IRELAND
Salon
MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
They have no headstones, no coffins. No memory boxes of toys and photographs. There are nearly eight hundred of them – and counting. They are the 796 babies and young children aged between two days and nine years whose grave, “filled to the brim with tiny bones and skulls,” was found last week in an unmarked site that once housed a septic tank near a County Galway home for unwed mothers.
Local death records show that the children, mostly babies and toddlers, died during the years The Home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters, was in operation — between 1926 and 1961. The causes of death listed include “sicknesses, diseases, deformities and premature births.” A full tally of the bodies has not yet been made, and it’s unknown yet if investigators will find more bodies than the ones whose deaths were recorded.
The grave was first discovered nearly forty years ago. In 1975, two boys playing in the area first uncovered a broken slab that revealed small skeletons underneath. As the Guardian reports, “a parish priest said prayers at the site, and it was sealed once more, the number of bodies below unknown, their names forgotten.” But more recently, local historian Catherine Corless spearheaded a long overdue investigation into what happened to the bodies of those children. She was inspired in part by her own memories of the children from The Home that she grew up with. “They were always segregated to the side of regular classrooms,” she recently told Irish Central. “By doing this the nuns telegraphed the message that they were different and that we should keep away from them. They didn’t suggest we be nice to them. In fact if you acted up in class some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies. That was the message we got in our young years.” When Corless contacted the Galway registry to find out how many children had died there, she said the person at the office asked her, “Do you really want all of these deaths?” It was only then she learned the magnitude of her task. She is now fundraising to create a memorial for the mothers and children who passed through The Home. (You can contact her directly about donating: catherinecorless@hotmail.com)
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