TUAM (IRELAND)
Film Ireland [Dublin, Ireland]
September 25, 2026
By Róisín Kearney
[See also the trailer.]
In this article, Róisín Kearney reflects on The Lost Children of Tuam, and we look at the growing online response to Frank Berry’s film and its portrayal of Catherine Corless’s campaign for truth.
Today Frank Berry’s The Lost Children of Tuam is released in Irish cinemas. Based on harrowing real-life events, the film follows the journey of Catherine Corless as she uncovers the story of the children who died at the former Tuam Mother and Baby Home and her crusade for justice.
Writer and Filmmaker Róisín Kearney shares her raw personal response to a film that confronts one of the darkest chapters in Ireland’s history, marking just one reaction of many to this moving and well told story.
There are films and TV shows I prepare for. I knew Frank Berry’s The Lost Children of Tuam would be one of them.
A sensitive, emotive film about Catherine Corless’s unwavering determination to find truth. To find the hundreds of missing babies, out of the thousands who were incarcerated in Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Incarcerated under the guise of some moral servitude they should endure due to the circumstance of their birth.
There is a hint of the abuse and gaslighting Catherine Corless herself endured at the time of the revelations. A moment standing in a supermarket when two women embody the attitude of so many ‘good Christians’ and ‘pillars of the community’.
Years of letters to the editor, calculated and planned, disingenuous comment in the hope she would let it lie.
I remember it. I remember a common fallacy at the time, that those little bones were there since the famine. Then, when it was proven they were not, the rumblings of “they should be left there in peace”.
In peace? Hundreds of children, aged from hours old to eight years. As if they could ever be at peace, piled high in the belly of a sewer system with no one to mourn them.
Our nation’s children were stolen, trafficked, enslaved, beaten, raped, and murdered by a system that replaced colonisation with domination. A patriarchal shame was enforced by church and state, by man and woman. The fear of a burning soul weaponised against our own flesh and blood.
Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes were still operational when I was in school. In this era, you could legally rape your wife, and ogle topless underage girls on page 3 in the daily newspaper.
We were taught our worth by the action and inaction of a state meant to protect us. A state that promised to value all children equally. We continue to hear the message loud and clear.
Bessborough, another unopened grave for the babies who were supposed to bring us ‘shame’.
That shame should be reserved for those who choose profit then and now. Those who would desecrate their unmarked graves, deny their personhood for an apartment block in the hopes their lives and deaths will be forgotten.
But they will not be forgotten because, just as we existed in our grandmother’s womb and carry our children’s DNA in our bodies long after their birth, those little lives lost will remain part of our legacy. Thanks to Catherine Corless, the survivors, and her supporters, the voiceless have been given voice.
The Lost Children of Tuam has been made and in its success a light will be shone on the resilience and strength of a woman who refused to give up. She found 796 babies and children who will have their short lives memorialised and mourned.
Catherine Corless’s dogged determination held us all to account and forced us to see our part in the acceptance of this brutality. Hopefully, in bringing her story to the world, this film will inspire us to do better, to speak louder, to put our own feelings of shame at past inaction aside, regardless of consequence.