The mass graves in Tuam are only the tip of the iceberg
YESTERDAY our sister paper the Irish Daily Mail revealed that three other children’s mass graves exist in former mother and baby homes in Seán Ross Abbey, St Peter’s in Castepollard and Bessborough, Cork.
Today, the MoS can reveal a potential fifth site where the bodies of hundreds of children may have been dumped in Loughrea, Co. Galway. Locals claim that there is a site on the grounds of the Sisters of Mercy Convent which was used to bury the children who died in St Brigid’s Industrial School.
When the MoS when searching this week, no burial records for children at the school could be found by Galway County Council. The nuns this week refused to respond to detailed questions on the issue.
One local source said: ‘The school ran for 100 years yet there’s only a grave for six children in a cemetery that opened in the 1950s. Where are all the other children?
‘There are six cemeteries in Loughrea. None of them date back to 1869, the oldest is from the 1950s, so they are not in there. Half the kids in there would have had every disease going and the mortality rate would have been high too.’
St Brigid’s, which was managed by the Mercy Nuns, opened on November 25, 1869 and closed in 1967.
One woman began to unearth some of its secrets after searching for the burial place of her aunt, who died in 1918.
Mary Mollie Corrigan from Dominick Street, in Dublin’s north inner city, was charged with ‘want of proper guardianship’ and sentenced to 10 years at St Brigid’s in Loughrea on June 3, 1911.
Mary was just 13 when she died from pneumonia on November 1, 1918 and her death cert confirms her place of death was the ‘Industrial School Loughrea’. There are no other burial records for the child in the county.
However, in a letter to her relative on January 21, 2013 from the Mercy Congregation Archives and seen by the MoS, the nuns confirmed Mary did attend the school but said: ‘We
‘Where are all the other children buried?’
do not have information to show where Mary Corrigan was buried.’
‘I just want to know where she is’ said her niece. ‘We have a family plot in Dublin and if we found her I’d have her moved but she is not in any of the burial records in Loughrea or the surrounding counties.
‘It’s terrible sad what happened to her, going to court as a child and being sentenced to an industrial school would have been hell on earth.’
Mary was born on June 4, 1905 at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin to her parents John and Anne Corrigan.
Anne died from TB and her three children were all sent to Industrial schools, Mary went to Loughrea while her brothers, John and William, were sent to Kilkenny. In school reports provided by the Mercy Nuns and dated October 12, 1915, Mary was described as ‘a good child, very satisfactory and a little bit giddy’. Two years before she died, she was visited by a doctor who reported: ‘Found her with a high temperature which I find to continue up to 8th and I can discover no definite to disease to account for it.
On July 8, he reported: ‘Again visited Mollie Corrigan she has a coated tongue with a temperature 101.6.’
St Brigid’s Industrial School, Loughrea was managed by the Sisters of Mercy. It operated in 1869 and closed in 1967, it was originally certified to accommodate 150 girls.
A spokesman for the Department of Education said: ‘They do not hold the burial records for the children’.
‘While the Department has records of pupils who were committed by the courts, it does not have records of pupils placed in industrial schools by local authorities under the Public Assistance Acts or the Health Acts or voluntary placements. As noted in the Ryan Report, 27,000 pupil files of children admitted through the Courts are missing.’
There are six graveyards in Loughrea and Garrybreeda on the Ballinsloe Road.