IRELAND
Daily Mail (UK)
‘I thought I’d seen it all. Then I found nuns’ secret grave for 800 babies’: By Philomena writer MARTIN SIXSMITH
SPECIAL REPORT BY MARTIN SIXSMITH
PUBLISHED: 7 June 2014
In nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent, I covered stories of mass graves in far-flung locations in Eastern Europe and Russia. The thought of them has remained lodged in my memory.
But never did I expect to be covering a mass grave from modern times on my own doorstep; I thought Western and Northern Europe was immune from such horrors.
Yet that is exactly what I came across in January this year in the small Irish town of Tuam in County Galway, an ugly place with its rundown streets and council estates.
On a grey, rainy afternoon, I was taken to a patch of land in the centre of one such estate. Surrounded by houses built in the 1970s, on the edge of a scruffy playground, I found a plaster statue of the Madonna on a pile of stones, incongruously sheltered by an old enamel bathtub. Beneath it were the bodies of nearly 800 babies.
The remains of a forbidding 8ft wall nearby were a clue to the place’s history. Until 1961 this had been the site of a Catholic religious community run by the Sisters of Bon Secours.
They had bought the workhouse in the 1920s and converted it into a home for unmarried mothers. For the next 36 years, the nuns took in thousands of women. In those days, sex outside marriage was proclaimed a mortal sin.
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