IRELAND
The Guardian
When Catherine Corless walked through a housing estate in Tuam, County Galway, with Judge Yvonne Murphy, head of the government Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, she pointed to the playground.
This,” said Corless, “is where I think some bodies are buried.”
It is a year since the story of what took place here broke. What became the Tuam Babies scandal, when the headline of “800 Children Dumped in Septic Tank” went around the world. It was Corless who told the media. She was later upset by inaccuracies – she never suggested all the bodies were in a septic tank or that any had been dumped. Researching the St Mary’s Home for unmarried mothers for a local history annual, Corless obtained death certificates for 796 children who died at the Tuam home, run by the Bon Secours Sisters on behalf of Galway County Council from 1925 to 1961. But there were only official burial records for two children.
A fiercely debated, long-delayed investigation into Ireland’s Catholic-run institutions said priests and nuns terrorised thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades – a 2,600-page report in 2009 cited reports of abuse from former students sent to more than 250 church-run, mostly residential institutions.
Corless discovered that in 1975 two boys, playing in wasteland at the former home site, fell into a tank containing children’s skeletons – no one knows how many. Local residents erected a little grotto. “Most of the deceased were newborns up to two years old,” says Corless. Were these some of the missing 794 children? Not all would have fit into a septic tank. She interviewed elderly residents who had witnessed night time burials from their upstairs windows in houses that overlooked the home’s eight foot walls. “I only go by maps and records,” says Corless, “that’s why I think the playground is where the bodies are most likely to be.”
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