AGONY IN THE GARDEN
The Bon Secours order faces calls to fund Tuam home survivors’ attempts to claim the remains of the dead infants, writes Maeve Sheehan
THE discovery of a “significant number” of infant remains in an underground container on the site of a former mother and baby home in Tuam was met with shock and horror last Friday. But not by Peter Mulryan, who heard the announcement with relief.
The elderly man is suffering from cancer and has spent anguished years searching to find out the fate of his infant sister. She is listed on the register of deaths for the St Mary’s home as Marian Brigid Mulryan, who died on December 22, 1955, aged 10 months. The cause of her death is listed as “a convulsion (or fit)” lasting one-and-a-half hours.
She was among 796 children who died at the home in the care of the Bon Secours order between the 1920s and 1960s. There is no record of where Marian Brigid is buried, and no headstone to acknowledge her short existence.
Peter wonders whether she actually died, or if she was trafficked to the US for a clandestine adoption, as he suspects hundreds of others were.
He went into the Tuam mother and baby home with his mother when he was just four days old. His mother appeared to have been dispatched to a Magdalene laundry. He was “boarded out” to a family whom he claimed treated him as “child labourer”.
He never knew his sister and, in the rest of his lifetime, he wants to find out all he can about her.
Last Friday, his first thought was for Marian Brigid. Had he finally found her?
“I hope so,” he said. “I haven’t a clue until the DNA is done whether she was fostered out to America or sold off or dead. I do not know. Not a clue. She was 10 years younger than me. So many of them were shipped off to America at that time.
“Friday was a very special day though, I can tell you that. [I felt] Elation and sadness, both. I never thought March 3, 2017, would be such an historic day in my life. It was the first sign of hope.”
If Marian Brigid is positively identified, Peter will take her back to her family.
“I will take her out of there anyway, and I will bring her to our own family plot,” he said. “Of course, it would mean so much to us. We have been so distraught.”
There is a long road ahead before Peter will get to take his sister to her rightful resting place.
When the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation was established two years ago, it was against a backdrop of international headlines of babies being dumped in a septic tank at St Mary’s in Tuam that was run by the Bon Secours nuns until the 1960s.
The home was run by the Bon Secours sisters from 1925 until 1961 in what was previously a workhouse dating back to famine times. In the 1970s, the former home was demolished to make way for a local authority housing estate.
For years, rumours have circulated in the local area that children were buried in the grounds. A small memorial garden is maintained by local residents and there is also a children’s playground on the site.
The painstaking research of local historian Catherine Corless confirmed the scale of deaths at the home — 796 children over five decades. She failed to find a single burial record. She did more research, studying maps and plans of the home; she talked to local people who, as children, recalled stumbling upon tiny skulls in some sort of crypt. She concluded that the bodies of dead children may have been placed in the disused septic tank.
Her findings, published in local papers and then picked up by the national press, were met with scepticism.
The Bon Secours religious order suggested there was nothing to see here. Terry Prone, the PR guru hired by the nuns at the time, emailed 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?’”
Last Friday, Catherine Corless was vindicated.
Test excavations conducted by the Commission revealed two large structures.
One appeared to be a decommissioned septic tank, filled with rubble, the second was a “long structure divided into 20 chambers” that may have been part of the sewerage system.
“In this second structure, significant quantities of human remains have been discovered in at least 17 of the 20 underground chambers which were examined,” the Commission said in a statement.
A small number of remains were removed for analysis and confirmed that their ages ranged from 35 foetal weeks to two to three years.
“Radiocarbon dating of the samples recovered suggest that the remains date from the time frame relevant to the operation of the mother and baby home (the mother and baby home operated from 1925 to 1961; a number of the samples are likely to date from the 1950s),” it added.
The Commission concluded that the investigation was “shocking”. For a State author- ity to use such language was in itself significant.
Sources suggested that the number of bodies disposed of there could be in the hundreds.
Yesterday, Catherine said: “It is apparent now that that became an ideal place to put the children in the nuns’ eyes, which was awful.”
The Commission has concluded its excavations. It has now handed over responsibility for exhuming the remains of these unclaimed anonymous children to Galway County Council and to the Galway County Coroner. But the Commission will continue to investigate “who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way”.
An explanation nor an apology has been forthcoming from the Bon Secours order. When the scandal first broke in 2014, the nuns issued a statement that said they no longer held the burial records.
“In 1961, the home was closed. All records were returned to the local authority, and would now be within the Health Service Executive, Co Galway,” it said at the time.
The order has dwindled to a handful of surviving sisters, the vast majority of whom are in their 70s or 80s.
It will be up to the coroner to decide whether the deaths should be investigated by gardai.
A criminal investigation into what happened could prove complex and fraught, according to one legal source, starting with establishing what crime was committed and by whom.
Gardai have been drafted in to advise on excavating the site. The State forensic anthropologist Dr Lorraine Buckley is expected to play a key role in establishing a year of death.
The death register shows that the children suffered malnutrition and neglect, and died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.
Tom McHugh, who chairs the municipal council, said: “I am quite sure that they will get a decent Christian burial.”
This weekend residents in the housing estate built on the site of the former mother and baby home are having to get on with doing the washing, feeding the kids, and all the routine stuff.
Beneath their feet, dead children remain in their mass grave this weekend, awaiting exhumation and, hopefully, repatriation with their families, although how that will be done remains unclear.
Catherine said: “This mess does not belong to the survivors. This mess belongs to the Bon Secours sisters. If a DNA centre has to be set up and funded, who should fund it? The Bon Secours sisters are responsible. Galway County Council are responsible as well, as they own the grounds.”
She urged the authorities to reach out now to the survivors of those homes.
“They are so grateful that announcement was made yesterday,” she said.
“And they are just waiting — for an apology and for accountability.”