By Drew Frayne
Work has begun to exhume the bodies of 798 children and babies at the site of the infamous Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway. The site is being forensically excavated a decade after historian Catherine Corless, a native of Tuam, found the death records for the children, but only two marked graves. The children died, often from neglect and malnutrition, between 1925 and 1991. Even the oldest of these children could potentially have lived until today.
As a child Catherine Corless felt empathy for the children behind the walls of the Mother and Baby Home, and as an adult began a dogged investigation into their lives, culminating in the discovery of a mass grave in a disused septic tank on the grounds of the building. Articles and reports independently published by Corless, without outside financial support, were published in 2012 and 2014. This led to a test excavation in 2017 which confirmed Corless’s findings.
During the course of her work, Corless was demonised and a local witch hunt left her feeling depressed and alone. And yet she persevered, and brought to light one of the worst atrocities in living memory on this island. Catherine Corless’ compassion and perseverance must be commended and emulated by all.
The “Home”
Unmarried and single mothers were sent, often kidnapped, to the home to give birth in dire conditions. Some of the nuns may have been nurses, but a Papal ban on nuns being midwives meant women were not given the care they needed. Rates of infant mortality and maternal deaths were extremely high.
Children that survived were often sold into “adoption” to the US at a profit for the Bon Secours order. Mothers were separated from their children and forced to work under slave labour conditions for 12 months to reimburse the nuns. If a woman returned to the home for a second time, they were sent straight to the Magdalene Laundries after giving birth as punishment.
The state paid the nuns a subsidy for each woman trapped there. The Church at the time absolved the new Irish state from any responsibility for social welfare, including education and healthcare.
Assets for compensation
The direct link between British and Catholic Church oppression of working class Irish people is embodied in Tuam: the building itself was constructed as barracks under British occupation in 1841, and was eventually converted to a workhouse during the Great Famine. It was demolished in 1972.
The system of state and Church collusion must be demolished in the same way as this “home” of brutality was. The Catholic Church continues to control large parts of Irish society, including in education and healthcare. Meanwhile the state offered the Church control over the new National Maternity Hospital, due to open later this decade, showing that this control is not just a relic of the past but continues to be part of Government policy.
The Church’s massive assets – bought on the back of things like of slavery through the Magdalene Laundries and human trafficking of babies in illegal for-profit adoptions – should be seized and used to pay compensation to survivors of the Church’s many abuses.
