How can we deny comfort to Tuam home survivors for so many years?

ANYONE who has experience of a missing loved one will tell you that it’s the not knowing that causes the greatest trauma. It’s the wondering if that brother, sister, daughter or son will surprise them one day by walking in through the door, the years having possibly changed their appearance, but still instantly recognisable no matter how long they have been gone.

It’s the wondering if they are being kept somewhere against their will, terrified and in pain, thinking of their family and desperately hoping they’ll be rescued one day. Or wondering if maybe they’re happier now where they are, living a new life with a family of their own with no intentions of ever coming home or contacting anyone they left behind.

I know people who, every time they go on holidays, scan crowds while out sightseeing some of the most beautiful places on earth, never fully immersed in the moment because their missing loved one is always there, in a corner of their mind. They hope they might just spot them in a random exotic setting because, well, you just never know.

Those same people have hired private detectives in places like Australia and New Zealand, obvious countries where an Irish person might go to take some time out. They’ve paid for countless Masses and, against their better judgement, have visited mediums in desperation that they might offer some clue as to whether or not a person is still alive and if they’re happy.

Sometimes the mystery of a missing person is solved simply, a body turns up, sometimes decades later, and DNA testing irrefutably proves that it is the person for whom the family never gave up hope.

And while the initial grief is crippling and will always remain before eventually becoming manageable, those who have experienced this particular kind of tragedy say it comes with a certain amount of relief. At least they now know.

It’s all that Peter Mulryan really wants – to know the truth about where his sister Marian is. Whether or not she’s buried at the mother and baby home in Tuam where they were both born, or if she was possibly one of the hundreds of children believed to have been illegally adopted to couples in the US.

He explained it very clearly in his two-minute-long address to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children this week as they met to discuss the Institutional Burials Bill. Sitting in his seat in the Dáil chamber, wearing a dark navy raincoat and his hands clasped in his lap, he looked noticeably tired.

‘I would like to know where my sister is at this moment,’ he told them. ‘I’m three years looking for records of my sister. Every time I go to bed at night I think of her, why am I left this way?

‘Is she dead or alive? I do not know, the information I have is so scant, it is unbelievable. To do this to a human being, who is recorded as being born a healthy baby and yet nine months later she died.

‘From what? Was it malnutrition, neglect, where they drowned? We don’t know.’

It is just over four years since I met Peter at his home in Ballinasloe in Galway. Although recovering from almost 30 rounds of chemotherapy and the same again of radiation to tackle his recently diagnosed colon cancer, he was impressively fit for a man of 73. Naturally quiet and reserved, and clearly very uncomfortable talking about his past, he did his best to answer everything I asked in a thoughtful, measured manner.

There were a lot of questions. The Tuam babies scandal had broken a couple of years earlier, and Peter was about to become heavily involved in the push for a full investigation into how almost 800 babies died at the mother and baby home, and where exactly they had been buried.

His own upbringing was particularly tragic. Born illegitimate, he was adopted out of the Galway home when he was four and half to an elderly woman and her son. He was put to work in the fields of their farm straight away, there were regular beatings and he left school early.

Life only got better when he met his wife Kathleen. They married when he was 33 years old and needing his baptismal certificate, he finally learned his mother’s name. He immediately tracked down her family, who told him how after having Peter she went to live in a Magdalene laundry in Galway city and she was still there. He went to meet her and recounted how she was a small, stooped and nervous woman of 66, who the nuns said was so institutionalised it would be impossible for her to leave them at this point.

He continued to visit her for the

Pain: Peter Mulryan has endured so much of it

next ten years, often bringing some of his own seven children to see her, until she died.

It was shocking for Peter to discover his mother had been living so close to where he was raised for all those years. But another, even bigger revelation was to come.

Local historian and Tuam babies whistle-blower Catherine Corless researched his mother’s time at the home and discovered she had another baby after Peter, a little girl called Marian.

But she also found a death certificate that recorded Marian as dying at nine months old after an hour and a half ‘of convulsions’. That’s all Peter has, those two certificates that show he had a sister.

And despite intense lobbying and countless stories shared by survivors and relatives of those who were born in those institutions, it seems he is not much closer to getting the answers he needs.

This week the Oireacthas committee was told by a host of witnesses and human rights experts that the proposed legislation for the excavation of the remains at places like Tuam ‘falls far, far short’ of what was ‘promised’.

In particular, the move to ‘disapply’ the requirement for inquests into deaths at the homes and bereaved families being excluded from investigations.

The exhaustion and disappointment was markedly etched on Peter Mulryan’s face. You could see how tired he is of having to tell his story, of having to explain why it is so important to him to find out what happened to the sister he never knew.

‘I want to know, my sibling, where she is now,’ he said. ‘I’m being denied all this information… I am so disheartened with it.’

It’s the knowing that matters most, it’s the knowing that brings some kind of comfort and allows people to finally rest.