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On a balmy summer day, the site of the children’s mass grave in Tuam appears deceptively bucolic. There are no crosses or tombstones in the walled patch of grass. Butterflies flit over shrubs. Robins cheep from branches. It’s peaceful.
“They are two-feet down from where we are standing,” Catherine Corless said. “The bones have mingled together and water got in and thrashed them around. But they’re there.”
Corless is the local historian who a decade ago alerted Ireland, and the world, to a shocking truth about this Galway town: for decades an institution for unmarried mothers put the remains of dead babies and children in a disused subterranean septic tank
Corless found that, between 1925 and 1961, 796 children died at the St Mary’s mother and baby home, run by nuns from the Bon Secours order – but there were no burial records. Many are believed to have ended up in the former sewage facility.
“It became a handy way to dispose of them,” Corless told the Observer. “They didn’t have to account for the deaths. They didn’t want anyone to know. All this time those poor little remains were disintegrating.”
‘A stain on Ireland’s conscience’: identification to begin of 796 bodies buried at children’s home
Between 1925 and 1961, babies and children were interred in the home’s grounds, many in a septic tank
