After a decade of research and advocacy, I can take a back seat

TUESDAY, February 22, 2022 was a very important day for Tuam babies and one that will live long in my memory.

It was the day the longawaited announcement finally came from Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman that the Institutional Burials Bill was being published, which would ensure further excavations at the Tuam home site, that babies would be exhumed by a forensic team, DNA tested in the hopes of matching with relatives, and forensically tested for any unnatural deaths.

And, lastly, that the babies would at least be given a proper decent dignified burial.

It was an important day for me too. I have dedicated the past decade to trying to unearth the truth and to see justice done for the 796 innocent babies.

Five years had now passed since their remains were discovered in the 23 chambers of a sewage system on the grounds of the former mother and baby home in Tuam, which was run by the Bon Secours Sisters from 1925 until 1961, when they closed its doors for good.

Our local newspaper, The Tuam Herald, gave space to a column at the time, reporting that the slates were already flying off the roof of the home on that September day in 1961 as Storm Debbie raged.

But no mention was given that, behind the gates and high walls of the mother and baby home, hundreds of babies and young children lay beneath these grounds, many of them discarded in a sewage tank. Others buried in boxes in ground that was later overlain with tarmacadam.

Was it known? Was it presumed by all that those illegitimate babies had lived and had been fostered out to families? Was Galway County Council, who owned the site and frequently called to check the home registers not aware of their existence? Were no questions asked? Did illegitimate children not matter? These are the questions that had haunted me over the past decade.

Initially, my research into the Tuam mother and baby home was for an essay for the local historical annual. It consisted of scrolling through archival material and many visits to libraries, examining Ordnance Survey maps of Tuam town and folklore. And the latter proved to be my best source as, on speaking to the local cemetery caretaker, he mentioned he feared some of the babies could be buried in a corner of a housing estate which was built in the 1970s on the old grounds.

He took me to the area and told me a story about how two young boys had come across some sort of pit, right under our feet, and that they saw a significant number of baby skulls and bones.

‘Famine bones,’ he said was the conclusion the gardaí and authorities came to after examining the remains. But from my research I knew that where we stood was, in fact, a very large old sewage facility which was in use during the Workhouse period and did not become defunct until the late 1930s.

Discarding babies in a sewage tank while in use was not a possibility, so I knew it had to be after this period – and this was subsequently proven by the archaeologists who were sent by the Commission of Inquiry to examine the site back in 2016.

Other material I researched pertained to the treatment of mothers who were incarcerated in the home and to the babies who were born to them, which showed a harsh, uncaring regime of poor feeding, cruelty, neglect, discrimination and total lack of medical care.

Toys, books or stimulation of any sort for toddlers was nonexistent. Beatings were frequent. Their young lives were pure misery.

I think I was quite naive in the early days of my research, for I breathed a sigh of relief when in March 2017, then children’s minister Katherine Zappone, made the unexpected announcement that the archaeologists had found that 23 chambers of the sewage tank in Tuam contained the skeletal remains of babies who had died in the home. I honestly thought my job was done, that the Bon Secours Sisters along with Galway County Council, the Catholic Church and government would take immediate action … for they all expressed horror and disbelief that this could have happened.

Alas, it was not to be.

Oh sure, accolades came in by the dozen from all and sundry in government for my discovery, but as time passed nothing happened. The hullabaloo died down and the council backfilled the site. More time passed.

It would take almost five more years of painstaking effort to keep pressure on the government, along with help from the media through newspaper articles, documentaries, short films, radio interviews, public appearances, which succeeded in keeping alive the tragic story of the Tuam babies. Thank you all.

Thanks too to the ordinary decent people of Ireland, who through their initiatives tried to express their sadness for those babies, and for all the cards, emails, letters, and messages of support which gave me the courage to keep going.

Now, I hope, I can finally take a back seat.

Catherine Corless is the historian who uncovered the Tuam Babies scandal, news of which was first published in the Irish Mail on Sunday