IRELAND
IrishCentral
Frances Mulraney @FrancesMulraney June 03, 2017
Irish Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone announced that experts have been employed to assess the possibility of exhuming bodies buried at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home to identify the remains of the hundreds of babies believed to be buried there.
In an op-ed with the Irish Examiner, Zappone wrote that she felt there is a “real possibility” that the identities of these children could be discovered but that the process is “very complicated.”As such, forensic archaeologist Niamh McCullough has been appointed to lead a team of international experts to investigate the best possible next step in dealing with the Tuam babies scandal.
Thanks to the tireless work of local historian Catherine Corless, it was revealed in 2014 that the Tuam Mother and Baby home and the order of nuns in control of it maintained a practice of burying the babies who died in their care in mass graves with the revelation earlier this year that there may be as many as 800 children buried on the Tuam grounds. The children are believed to have died in the home and been buried here by nuns between 1925 and 1961.
These babies were the children of the mothers regarded as “fallen women”, those who had fallen pregnant out of wedlock or as a result of rape or incest, and were committed to the homes run nationwide by religious orders around the country.
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