I thought I’d seen it all with Philomena. And then I found nuns’ secret grave... for 800 babies

His exposure of the Sisters who sold the children of ‘fallen’ girls became a hit film. But the writer was to make a discovery even more horrifying...

We children burst open the slab... the tank was full of skeletons

IN NEARLY two decades as a foreign correspondent, I covered stories of mass graves in far-flung locations in Eastern Europe and Russia. The thought of them has remained lodged in my memory. But never did I expect to be covering a mass grave from modern times on my own doorstep; I thought Western and Northern Europe was immune from such horrors. Yet that is exactly what I came across in January this year in the small Irish town of Tuam in County Galway, an ugly place with its rundown streets and council estates.

On a grey, rainy afternoon, I was taken to a patch of land in the centre of one such estate. Surrounded by houses built in the 1970s, on the edge of a scruffy playground, I found a plaster statue of the Madonna on a pile of stones, incongruously sheltered by an old enamel bathtub. Beneath it were the bodies of nearly 800 babies.

The remains of a forbidding 8ft wall nearby were a clue to the place’s history. Until 1961 this had been the site of a Catholic religious community run by the Sisters of Bon Secours.

They had bought the workhouse in the 1920s and converted it into a home for unmarried mothers. For the next 36 years, the nuns took in thousands of women. In those days, sex outside marriage was proclaimed a mortal sin.

The Church said the girls were ‘fallen women’ and degenerates. Their crime had to be hidden, their babies delivered in secret behind high walls, and their children taken away.

News of the mass graves at Tuam finally made the newspapers last week, but I had heard of the site and visited the shrine five months ago while researching a BBC TV documentary about the estimated 60,000 babies that the Church took for adoption in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them sent to America in return for large payments disguised as ‘donations’.

I had written about one such case in my book Philomena, later made into a film starring Judi Dench.

The hundreds of letters I received from mothers and children forcibly separated by the nuns, and still seeking each other even now, made me painfully aware of the full human tragedy behind Ireland’s mother and baby homes. But Tuam had other, even darker secrets.

I talked to local residents and met John, now in his 80s and one of the first to move into the estate in October 1972, who told me how children made a grim discovery on the grassy area. He said: ‘Not too long after we came here they were playing football and they saw something they thought was a ball or something. They kicked it around, but when we looked at it we saw it was a child’s skull.’

Worse was to follow. ‘The local lads used to go fishing in the river’, John said. ‘They needed to dig for worms and one day they lifted up some old slabs that had been lying since before the estate was built…’

What the boys found was horrific. The slabs concealed the entrance to a Victorian septic tank built for the workhouse. Its original function had ceased in the 1930s when mains sewerage came, but the nuns had seemingly put it to a new and grisly use.

Barry Sweeney, one of the boys there that day, says: ‘It was a concrete slab, but there was something hollow underneath it, so we decided to bust it open and it was full to the brim with skeletons. The priest came over and blessed it. I had nightmares over it.’

Like all the mother and baby homes run by the Church, conditions in Tuam had been primitive. The girls were denied basic medical care and refused