No burial records. No headstones. No memorials. Nothing until 2014, when an amateur historian uncovered evidence of a mass grave, potentially in a former sewage tank, believed to contain hundreds of babies in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland.
Now, investigators have moved their diggers onto the nondescript patch of grass next to a children’s playground on a housing estate in the town. An excavation, expected to last two years, will begin today, BBC reported.
The area was once where St Mary’s children’s home stood, a church-run institution that housed thousands of women and children between 1925 and 1961.
Many of the women had fallen pregnant outside of marriage and were shunned by their families – and separated from their children after giving birth.
According to death records, Patrick Derrane was the first baby to die at St Mary’s – in 1925, aged five months. Mary Carty, the same age, was the last in 1960. In the 35 years between their deaths, another 794 babies and young children are known to have died there – and it is believed they are buried in what former Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Enda Kenny dubbed a ‘chamber of horrors’.
PJ Haverty spent the first six years of his life in the place he calls a prison – but he considers himself one of the lucky ones.
“I got out of there.”
He remembers how the ‘home children’, as they were known, were shunned at school.
The stigma stayed with PJ his whole life, even after finding a loving foster home and, in later years, tracking down his birth mother, who was separated from him when he was a one-year-old.
The home, run by the nuns of the Bon Secours Sisters, was an invisible spectre that loomed over him and many others in Tuam for decades – until amateur historian Catherine Corless brought St Mary’s dark past into the light.
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