In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green
landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a
place
called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.
Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for
their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in
other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so
fortunate.
More than five decades after the
Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and
children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those
abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a
massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten,
with neither gravestones nor coffins.
“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who
uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of
never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone
interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”
The grim findings, which are being investigated by police, provide a
glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in
Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without
means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home.
“When daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,”
Corless said. “Families would be afraid of neighbors finding out,
because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It
was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time
it had been because of a rape.”
According to documents Corless provided the
Irish Mail on Sunday, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the
children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis
and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high.
“If you look at the records,
babies were dying two a week, but I’m still trying to figure out how
they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],” Corless said. “Couldn’t
they have afforded baby coffins?”
Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities remember them.
They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms,
and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the
others. They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were “usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.”
According to Irish Central,
a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the
Home as “emaciated,” “pot-bellied,” “fragile” and with “flesh hanging
loosely on limbs.”
Corless has a vivid recollection of the Home Babies. “If you acted up
in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home
Babies,” she said. She
said she recalled one instance in which an older schoolgirl wrapped a
tiny stone in a bright candy wrapper and gave it to a Home Baby as a
gift.
“When the child opened it, she saw she’d been fooled,” Corless told Irish Central.
“Of course, I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another
little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time…. Years after, I
asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a
sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up
to them.”
She said she first started investigating the Home, which most locals
wanted to “forget,” when she started working on a local annual
historical journal. She heard there was a little graveyard near what had
been the Home, and that piqued her curiosity. How many children were
there?
So she requested the records through the local registration house to
find out. The attendant “came back a couple of weeks later and said the
number was staggering, just hundreds and hundreds, that it was nearly
800 dead children,” Corless said.
Once, in 1995, Corless said in the phone interview, several boys had
stumbled across the mass grave, which lay beneath a cracked piece of
concrete: “The boys told me it had been filled to the brim with human
skulls and bones. They said even to this day they still have nightmares
of finding the bodies.”
Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the mass grave, which
will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. “God knows
who else is in the grave,” one anonymous source told the Daily Mail. “It’s been lying there for years, and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.”
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