When Catherine Corless enrolled in a local history night course in 2005, she thought it would be something "simple, without major surprises." She was interested in family history and was curious about the origin of the many old buildings scattered around her hometown, Tuam, in County Galway, Ireland. During that year of classes, she learned to research, follow leads, and, above all, confront the most uncomfortable chapters of the past. "If you don't find something, you don't give up. You wonder why it's not there. You use 'why' a lot," explained the former textile factory secretary to The New York Times in 2017. But she never imagined that this decision would lead her to embody the conscience of Ireland, uncovering a tragedy that happened just five kilometers from the farm where she grew up.
Her merit? Discovering, after a thorough investigation, that the mortal remains of 796 children and babies who died at the St Mary's mother and baby home run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours (Bon Secours), which operated between 1925 and 1961, were buried in an old septic tank. This Monday, a team of 18 archaeologists, anthropologists, and forensic experts began excavation work on a plot of land in the town where the home once stood, now converted into a housing development. Over the next two years, a toothless excavator will dig through every inch of the 5,000 square meters of land, searching for any remains of the minors, supposedly buried two meters deep; a task made possible by Corless's research.
Although she claims that as a child she knew nothing about the so-called "mother and baby home," the Irishwoman was always aware of the hierarchy in Tuam between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children, a legal distinction that classified children born out of wedlock as inferior. These minors lived, along with their mothers, in institutions run by religious orders, separated from the society that rejected them before giving them up for adoption (some illegally). The law would not recognize them as "equals" until 1987.
"I have a vague memory of that handful of emaciated and sad children who were brought, like a flock, to our class. Always a little later than the rest, and who always left before the others," she wrote last month in The Observer. "The nuns told us not to mix with them, that they had a contagious disease. We never saw them in our transition to secondary education, and they were soon forgotten."
It was only when a local history magazine asked her to write an essay for its 2012 annual edition that, "for reasons I can't explain," she remembered those creatures and wondered: "Why?". It was not easy for her. "It was only by talking to the elders of the town that I learned about the existence of St Mary's," she recounts in the The Observer article. Later, she would find out that in 1975, two children found human remains in a nearby septic tank while looking for apples, a discovery that prompted her to request the list of all those who had died there from the civil registry. "It wasn't until a deputy intervened on my behalf that I was able to access the records from Galway City Hall," she adds.
With the help of maps and the few existing documents, she concluded that a high number of babies and children had died before the home closed. The fortuitous discovery of the bones led her to the trail of a possible mass grave in the area. When she published her essay, she had documented the deaths of 200 minors. By the end of her research in 2014, the total number was 796. All had been baptized, but she could only find the death certificates of two of them. She paid four euros for each record, spending a total of 3,184 euros.
However, the Church denied knowledge of their deaths or burials, and the Sisters of the Bon Secours hired a public relations agency to deny the existence of a mass grave, claiming that the bones were from the famine. "My research was publicly ridiculed."
For eight months, her research went unnoticed. The story only gained traction when a relative of one of the deceased children, alerted to Corless's work through social media, spoke to a journalist in Dublin. Then, the scandalous possibility of babies' bodies buried in a septic tank made headlines in national and international media.
The Government established a commission to investigate the issue - which, in a preliminary conclusion three years ago, sided with Corless - and, in the process, shed light on what happened in these homes created shortly after the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1922 and mostly managed by Catholic nuns. Between 2016 and 2017, initial excavations confirmed "significant quantities of human remains" on the Tuam site.
However, Corless's discovery did not receive much support from the local community. "Many businesses and people in authority wanted to keep this quiet and simply put up a monument, without implying that there were so many buried there. They always downplayed it," she explained to the Irish Times in June, insisting that she did not expect or desire to spark a national debate. "They told me I was giving Tuam and the Church a bad name. Their stance was simply: 'Leave it, this is a thing of the past, and leave it there,'" she added. But the treatment of the babies and the lack of dignity in their burials were "too horrible" to turn a blind eye to the history.
Following the 2021 publication of the government report on the mother and baby homes, all involved institutions apologized and promised to excavate the Tuam site. However, it took another year for a law to be passed allowing the exhumation and forensic analysis of the remains, despite archaeologists frequently unearthing remains during road construction.
Now, shielded by over two-meter fences designed to preserve the privacy of this delicate process, the team led by Daniel MacSweeney, a former special envoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross, works not only to unearth another part of the past that Irish institutions were keen on hiding but also to "restore dignity in death". The operation aims to recover all human remains, attempt to identify them, deliver them to their families, and proceed with their reburial. Over 80 people have come forward so far to provide DNA samples, hoping to retrieve the bodies of their relatives.
A victory for the amateur historian who had to endure ridicule for over a decade. "As I looked at everything, through a small hole in the fence, I felt a sense of joy. The site is now full of cabins, fences, and small excavators. Workers with helmets, forensic archaeologists, and several others who will keep us informed of the progress of the investigation. I trust that they will find all of them, the 796 babies still awaiting a dignified burial," Corless concluded.