This story begins with the forbidden fruit.
It was the 1970s in a small town in the west of Ireland when the owner of an orchard chased away two boys who were stealing apples.
The boys escaped by jumping over the stone wall of the abandoned "Bon Secur" home for mothers and children. When they landed, they discovered a dark secret that would haunt Ireland for decades.
One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound when his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney parted the bushes and came across a concrete slab that they managed to lift.
"There was just a pile of bones," Hopkins said. "We didn't know if we had found treasure or a nightmare."
Hopkins didn't realize at the time that they had discovered a mass, unmarked grave of babies in a former septic tank.
It took four decades and the persistence of a local historian to uncover the disturbing truth, which led to the start of excavations in July, during which the remains of nearly 800 babies and young children could be exhumed.
The tomb at Tjum has triggered a broader confrontation with the past, reaching to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican. The Irish state and the Catholic Church, once the core of national identity, are now grappling with the legacy of stigmatizing unmarried women, believed to have committed mortal sin, and separating these women from their children, left to the mercy of a cruel system.
An unexpected investigator
News of Hopkins' discovery might never have made it outside the walls of the former home if it weren't for the work of Catherine Corless, a housewife with an interest in history.
Corles, who grew up in the town and vividly remembers how the children from the home were ostracized at school, decided to write an article about the place for the local historical society. However, she soon found herself searching for the ghosts of the lost children.
"I thought I was writing a warm story about orphans, but the more I researched, the worse it got," she said.
Homes for mothers and children were not unique to Ireland, but the influence of the Church on social values there reinforced the stigma against women and girls who became pregnant out of wedlock.
Homes began to open in the 1920s, after Ireland gained independence from Britain. Most were run by Catholic nuns.
In the case of Tjuma, a home for mothers and children was opened in a former workshop from the 1840s.
During the Irish Civil War of 1922-23, the building was occupied by British troops. In 1923, six members of an IRA faction that opposed the peace agreement that ended the war were executed there.
Two years later, those imposing three-story gray buildings on the outskirts of the city reopened as a home for pregnant women, young mothers, and orphans. It was run by the Bon Secours Catholic nuns for the needs of County Galway.
The buildings were primitive, poorly heated, with running water only in the kitchen and the maternity ward. Over 200 children and 100 mothers were housed in large dormitories at the same time.
Korles found very little information in her local library, but was horrified to learn that women, rejected by their families, were essentially confined to these homes. They worked there for up to a year before being kicked out, often separated from their children forever.
The shame of out-of-wedlock pregnancy was so deep that women were often secretly brought into homes.
Peter Malrajan, who grew up in the home, learned decades later that his mother was six months pregnant when she was taken from the family home on a bicycle under cover of night. The local priest had arranged it after telling her father she was "causing a scandal in the parish".
Mothers and their children carried this stigma for most of their lives.
The men they got pregnant with, whether through romantic relationships, rape, or incest, were never held accountable. Even more shocking was the huge number of deaths Corless uncovered.
When she tried to find the plot in the local cemetery where the babies from the home were buried, she found nothing.
Long lost brothers
Around the same time that Catherine Corless was digging up a sad past, Anna Corrigan was discovering her own personal secret in Dublin.
Corrigan, who grew up an only child, vaguely remembers a moment in her childhood when her uncle, angry with her mother, blurted out that she had given birth to two sons. To this day, she is unsure whether it was a real memory or a dream.
While researching the traumatic childhood of her late father, who was confined to an industrial school for abandoned, troubled children or orphans, she asked the woman who was helping her to look for any information about her deceased mother. Corrigan was devastated to learn the truth: before she was born, her mother had given birth to two boys in a home in Tyum.
"I cried for the brothers I never knew, because now I had biological brothers, but I never met them," she said. Her mother never said a word about it.
A 1947 inspection record provided insight into the overcrowded and deadly environment at the home.
Twelve of the 31 newborns in the nursery were starving. Other children were described as "tender," "exhausted," or with "underdeveloped limbs."
The Irish state and the Catholic Church, once the core of national identity, are now grappling with the legacy of stigmatizing unmarried women, believed to have committed mortal sin, and separating these women from their children, left to the mercy of a cruel system.
Anna Corrigan's brother, John Dolan, weighed almost nine pounds at birth, but was described in the report as "a poor, starving child with an excessive appetite and no control over bodily functions, probably mentally retarded." He died two months later, during a measles epidemic.
Despite the high mortality rate, the report states that the infants were well cared for and that the nutrition was excellent.
Anne Corrigan's second brother, William, was born in May 1950 and is recorded as having died about eight months later. However, there was no death certificate and his date of birth had been altered in the civil registry, which Corrigan said was sometimes done to conceal adoptions.
Ireland was very poor at the time, and infant mortality rates were high. According to the findings of a government commission, around 9.000 babies, or 15 percent, died in 18 homes for mothers and children, some of which operated until 1998.
In the 40s and 1961s, more than XNUMX percent of children in these homes died before their first birthday. Tjum had the highest mortality rate before its closure in XNUMX, with almost a third of the children dying there.
In search of graves, the cemetery caretaker took Korles across the street, into the neighborhood and playground where the home once stood.
In one corner was a carefully landscaped garden with flowers, a grotto, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by a wall. It had been built by a couple who lived next door to mark the spot where Hopkins had found the bones.
Some initially thought they were the remains of famine victims. But that was before Corles discovered that the garden was located directly above a septic tank that was built later.
She wondered if the nuns had used the pit as a convenient burial place after it fell into disuse in 1937, hidden behind the ten-meter-high walls of the home.
"They avoided admitting that so many babies were dying," she said. "Nobody knew what they were doing."
Sensational story
When Catherine Corless published her article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society in 2012, she braced herself for a backlash. However, nothing happened.
That changed after Anna Corrigan, who persistently searched for documentation and contacted officials, from the prime minister to the police, found Corless.
Corrigan connected her with journalist Alison O'Reilly, and international media took notice after the front page of the Sunday edition of the Irish Mail on May 25, 2014, featured an article titled: "Mass grave of 800 babies."
The article caused a storm, but also a backlash. Some media outlets, including the Associated Press, pointed out the sensationalist reporting and questioned whether the septic tank could really have been used as a grave.
The Bon Secours nuns hired a PR consultant, Terri Pron, who tried to dissuade journalists from reporting. "If you come here, you won't find any mass graves," she wrote in an email to a French television station. "There is no evidence that children were ever buried like that, and the local police roll their eyes and say: Yes, a few bones were found, but this is an area where famine victims were buried. So what?"
Despite skeptics, the public was deeply disgusted.
Korles was inundated with inquiries from people looking for relatives on the list of 796 children she had compiled who had died. Those who grew up carrying the stigma of "out-of-wedlock" were finding their voice.
Peter Malrajan, who lived in the home until he was four and a half years old, spoke about the abuse he suffered as an adopted child on a farm, without shoes for most of the year, with almost no education, malnourished and starved of any affection.
"We were afraid to open our mouths, you know, they told us to mind our own business," Malrajan said. "It's a shame. The church and the state had so much power that they could do whatever they wanted, and no one dared ask them why."
Then-Prime Minister Enda Keni said children were treated as an "inferior subspecies" as he announced an investigation into mother and child homes.
When the first excavations in 2017 confirmed that the skeletons of babies and young children were found in an old septic tank, Kenny called it a "chamber of horrors."
Pope Francis acknowledged the scandal during his visit to Ireland in 2018, when he apologized for the "crimes" of the Catholic Church, including child abuse and forcing unwed mothers to give up their children.
We were afraid to open our mouths, you know, they told us to mind our own business. Shame. The church and the state had so much power that they could do whatever they wanted, and no one was allowed to ask them why.
It took five years for a government inquiry to conclude, in a comprehensive report in 2021, that the greatest responsibility lay with the children’s fathers and the women’s families. The state and churches were said to have played a minor role in the abuse, but the report said that these institutions, despite their shortcomings, still provided refuge when families did not want to accept them.
Some survivors saw the report as a painful but fair admission of the truth, while others called it an attempt to cover up responsibility.
Prime Minister Michael Martin apologized, saying mothers and children had paid a terrible price for the "distorted religious morality" of the Irish nation. "The shame was not theirs - it was ours," Martin said.
The Bon Secours nuns issued a profound apology and admitted that the children were buried without dignity. "We did not respect the inherent dignity of these women and children," said Sister Eileen O'Connor. "We did not give them the compassion they desperately needed."
Iskopavanje
When a team including forensic scientists and archaeologists recently began excavating at the site, Katherine Corless said she was "bewildered," amazed that work had finally begun after so many years.
Collecting the bones, sorting them and attempting to identify them using DNA analysis is expected to take about two years. The goal is to link the remains to relatives, such as Anna Corrigan.
The excavation manager, Daniel McSweeney, who previously worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross on identifying missing persons in war zones in Afghanistan and Lebanon, said it was an extremely difficult undertaking.
"We must not underestimate the complexity of the task before us, the gravity of the location itself, the age of the remains, the place of burial, as well as the scarce information about these children and their lives," said McSweeney.
Nearly 100 people, including those from the US, Britain, Australia and Canada, have already provided their DNA or been contacted about it. Some in the city believe the remains should not be touched.
Patrick McDonagh, who grew up in the settlement, said a priest blessed the land after Hopkins' discovery and that masses were held there regularly.
"We should leave everything as it is," McDonagh said. "It's always been a cemetery."
Seven days before the excavations began, a bus brought in a group of elderly survivors from the home and relatives of women who had given birth there.
A passage between two houses led them through a gate in a metal fence erected to screen off the site, which now has an industrial look.
Behind the lawn where children once played, and under which other children may have been buried, were storage containers, a waste container, and an excavator ready to dig.
It was their last chance to see the site before it was dug up, and perhaps find the bones of their loved ones so they could give them a dignified burial.
Corrigan, who often says that Irish-style justice means "delay, deny, until we all go home and die," hopes that every child will be found.
"They were denied a dignified death, just as they were denied a dignified youth and life," she said. "That's why we hope that maybe from today their voices will finally be heard, because I think they've been crying out for a very long time to be heard."
Translation: NB
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