bad hangings, which amounted to slow strangulation, causing kindly relatives of the person being executed to drag on their legs to speed up the process. Bad hangings after the Nuremberg trials led to reflex leg movements that became known as the 'Spandau Ballet', and gave rise to the name of that band. When it comes to woodlice, I'm Pierrepoint: fast and efficient. Not quite as fast as my late husband used to be with earwigs, but his aversion to earwigs was total. He saw them as the embodiment of evil. But then, anything with more than two legs inside a house draws the family into disrepute. Wildlife can put on an impressive turn of speed if cat-nudged, and that speed speaks to a primeval feline need. Picture: iStockphoto I remember preparing a man for a major promotion interview in my kitchen, once. The job was so important and evoked such media interest that if he'd come to our offices, he might have been spotted, and two and two might have been added together. Hence, my kitchen in a previous dwelling, a camera on a tripod capturing his every answer. He was doing pretty well until one question seemed to cause him to silently freeze. He was looking, not at me or the lens, but at the floor behind me. A glance back revealed an audience of one. A curious mouse. I flailed at the mouse with a newspaper and pointed out that we lived by the sea and didn't have cats, which was true at the time. The job aspirant was too polite to criticise, but you could tell he had lost confidence in the whole process. Rodents, where I now live, are assassinated or prevented by Specs, although I worry that, now she is headed for her 20th year — which is pretty advanced for a cat — she may put in for retirement. In fact, I was discussing this with her on Friday morning and advancing the theory that her life, in common with that of most humans, would be greatly improved by not retiring. Humans who give up the day job end up walking the Camino or — worse still — walking the Salt Path, and you know where the latter gets you. Well, OK, it got the one who wrote the book about £11m before things came apart a bit, but the future doesn't look promising — in publication terms — for her. Specs reacted to my advice by throwing up on the coverlet of my bed, which had been washed and dried only the day before. 'You're adding to the water shortage,' I told her, as I turfed the thing into the wash for another go-around. I had an urge to go and confess to Uisce Éireann because I was already failing with the upstairs toilet, which went on strike during the week and had to have its innards replaced by Bryan, who describes himself as a handyman, and is. Very handy. Usually. In this instance, something seems to have gone slightly wrong, because, downstairs quietly reading a Robert Crais thriller — there are few more rewarding pleasures — I registered a sporadic growl. Now, if wildlife large enough to growl had come in through the cat flap, Specs would muster her not-extensive courage and knock hell out of it. She didn't even rouse herself from sleep for a minute in response to the growl. I timed it. It seemed to happen about every seven minutes. I wandered the house, leaving Elvis Cole, the Crais private eye whose business card describes himself as 'the biggest dick in the business', face down on the arm of my chair. All became clear. The growl was coming from the upstairs toilet, which was managing to lightly spray the tiled floor of the wet room with every groan. 'Hell,' I thought, 'if short-taken visitors arrive before Bryan does, they can use the downstairs loo. 'I'll find a way to frame malfunctioning lavatories as an amusing aspect of the narrative of Martello living.'
