‘Digging up bodies, burying the truth’

THEY’RE digging for bodies in Tuam. Bodies of little kids like yours and mine. But ones who didn’t always have the right kind of mammy or daddy. For a while they tried to convince us there were no little kids buried there. And then they said they might have been from the Famine. That would have been all right. We blame other people for the Famine.

But they aren’t from the Famine. They aren’t from ancient history at all. If those kids hadn’t died so young they would still be around now. But they died. And they were dumped there in the human waste and muck in Tuam with no acknowledgement that they had ever even lived. Forgotten in the dirt. Nothing to say: “We were here once, we walked the earth briefly. They sent our mother away, and they took us but they didn’t mind us and now here we lie.” No sign of them. Nothing to give them any voice from under the muck. Voiceless, as they were in their short lives.

In Ireland, we are obsessed with digging for bodies. We dig up the past and we are appalled and we wonder how it happened, and we thank God that we are not like that now. They were different times. People knew no better. And priests and nuns were cruel and heartless back then.

We have been digging up the recent past, too. We are trying to find out why Grace was sent back to her foster home to be abused again and again, for years on end.

Grace could probably tell us herself if she could speak. “I didn’t matter, because I’m broken and I have no voice and I’m just a problem to you all. And there were plenty to speak up for the people in the foster home but not so many to speak up for me.”

The problem is that the digging is getting closer and closer to home and we are having to dig less and less.

Grace is getting too close for comfort. And we can’t blame the Church or the past for what happened to her. And we were supposed to know better by the time it was happening to Grace.

Will future generations be as obsessed with digging? They will have plenty to dig for. Will they dig up the twisted spines of children who couldn’t get operations in one of the richest countries in the world? Will they dig up children who never learnt to speak or walk or dress themselves or have any dignity because there was no money for speech therapy or occupational therapy, because they waited years for what is laughably called early intervention?

Will they dig up the adults those children became? Who were placed in institutions and treated in ways that you wouldn’t treat animals? Will they dig up the children who had no homes, who grew up in hotel rooms? And who never found homes again?

We pride ourselves on how we value our children in this country. It upsets us so much when we see a little Syrian boy dead on a beach, or when we are confronted with the shameful past of that other Ireland, dug out of the muck in Tuam.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so smug. Because while politicians are busy fighting away in their bubble and making a balls of pretty much everything they turn their hands to, and while we’re busy arguing over what to do with the unborn children, too many of the ones already born are cast aside. Voiceless.

They’re digging for bodies in Tuam. But all the time we are burying more. We like to blame the nuns and the Church and the past and that other Ireland for the bodies in the muck. But who will they blame in another 50 years when they dig up our atrocities? Maybe we are all complicit in ways we don’t even realise and maybe we should all be ashamed of ourselves. Let’s not wait to hear children’s voices echo accusingly from 70 years ago. Seventy years too late. Let’s listen to them now.