VINDICATED FOR TRUTH OVER TUAM
NOW that we know the truth of what happened in the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, we must not allow the Order to avoid taking responsibility, even at this late stage, for what was done in their name and by their members. As news of the Mother and Baby Home Commission of Investigation findings spread on Friday, the Order put out a very insensitive statement. That statement was exactly the same as one they gave to me in 2013 when I was trying to find out more information about the site.
They said they have no records, that they passed them on to Galway County Council which in turn stated it passed them on to the western health board, now named the HSE.
I sit here today talking to people from all over the world who are shocked by what happened, and I wonder if my research had not been shared in the Irish Mail on Sunday in 2014 would those families have ever received this information?
There are some glimmers of light for
these families now. I spoke with Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone yesterday and felt she was genuinely speaking from the heart. She was upset, and wanted to make amends.
It would be a generous offering if both the Bon Secours Order and Galway County Council were to meet with the former residents of the Tuam home, especially those who have brothers or sisters buried in the tank, and offer an apology for discarding their loved ones in this manner.
Some of the survivors have been brave enough to share their stories with the media. But many more are simply too broken, they are too scarred and still feel the stigma that was falsely put upon them. They don’t have the courage to revisit that time.
It’s not clear what will happen with the site. It is in a housing estate, and a children’s playground covers part of the burial ground. We cannot now, after all these years, ask families to visit graves left in the middle of a housing estate. That would not be proper.
How can we memorialise a septic tank? The Commission said this week the children’s bodies have been found in two areas. They described one area as ‘large sewage containment system or septic tank that had been decommissioned and filled with rubble and debris and then covered with top soil’. They described the second area as ‘it appears to be related to the treatment/containment of sewage and/or waste water’.
It is heartrending to visualise scores of babies and toddlers, wrapped in bare shrouds, being transported through underground tunnels to lay them in a septic tank. But this is what happened.
The revelations on Friday from the Commission stating as an actual fact that a significant amount of human remains of infants and young children had been found in the septic tank, was a welcome relief for the many former residents at Tuam.
Over two years ago when my research went public in the MoS a lot of people were unhappy with that word ‘septic tank’. They couldn’t believe it so they didn’t want it to be true. Now we know that it is the truth.
I only ever stated facts. I had the records and the old maps and we had witnesses. It was indisputable but they were still insisting that
I had the records and only ever stated facts
my research was inaccurate.
We must remember; these children did not die in some far off time. The Commission has provisionally dated the remains from the 1920s to the 1960s.
There are people alive today who were in that home. Elderly women alive who lost babies in that home and are now wondering if these little bones are their children.
There are men and women alive who have searched all their lives for the brother or sister they may never have met, or met briefly. This news means vindication for them but surely also heartbreak.
I still remember as a child of maybe seven myself in Tuam seeing those children marching in lines from the Home to school. They wore big heavy clogs and you could hear them coming. I remember seeing broken glass in the cement along the top of the walls to stop them getting out.
We were taught by nuns, and they used to say if we misbehaved that we’d be put next to a Home child. That’s the type of humiliation that was there. As a little girl I remember wrapping a stone in a sweet paper and handing it to one of the Home girls as a joke, and at the time I had no idea of what a sweet would have meant to that child. And to this day I deeply regret that little incident.
This sense of injustice has driven me for years as a local historian to research, to collect 796 death certificates and find out what happened behind those walls.
Also, we know there are other burials; all of the dead children are not together down in the tanks. We know the nuns did advertise for elaborate coffins. However, we know, again because this is recent history, we know the carpenters made very simple, white coffins.
So we must look beyond the septic tanks, horrific as they are. In the playground on the site you can see indentations in the grass which strongly suggest burials.
We cannot forget anyone. Many of those little children do not have family to commemorate them, so we must continue to speak for them. The tragedy now is we don’t know how many bodies are in these tanks. I have found death records for 796 children, are they all there? Were some of them sent to America through illegal adoption schemes? All these details must be accounted for to protect these children’s memories. Each and every one of those 796 babies must be accounted for. And that will be my aim.
Evidence strongly suggests other burials