The Search for the Truth

The Economist
June 12, 2014

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21604210-where-are-nearly-800-babies-buried-search-truth

CATHERINE CORLESS, a farmer, housewife and local historian in Tuam, a small town in the west of Ireland, struggled for four years to establish the truth about two questions: how many children died in a local mother-and-baby home between 1925 and 1961, and where were their bodies buried? Although she received little help, she has succeeded in answering the first question. A government inquiry should soon help to answer the second.

Her recently completed research showed that 796 children had died in the town’s home for unmarried mothers in those 36 years. The home, previously a workhouse, was run by the nuns of Bon Secours, a Roman Catholic order of French origin; the rate of infant mortality was well above the national average.

The revelation of the very large number of baby deaths, and the suggestion, as yet unproven, that many infants may have been buried in a mass grave in the grounds of the former care-home, has stirred the national conscience. It has also shed light on a shadowy chapter in Ireland’s history: how the church, the state and society as a whole treated unmarried women and their children. The women were shown little compassion and generally shunned as social outcasts. Many were disowned by their families; polite society dismissed them as “fallen”. Since their offspring were born out of wedlock, they were stigmatised, too. Unmarried mothers and their children were seen as a “ problem” best solved by removing them from society and by sending them to institutional care and isolation.

By painstakingly collecting the death certificates of the deceased children at the home, Ms Corless has established both their number and how they had died. But where they were buried remains mostly a mystery, as no burial records exist for these children. A first step in solving it was made when two young boys found an estimated 20 skeletons buried in a small hole in 1975. No official investigation followed that discovery. Some thought the bones could have been the remains of famine victims from the mid-19th century. Ms Corless concluded that many of the babies were buried in an unofficial graveyard at the back of the former home.

The Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, was quick to respond to the Tuam story by calling for a full independent inquiry. A barrage of lurid and often misleading headlines (“Ireland shock over 800 babies in septic tank”) in the international media played a role in the decision of the government to follow suit. On June 10th it agreed to set up a commission of inquiry to investigate events in Tuam as well as in all of Ireland’s other mother-and-baby homes.

When he announced the inquiry in parliament, the taoiseach (prime minister), Enda Kenny, was keen to stress that this was about the country’s past: “This is about the kind of country Ireland was, where women, in particular, were the focus of shame and suppression.”

Perhaps, but modern Ireland can still make some amends for the sins of their fathers and grandfathers. Establishing the truth, as sought by Ms Corless, and giving hundreds of dead babies the recognition and dignity they were denied in life, would be a start.