IRELAND
Daily Mail (UK)
By ALISON O’REILLY
PUBLISHED: 03:56 EST, 2 June 2014
The bodies of nearly 800 babies are believed to have been interred in a concrete tank beside a former home for unmarried mothers.
The dead babies are thought to have been secretly buried beside a home for single mothers and their children in County Galway, Ireland, over a period of 36 years.
It is suspected that 796 children were interred on unconsecrated ground without headstones or coffins next to the home run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam between 1925 and 1961.
Newly unearthed reports show that they suffered malnutrition and neglect, which caused the deaths of many, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.
The babies were usually buried in a plain shroud without a coffin in a plot that had housed a water tank attached to the workhouse that preceded the mother and child home.
No memorial was erected to the dead children and the grave was left unmarked.
The site is now surrounded by a housing estate. But a missing persons report just filed to Irish police, gardai, means that the burial site may now be excavated.
A relative of one boy who lived there, William Joseph Dolan, has made a formal complaint to gardai after she failed to find his death certificate, despite records in the home stating that he had died.
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