How Tuam happened

Back in Tuam in the 1980s, I was friendly with a girl my own age who got pregnant. We were both convent-educated west of Ireland girls, and anyone over 35 will comprehend at once all that is implied by those few words – ‘west of Ireland’, ‘convent, ‘1980s’.

The Bon Secours Mother and Baby home at Dublin Road had been closed for decades by then. But not much else had changed. ‘Illegitimacy’ was still very much a problem, and, it was still very much a specifically female problem.

People under 35 visit that foreign country that is the recent past as mere tourists. The rest of us were prisoners there. It is almost impossible to get across how much gumption it took for this young woman to stand her ground, endure the insults, go through with her pregnancy on her own, and keep her child as a single mother, so I’ll offer a clue.

One of the insults my friend endured was being called ‘a whore’. She herself worried that people would think she was ‘a whore’, and it seemed she was right. And the kindest thing some well-wisher thought to say by way of support? ‘Whores don’t get pregnant.’ In that world, the only sin worse than having sex outside marriage was the sin of using contraception while doing it. What’s worse is that my friend was gratified by the remark.

This was the 1980s; not the 1930s, or even the 1950s, when hundreds of pregnant women were still being incarcerated a little over a kilometre from the town’s market square. The status of illegitimacy was not done away with in Ireland until 1987. Contraception would not become freely available until 1992. The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996. Back in the ’80s, you could not prevent a pregnancy by artificial means, and your child would be an ‘illegitimate’ child. Somehow not a legitimate child.

The fearful and fearsome culture in which we grew up – the culture that allowed women to be imprisoned and enslaved, that sundered children from their mothers, and that has left us today with many thousands of dead infants lying in unmarked graves – was a faithful reflection of Christian doctrine.

In view of that, it’s worth looking at the doctrine as it might have applied to the children ‘laid to rest’ in Tuam. Consider, for instance, this telling quote from the Vatican: ‘A human cadaver is not trash.’ It’s from Cardinal Gerhard Müller in an ‘instruction’ issued in 2016 on the treatment of human remains. ‘The Catholic Church insists that the bodies of the deceased be treated with respect and laid to rest in a consecrated place.’

It does now, that is. Until 1983, Canon Law forbade ecclesiastical burials for babies who died unbaptised, as having been born with Original Sin uncleansed, they could not hope to ‘commune with the beatific vision’. Unbaptised babies weren’t alone in this. The 1912 code also included suicides, apostates, people who’d been cremated, and, notably, women who had died in childbirth before they could be ‘churched’. The Anglican church had a similar prohibition.

Some of the Tuam remains unearthed by the Commission, though, are of children as old as three years. Are we to assume they had still not been baptised after three years? Or were baptised children being denied – along with so many of their rights – the ecclesiastical right to be buried in consecrated ground? Was the stain of illegitimacy so indelible that it obliterated even the claim to eternal salvation?

The countryside is dotted with cillíní – unconsecrated burial grounds for dead infants. There are some 50,000 babies in the Old Plot at Glasnevin, a mass burial practice that continued until the 1970s.

And Tuam is by no means an isolated case, as the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors has pointed out. There are 227 children buried in the grounds of Protestant Bethany home in Dublin, and Bessborough in Cork reportedly recorded 472 infant deaths between 1934 and 1953 – a higher mortality rate even than Tuam. The survivors believe the nine homes covered by the Commission’s terms of reference are responsible for the deaths of 6,000 infants.

Infant mortality in Ireland in the 1940s was 66 per 1,000 live births, or 6.6%. By the 1950s – which is when many of the Tuam remains are said to date from – it was 37 or 3.7%. In both those decades infant mortality was already much higher in this country than in Northern Ireland or Britain. Yet in the Tuam home in one year the rate was 31.6%. In Bessborough in the 1940s it went as high as 68%.

We know, and have known for a long time, that ‘fallen women’ were treated appallingly in Ireland until very recently – by the church (indeed by more than one of the churches), by the State, and by their own kith and kin. We know that a

woman who became pregnant outside marriage usually disappeared.

We know that their children were ostracised, abused, boarded out for slave labour, and even trafficked. We know that those children were dying in institutions, in alarming numbers, of preventable conditions such as marasmus, or severe malnutrition. What’s worse, the evidence suggests people knew this was going on while it was going on. It may have taken the dedicated work of an unpaid and self-taught historian to uncover it now, but Catherine Corless found death records for 796 Tuam babies. Their deaths were reported as they happened, and nobody wondered at it.

What makes the Tuam story more chilling is the matter of the treatment of the remains after death, and in that respect the Commission’s findings so far have thrown up as many questions as answers. We now know there are bodies in what appears to be a septic tank. We don’t yet know how many, and we won’t until the Commission orders whatever DNA recoveries or exhumations it deems necessary to determine the facts. Moreover, we don’t yet know how many facts are going to be deemed necessary before the case is closed on the basis that certain principles have been established beyond doubt. After all, the Commission isn’t even investigating every Mother and Baby home, let alone every tiny body buried in the grounds thereof.

It’s possible we may never get empirical proof of how many bodies are in Tuam, or elsewhere. There may be arguments on the internet for months about one man’s septic tank being another man’s makeshift crypt. But even if the what and the who and the when were established once and for all, the past always recedes into foreignness. As we go along, it will become harder and harder to recall why this happened.

In Catherine Corless’s article for the Journal Of The Old Tuam Society, she quotes the writer Halliday Sutherland, who visited the Tuam home for his ‘Irish Journey’ in 1956: ‘I was mobbed by over a score of the younger children. They said nothing but each struggled to shake my hand… Then I realised that to these children I was a potential adopter who might take some boy or girl away to a real home. It was pathetic… At the Dogs’ Home in Battersea, every dog barks at the visitor in the hope that it will be taken away.’

The dogs’ home analogy is compelling. By the moral standards of today, what kind of heartless person would bury a dog in a septic tank?