Tuam babies? I’m not talking about it anymore
We asked Terry Prone about law to exhume tragic site, she told us:
SHE publically criticised the research carried out by historian Catherine Corless, who exposed the Tuam baby scandal, but now PR executive Terry Prone has told the Irish Mail on Sunday she doesn’t ‘talk at all about Tuam’ anymore.
Ms Prone, described on her company’s website as a ‘leading adviser of reputational management and crisis handling’, told a French TV company in 2014 that the mass grave which possibly contains 796 babies was more likely to contain ‘Famine victims’. She also offered to put the company in touch with ‘reputable historians’.
In 2017, confronted on the issue, she admitted she was wrong – and said that she should have offered Ms Corless a personal apology at the time.
The MoS contacted Ms Prone, who acts as chairman for public relations firm The Communications Clinic, to see if she would now support Ms Corless in her new fight to have legislation for the full exhumation of the burials at the site of the controversial Mother and Baby Home, passed quickly.
‘I should have said sorry to Catherine’
She said: ‘I don’t talk at all about Tuam, Ger [her colleague] is the person you would need to talk to for that, thank you.’
The MoS also sought a comment from Ger Kenny, Ms Prone’s colleague, who reiterated that Ms Prone had no comment to make. He denied Ms Prone had spoken out against Ms Corless:
‘She didn’t talk out against Catherine. She gave a response to a video journalist in France that she has subsequently apologised for repeatedly on The Late Late and on the Seán O’Rourke show, it’s something she shouldn’t have done and she’s acknowledged that.’
In 2015, on behalf of the Order of the Bon Secours sisters who formerly managed the home, Ms Prone told a French journalist: ‘If you come here, you’ll find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried, and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, “Yeah, a few bones were found – but this was an area where Famine victims were buried. So?”’
Seeming to comment on the lengthy research carried out by Ms Corless, she added: ‘If you’d like me to point you at a few reputable historians who might be good, I’ll certainly do that.’
In an October 2017 interview on RTÉ’s Late Late Show, Ms Prone said following the first report from the test excavation of the site she realised they were not Famine bones. She also said: ‘It was the most shocking thing. I should have contacted Catherine and said: “I’m really sorry. Based on the evidence I had I believed they were Famine burials there but you were absolutely right and you were right to fight it through”.’
Ms Corless has recently said it was ‘unacceptable’ that the full excavation of the Tuam site could take up to a year to commence. She has said the consistent delays since her research was first revealed by the MoS is ‘cruel’ and that ‘time is running out’ for survivors who want to see progress made on the promises of full exhumation, DNA testing and reinternment of remains found of babies and children buried at the site.
Last week, survivors of the home told the MoS that the ‘wound is widening’ as delays continue to mount and those who wonder if they have brothers or sisters buried at the site, age and fear they will never get their answers.
A spokesman for the Department of Children and Youth Affairs told the MoS: ‘An identification programme will be contingent on a number of factors, including enactment of legislation based on the General Scheme [of the Certain Institutional Burials (Authorised Interventions) Bill 2019,] and subsequent exhumation of remains. This is a priority for the Minister and she hopes to have the legislation based on the General Scheme drafted and to bring it through the Oireachtas as soon as reasonably possible. It is not certain that an identification programme will be possible as we do not yet know if it will be possible to generate DNA profiles from the remains of sufficient quality to undertake familial comparison.’
‘I believed they were Famine burials’