IRELAND
Daily Mail (UK)
‘My granny delivered the Tuam babies’: Michelle Fleming grew up hearing stories about the ‘abandoned children’
By MICHELLE FLEMING
What happened at Tuam, at the Mother and Child Home run by the Bon Secours nuns, shocked everyone.
But for me, it feels personal – for my Granny Nora delivered many of those babies.
Michelle Fleming’s granny, Nora Burke, who was a midwife at the Tuam Mother and Child Home
I grew up hearing stories about these abandoned children, the ‘Home Babies’, with whom my mother Mary and her sister Eleanor played as children.
I think I was about 10 when my mother first told me about the Home Babies. She told me how she was in fifth class at the Mercy Convent when Sister Lawrence attempted to teach the girls the ‘facts of life’.
Puzzled by Sister Lawrence constantly prefacing every statement with ‘when you get married’, she shot up her hand.
‘No Sister, that can’t be right,’ she said. ‘What about the Home Babies, Sister? Their mammies and daddies aren’t married.’
The flustered nun accused my mother of being disruptive and sinful.
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