Tuam, Ireland
CNN
–
When Annette McKay’s first grandson was born, she thought her mother, Maggie O’Connor, would surpass the moon. She became a great grandmother.
Instead, McKay spotted her sobbing and crying outside her house: “It’s a baby, a baby.”
McKay reassured her 70-year-old mother that her great grandson was in good health. But O’Connor hadn’t spoken about him.
“It’s my baby, not your baby,” O’Connor said. Her first child, Mary Margaret, passed away in June 1943, just six months old.
It was the only time O’Connor spoke about her experiences at Mary Margaret, or St. Mary’s house.
The Tuam facility was one of dozens of “homes” in which pregnant girls and unmarried women were sent to give birth in secret for much of the 20th century. Women were often forced to separate from children. Hundreds of babies, as far away as Ireland, the UK, or the US, Canada and Australia, have died, and their bodies have been abandoned.
On Monday, a team of Irish and international forensic experts will break through the ground at Tuam’s mass cemetery, believed to contain the bodies of 796 children as they begin the two-year excavation.
From 1922 to 1998, the Catholic Church and the Irish state established a highly misogynistic network of institutions that targeted and punished unmarried women. It created a culture of containment that touched all aspects of society. Then Ireland’s attitude changed. But the shame, secrets and social expulsions that the system created left lasting scars.
“In this twisted, authoritarian world, sex was the biggest crime for women, not men,” McKay told CNN.
“This visible sign of sex, the pregnancy of “indulging in sin” — is a woman who “disappears” from the parish behind a high wall at the edge of town,” she said.
O’Connor was sent to Tuam’s home as a 17-year-old pregnant home after being raped by the admin of the industrial school where she grew up, McKay said.
In the house, the mother and baby were separated from each other. Many women were eventually sent to Magdalene Laundry, a Catholic-run workhouse where they were detained as unpaid workers. Their babies were then illegally adopted and trafficked outside of Ireland, including in the United States, where more than 2,000 children were sent from the 1940s to the 1970s to the 1940s, and more than 2,000 children were sent, according to the Clan Project.
But many of those babies never survived living outside the wall. At least 9,000 infants and children died at these agencies, including Tuam’s home.
After Mary Margaret was born, O’Connor was sent to another industrial school and learns that his daughter had passed away six months later while doing laundry.
“‘The child of your sin is dead,” the nun told her, McKay said, “As if it was nothing.”
O’Connor eventually moved to England, where he raised six other children and lived a life that looked superficially attractive, McKay said. However, the fear of Tuam’s house did not leave her.
McKay lamented her sister, whom she had never met, but found comfort in imagining a small grave in the Irish countryside where Mary Margaret might be buried.
But in 2014, its idyllic vision was crushed after opening an English newspaper that read “Mass Septic Tank Tombs” that included the skeletal structures of 800 babies on an Irish home ground for an unmarried mother.
It was the job of local Tuam historian Katherine Coles, who revealed that 796 babies had died in Tuam without burial records and that they had been placed in a repealed sewage tank.
Authorities initially refused to engage with Corless’s findings and completely rejected her work. The nun’s sister, who ran through the house from 1925 to 1961, hired a consulting company that completely denied the graves of the masses, saying there was no evidence that the child was buried there.
However, Colles, survivors of the mother and baby home, and members of the family did not stop the campaign for Tuam’s babies and their mothers.
And it worked.
In 2015, the Irish government set up a survey of 14 mothers and baby homes and four county homes. The investigation said that despite being “known to local and national authorities” and “recorded in official publications,” the facility found “a frightening level of infant mortality rates” and that the state has not been alerted.
Before 1960, mothers and babies’ homes “didn’t save the lives of ‘illegal’ children. In fact, it appears they have significantly reduced their survival prospects.” The provincial investigation led to a formal government apology in 2021, an announcement of a relief scheme, and an apology from the Bonsecourt sisters.
Many families and survivors feel that the government is inadequate and that they are not treated with the respect and dignity they deserve, but there is now a general sense of security in Tuam.
For the next two years, forensic experts will work on the Tuam site, excavating and analyzing the remains of children.
Niamh McCullagh is a forensic archaeologist working with the office of Tuam (ODAIT), the independent intervention director overseeing the project, and said that “test excavations” on site were discovered in 20 rooms in the sewage tanks containing infants, and found remaining sewage tanks in the 35-week period to three years.
McCullagh told CNN that if forensic experts reveal evidence that any of the children have died illegally, they will notify the coroner, who notifies police.
“The possibility is certainly there, you can see it on the death register,” she said.
However, she warned that identifying the body and its cause of death is a challenge due to the fragmented nature of the body, the amount of time that has passed, and the lack of complete DNA samples from potential relatives.
“The terrible truth about babies is that they have to live with illness long enough to affect bones. So they don’t live long enough to affect bones. That’s not a pretty story, but that’s true,” she said.
Standing in front of where her two brothers, John and William were born, Anna Corrigan, 70, from Dublin, told CNN he hopes the dig will bring justice and closure.
“They had no dignity in life. They had no dignity of death. They were denied all human rights,” said Corrigan, who grew up as the only child. It was first time her mother, Bridget, died in 2012, when she learned about her siblings born in Tuam while studying her mother’s early life at an industrial school.
Corrigan’s brother John weighed 8.5 pounds at birth in February 1946. However, an authorities’ report on the conditions at home, published months after her mother left, paints a harsh picture of reality for people inside, explaining that she was “debilitated by a miserable, vortexing appetite” and “uncontrolled physical functioning.”
According to the report, 271 children lived in their homes at the time. Of the 31 infants, 12 were said to be “poor babies, weak and unprosperous.”
John died of measles at 13 months, according to his death certificate. She hopes that her brother may be adopted in North America and still alive, but Corrigan believes that John is buried in the tomb of the masses.
On Tuesday, relatives and survivors gathered at the site to hear from experts about their next steps.
“It could have been me. Every one of us who survived there was only hair width because we fell into the septic tank,” survivor Teresa O’Sullivan told CNN.
O’Sullivan was born in his home in 1957 to a teenage mother who told her that “she ruined her life” that she had not stopped looking for her, despite telling her that her child had been sent to America. They only reconnected when O’Sullivan was in her 30s.
Recently, she found a brother from her father’s side. He was with O’Sullivan to support her as the excavation progressed.
“We were by their side. They were in the room with us, they were in the building with us,” O’Sullivan said of the baby whose body reached the septic tank.
“We need to get them out of there,” she said.
Donie O’Sullivan and William Bonnett of CNN contributed to this report.
