Excavation may reveal how 796 babies died in Irish mother and baby home

Times

a day ago

She is considered a national hero, but Catherine Corless was amused that her refusal to meet Pope Francis when he visited Ireland in 2018 attracted so much media attention.
'It was never about me,' said the 71-year-old arable farmer-turned-local historian. 'It was about the babies. They didn't matter in life. They didn't matter in death — but they were all that mattered to me.'
On Monday, digging will finally begin at the Tuam mother and baby home where Corless uncovered the deaths and mass burial of 796 babies. An investigation prompted by her work found that 9,000 children died in similar homes across Ireland in the 20th century.
'I could never understand how anyone could turn a blind eye,' said Corless, for whom Monday marks some sort of personal closure. 'This is all I have ever asked for, right from the beginning. These are baptised babies. We have to get them out.'
Corless said she began 'naively dabbling' in local and family history after she discovered that her own mother, Kathleen, was born out of wedlock and subsequently fostered.
While doing a part-time history course in the nearby village of Kilkerrin, Co Galway, in 2011, she became interested in the local Tuam mother and baby home, which had closed down in 1961 and was demolished in 1972.
Run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, between 1925 and its closure, the home housed pregnant women and babies born to unmarried mothers — who found themselves subjected to huge stigma in Ireland at the time. It was only closed down due to the dilapidation of the building, rather than the current scandal.
In 1975, two boys, Frannie Hopkins, 12, and Barry Sweeney, 10, were playing on the Tuam site when they discovered, under a concrete slab, an underground septic tank containing the bones of children. Local people assumed they were remains from the workhouse that had been on the same site before 1925, or the bones of victims of the Great Famine of the 1840s.
In 2012, Corless published a piece in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society establishing that she had found 796 records of children that had died with no corresponding burial record. 'By then,' she said, 'I had heard the story of the two little boys who found bones in the sewage tank. I was putting two and two together.'
She concluded the bones that the boys had found in the septic tank could only belong to the 796 babies from the home. Not long afterwards, the press uncovered her findings and the stories of survivors began to come forward. The story exploded around the world.
'I was in prison for seven years,' recounted PJ Haverty, 73, matter of factly. Born in Tuam, he lived in the home until he was seven, when he was fostered by Teresa and Mikey Hansbury, local farmers from Menlough, near Tuam.
He does not remember much about Tuam: 'There was a high wall all around, so we couldn't see anything. We were allowed out just to go to school, ten minutes late in the morning and ten minutes early in the evening because we weren't allowed to mix with the other kids. Then we were marched back in again to the prison.'
His mother, Eileen, became pregnant with him in 1951, age 26. She went to the local priest for help but the reaction from the Catholic Church was one of stigma, not mercy.
Her experience was far from unique. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland found in 2021 that there were approximately 56,000 unmarried mothers and 57,000 children in the homes across Ireland between 1922 to 1998, when the last of the institutions closed. Almost 15 per cent of all children in the institutions were found to have died — around 9,000.
Micheál Martin, the Irish taoiseach, apologised, saying: 'The most striking thing is the shame felt by women who became pregnant outside of marriage and the stigma that was so cruelly attached to their children.
'I apologise for the profound generational wrong visited upon Irish mothers and their children who ended up in a mother and baby home or a county home. As the commission says plainly, 'They should not have been there.''
Haverty explained how shame came knocking for his mother: 'The priest said she was to be kept indoors till the baby was due to be born, and she wasn't to enter the house of God, that's the church, because she was a sinner.' Eileen was taken to the Tuam baby home to give birth and lived there for 12 months, after which she was told to leave by the nuns.
She was not allowed to take her baby son with her, though she desperately wanted to, but was expected to pay five shillings a week for his upkeep. In 1953, she had to write a letter to the home to beg for respite from the payments when a period of sickness prevented her from working.
Eileen tried often to visit Haverty, he later discovered, but she was refused entry and eventually moved to Brixton, south London.
As a young man, shame followed Haverty too: 'You were called a bastard and a dog from the street and a disease carrier. All that was thrown at me. It was awful, very hurtful.' In 1977, with the help of his foster mother, Haverty found and travelled to meet Eileen, and they met twice more before she died in 2011.
Haverty, now married to an English woman, who is also called Eileen, with three sons of his own, John, Kevin and Connor, had not spoken of his experience publicly until he met Corless in 2021. 'Catherine said to me: 'Stand up, you did nothing wrong.' It was a weight off my shoulders.'
He was adamant: 'I want everybody to come forward, walk around with their heads up. We did nothing wrong to anyone.'
On average, Corless's research showed, a baby died at Tuam every two weeks. They were buried, without coffins, one on top of the other in the 9ft-deep chambers of the underground septic tank.
'My God, it dragged on and on and on,' Corless explained of the path to get to a proper excavation of the site on Monday. 'It was horrific the way it carried on but the more it did, the more determined I got. In my mind I thought they're not getting away with this, the government had to buckle eventually.'
In 2017, an initial analysis of some bones carbon-dated them to the same period as the mother and baby home. In 2018, the Irish government announced the site would be excavated but did not draft the bill enabling a dig until 2019. The coronavirus pandemic further delayed matters. The Institutional Burials Act was finally passed in 2022 and a year later, the independent Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention was created to oversee the excavation.
Daniel MacSweeney, 51, a former aid worker and Red Cross solicitor, has led the work with a team of forensic scientists and archaeologists from around the world, in order to prepare the site for Monday's breaking of the ground. The excavation is expected to take two years to complete.
'Survivors have been waiting a long time for answers and this marks the shift from looking and prepping to finally doing,' MacSweeney said. But he cautioned that there is no way of predicting what they will find over the course of the dig: 'For many survivors and family members it's a time of heightened emotion — they are pleased we are moving ahead but it brings into view lots of questions that may or may not be answered.'
Anna Corrigan, 68, was not aware of the Tuam mother and baby home until she was in her fifties and became more interested in her family's history. With the help of Barnardo's children's charity, she discovered around Christmas time 2012 that she had two half-brothers, who had both been born in the mother and baby home.
'I had some vague recollection of an argument my mother had with a family member about her having sons but I thought it was a dream,' she said. 'But once I get a bone between my teeth, I'm like a dog.'
Through her own research she uncovered that her mother, Bridget Dolan, who died in 2001, had two sons: John Desmond Dolan, born February 22, 1946, and William Joseph Dolan, born May 21, 1950.
Beyond their birth certificates, the documentation Corrigan found is sparse, leaving her with more questions than answers.
At his birth, John was recorded as weighing 8lb 9oz and healthy. When he died at just 14 months old, the cause of death was given as measles. His notes also said he was a 'congenital idiot' and 'emaciated'. She believes it is evidence her brothers were mistreated in Tuam.
William lacks even a death certificate — merely a note in the nun's files from the time which reads: 'Dead 3rd February 1951'.
John is listed as one of the 796 babies uncovered by Corless's research. Corrigan is still unsure whether William's death has been inaccurately recorded, or if he was in fact adopted and might still be alive.
Like many families and survivors she awaits Monday's excavation with bated breath: 'I just want truth or answers or closure, if they are in that pit at least I can tool on my mother's headstones, 'pre-deceased by her two sons John and William', it's truth, closure, finality, answers.'
Does she expect that closure? 'No, the nuns lie through their teeth, they hand you an apology, I could wallpaper my kitchen with apologies that won't bring answers.'
The Bon Secours Sisters have been contacted for comment.