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…