Preparatory work begins ahead of Tuam mother and baby home mass grave excavation in Co. Galway

[IwantToRetire]

The preparatory phase, which will last around four weeks, comes ahead of the full-scale excavation of the site to try to identify the remains of infants who died at the home between 1925 and 1961.

In 2014, research led by local historian Catherine Corless indicated that 796 babies and young children were buried in a sewage system at the Co Galway institution across that time period.

The St Mary’s home for unmarried mothers and their children was run by the Bon Secours Sisters, a religious order of Catholic nuns.In 2021, Taoiseach Micheal Martin delivered an apology on behalf of the state for the treatment of women and children who were housed in mother and baby homes across Ireland.

The Bon Secours Sisters also offered a “profound apology” after acknowledging the order had “failed to protect the inherent dignity” of women and children in the Tuam home.

One of the main responsibilities will be to ensure any remains that are uncovered are re-interred in a respectful and appropriate way.

Full article https://www.itv.com/news/utv/2025-06-16/mass-grave-excavation-at-mother-and-baby-home-to-begin

Very difficult to tell natural causes versus not this long down the line. Shaking sometimes leaves rib fractures, and rarer blunt force trauma might leave skull fractures, but so much evidence lost. I would also argue strongly that babies and young children who are subject to neglect are more likely to die of “natural causes” - which in some cases would be closer to gross negligence manslaughter. But again that’s unlikely to be apparent now. Those poor babies, and their vulnerable mothers, will never know true justice, but maybe a weak partial light may be shone.

The issue is however or why they died (seems an incredibly high number) is the terrible callous treatment of the bodies.

So much for "Christian" values.

Workhouses or mother and baby homes? The latter were still functioning until the 80s and possibly early 90s. My mother was an Irish girl who came to England to have her baby and have it adopted. That child is now in his 50s. Mum would have been 85 but died a long time ago. I find the actions of the Church (and parts of the community) utterly abhorrent.

Yes, the treatment in both life and death was shamefully unchristian. And I would be more likely to believe in the remorse of the higher ups in the Catholic Church if they had sorted out safeguarding properly even today. (Raised Catholic)

My ex husband was born in a home in the late 60's. Fair play to his grandfather, once he realised what had happened, he drove up and brought his mother and him home. They were there about 10 days in total and he was the only one out of about 20 babies and mothers in the home at that time to leave with his mother. My ex mil had gone to England to work when she was pregnant but came home just before she was due. There is still trauma to this day. Me and my ex went to counselling and he was asked about his childhood but he wouldn't say one word about it, his childhood I mean. So it's not even one generation removed yet, sadly.

Forgot to say ex mil is in her early eighties.

The word 'workhouses' in my post was a subtly cunning clue that I mean 'workhouses'.

People do know that the NHS-run unmarried mother provision in England up to the 1970s was also pretty grim? I remember my mother being very shocked when hearing from one of her best sixth-formers that she had (a) been given no chance to keep her baby and (b) was made breast-feed him for six week before handing him over to his adoptive parents. That was East Anglia in the late 1960s.

The world expects a lot from young women, and doesn't give much back.

This graph is from an academic paper looking at infant mortality in the mother and baby homes. Look at how high Tuam goes above the infant mortality in the general population.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-024-09901-7/figures/5

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-024-09901-7

Callous? Maybe so, but maybe not - interment underground e.g. crypts is not unusual, and the communal burial area, one of many in the vicinity, may have been 'Christian' consecrated ground.

All the 796 deaths, which took place over decades, were not hidden, they were officially recorded, with date and cause of death, so there is at least the possibility that the same care was taken in committing them to their resting place.

The narrative that they were 'dumped' - Catherine Corless has rejected the term - has gone all around the world and back again, with little room for raising questions about aspects of the accepted narrative that are open to debate or interpretation.

If you read the article or listened to the interview this has NOTHING what so ever to do with crypts.

This is about putting the bodies of dead babies in the sewage system.

Yes, this was discussed earlier in the thread.

Such a sad story. And I am sure it wasn't always that young women were kicked out of their homes, and also that many genuinely believed that a service provided by the Church would take care of their daughter and her child.

The ongoing trauma sadly does thread through generations.

And of course for the fathers of these poor babies, they just carry on with their lives.

Many of those babies have living relatives who have given DNA.

What’s worse is he was told that he would be told who his father is, or was, when he was a teenager by both his mother and grandmother but his mother didn’t actually know who his father was. I always thought that was extremely cruel.

I've done an awful lot more than 'reading the article' or 'listening to the interview', and I have been doing so for years, which is why I know what I know - e.g. that it was not 'the sewage system' of the institution, it was a disused underground chamber or series of chambers dating from the 19th century workhouse, which was the building's original function.

It was not part of the current sewage system. It was not, as some narratives state, a 'septic tank'.

A crypt is an underground space used for 'burial', or interment, of the dead.
These chambers seem to have been repurposed to fulfil the same function as a crypt. So there is a similarity in the mode of burial i.e. in an existing underground space, rather than digging a grave.

In cases like this, the facts alone are bad enough, so I try research as many historical facts as I can, and stay within the limits of what's verifiable.

Ireland had its own version of Catholicism, I was brought up in it and it was not a pleasant part of my life. The Catholicism that I lived through was very sexist and highly judgemental. It was extremely socially conservative and more or less preached that bad things happen to people because God is punishing them for something. God’s love was low down on the order of things that Irish Catholics were taught by priests, brothers, and nuns

A lot of nuns of that era didn’t become nuns voluntarily or because of a religious calling. There was a custom among large Catholic families that one son and one daughter should join the church (I encountered this custom in action as late as the early 90s). There was also a custom of girls sent away to boarding school at convents who stayed on and joined the religious order because they had no family support or any other way of supporting themselves. There were many social reasons why many Irish nuns were angry, bitter women who took their personal frustrations out on the women and children in their care.

It’s a dark part of our history as a nation.

@UtopiaPlanitia That's a very insightful post, thank you. The Catholicism I know absolutely has its roots in Ireland (as that's where big chunks of my family tree are from) but I'd never thought about Irish Catholicism being different to general Catholicism. Mostly, I suppose, because it's my only experience of it. I very much noticed the difference, however, between Catholicism and the vague CofE-ness I experienced at school. The latter seemed to be a lot more about God's love, forgiveness, and cups of tea!

I also had no idea about how women came to be nuns, and the bitterness of enforced taking of vows would explain the distinctly Aunt Lydia attitudes.

It happened in my own extended family that in an ‘unwanted' daughter was sent to join a convent at the age of 14. Her mother had died and the stepmother didn’t want her around. As an adult, that woman was not a nice nun or person.

I’m not saying all members of religious orders were horrible in Ireland but there were a lot of bitter and angry nuns, brothers, and priests encountered by my parents’ and grandparents’ and even my generation. The horror stories I’ve heard over the years were heartbreaking.

And the older version of Catholicism in Ireland was big on punishment and guilt. I’ve been told myself by a priest (in the late 90s) that a life threatening illness I suffered was punishment from God. And I also remember my grandmothers telling me they had to be ‘churched’ after every birth and it continued into the 1960s in our parish.

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/churching-labour-and-deliveries/28892816.html

The scandal of 796 dead Irish babies — and one woman’s fight

https://www.thetimes.com/article/1f368075-5d6e-448d-a981-97ce45a3dbbd?shareToken=bbc63fb09e767959c522edc186a8a679

Excellent article on Catherine Corless, who fought to investigate and publicise the burials

There was a lot that was horrible about the way the poor were treated in the past. There's still a lot wrong with the way the poor are treated. That report misses two things.

First, just how high childhood and neonatal mortality was. Between 1920 and 1945 both my grandmothers gave birth 13 times. They both raised 8 living children to adulthood. Neither was living in poverty or deprivation.
All my city grandmother's babies were born in hospital and had birth certificates. Only one of my country grandmother's, all born at home, did. All the babies born in council homes (mostly run by nuns, as in Tuam) had birth/death certificates. That skews the statistics.

Second, the burial of children who died in the council homes at Tuam was the responsibility of the county council. Whoever put the poor little corpses to rest, whether in the cement vault or elsewhere, it wasn't 'the nuns'.

It really depended on money

If the family needed the older ones to bring money in to feed the younger ones then they went to work
My grandmother died leaving grandad with seven the youngest 2/3 yrs old so my mum went off to be a maid of all work at the big house when she was 14. ( the year granny died). She sent all the money back to grandad.
There’s no way he could afford to feed her too and no way she could have joined the nuns. He needed the extra wage.

For families where that wasnt an issue then yes it was ‘understood’ one would be a priest and one a nun.

My family members that weren’t so destitute had several nuns in each family

I agree entirely with your broader point, @DeanElderberry. A lot of overseas coverage gets significant things wrong. The unsettling fact was that this was never a matter of evil religious orders snatching babies and mistreating women in secret. Everyone knew. The laundries were locally prominent, and did the linen for the big hotels, big local businesses, boarding schools, the army etc. The county councils paid religious orders to run them. Pregnant women’s families often were the ones bringing them in. I live in a Victorian house next door to a former Magdalen laundry and orphanage, and I know that the prosperous Church of Ireland family living here in the early 1900s got their servant girls from the orphanage. The convent only closed in the 1990s and my neighbours used to go to Mass in the convent church and have women from the convent in as cleaners.

And a friend of mine is working on the dig and has been involved since the first excavations there. That article doesn’t mention that many relatives/possible relatives of babies buried in Tuam don’t want them exhumed. They want them left undisturbed, and the land consecrated and turned into a proper cemetery. Because it’s not going to be possible to separate out individual skeletons of tiny babies buried for 100 years. And that it’s also simply not going to be possible to extract DNA and identify named individuals to the extent hoped by some families. So some people are unhappy either way.

For more than a decade Catherine Corless defied ridicule and disbelief in her search for the shocking truth of what happened at Tuam’s mother and baby home
https://observer.co.uk/news/international/article/catherine-corless-why-i-refused-to-give-up-until-i-learned-the-fate-of-those-lost-souls-in-tuam

https://archive.is/iay8U

Also this interview https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct7wzt