In a quiet Irish housing estate, beside a playground where children’s laughter echoes through the summer air, a scene of unspeakable sorrow is about to be unearthed. Diggers have moved into Tuam.
What lies beneath this nondescript patch of grass in Tuam, County Galway, is believed to be the final resting place of hundreds of babies and young children — victims of a system that abandoned them in life and forgot them in death.
On Monday, an official two-year excavation will begin at the site of the former St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters from 1925 to 1961.
Behind the institution’s gates, women pregnant out of wedlock were hidden away from “respectable” society. Once they gave birth, most were separated from their children, many of whom would never leave the home alive.
The horror lay buried — quite literally — until one woman, a local amateur historian named Catherine Corless, refused to look away. Her painstaking investigation revealed what the Irish state, the Catholic Church, and much of society had long chosen to ignore: that at least 796 children had died while in the care of St Mary’s. And that nobody could say with certainty where their bodies lay.
“When I started out, I had no idea what I was going to find,” Corless said. What began as a curiosity about the “home children” who had once sat apart in her childhood classroom turned into a full-blown historical reckoning.
Corless encountered blank stares, closed doors, and a resistance that only sharpened her resolve. Eventually, a local caretaker led her to the plot next to the playground. There, nestled between flowerbeds and a small religious shrine, was a square of lawn where boys in the 1970s had found bones beneath a cracked concrete slab.
At first, locals assumed they were famine-era remains — after all, the site had once housed a 19th-century workhouse. But Corless knew the bodies of famine victims had been buried elsewhere, marked by a monument. What she uncovered instead was a jarring piece of evidence: an official 1929 map that labelled the spot a “sewage tank”, and another from the 1970s scrawled with a handwritten note — “burial ground”.
The implications were almost too awful to contemplate: the remains of hundreds of children, interred without ceremony, in what may once have been a septic tank.
Corless contacted the registrar in Galway for a list of the deceased children from the home. Expecting a few dozen names, she was stunned when she received a list of 796. Cross-referencing those names with graveyard records turned up nothing. These children had died — and then simply disappeared.
It took years before Corless’s findings finally drew the world’s attention. In 2014, her research sparked international outrage. Yet even then, many in Tuam refused to believe her. Some treated her with open hostility, resentful that she had dragged the past into the light. “People weren’t believing me,” she recalled. “Nobody thought someone like me could uncover something like this.”
But she had. And in 2017, an official investigation vindicated her. Forensic archaeologists, in a limited test excavation, confirmed that human remains were indeed buried in underground chambers — the same chambers believed to be part of the disused sewage system. The ages of the dead ranged from just 35 weeks’ gestation to three years old.
These were not famine victims. They were the sons and daughters of a broken, shamed, and silent Ireland.
Eyewitness testimony now echoes Corless’s findings. Mary Moriarty, who lived near the site in the 1970s, remembered boys playing with what turned out to be human skulls. One day, investigating further, she fell into a hole and landed in what she described as a chamber filled with “little bundles” — infant remains wrapped in rotting cloth. “Packed one after the other, in rows up to the ceiling,” she said. “Hundreds.”
It was only years later, when nuns brought her newborn son to her in a hospital swaddled in cloth like those bundles in the chamber, that the awful realisation came: “That’s when I copped on,” she said. “What I had seen after I fell down that hole were babies.”
Now, after years of foot-dragging and bureaucratic delay, the state has finally begun to act. The excavation will take at least two years. Each bone uncovered will be catalogued, tested, and — if possible — identified. For families still searching for answers, it is a long-overdue reckoning.
Former Taoiseach Enda Kenny once called Tuam a “chamber of horrors”. It is that — and more. It is a national disgrace, a monument to a time when women were exiled for the sin of motherhood, and their children condemned to a life — and death — of institutional neglect.
Ireland is not unique in having a dark past. But what it chooses to do with that past will define its future. The dig in Tuam is not just an archaeological operation; it is a moral exhumation. A country cannot move forward until it has faced what it buried — not just in the ground, but in the silence of its collective memory.
And thanks to Catherine Corless, that silence is finally broken.
Main Image: AugusteBlanqui via Wikipedia
