The Mother behind the Galway Children's Mass Grave Story: "I Want to Know Who's down There"
By Amelia Gentleman
Catherine Corless spent eight months trying unsuccessfully to get people to pay attention to the research she was doing on an institution for unmarried mothers in Tuam, the Galway town where she grew up. An amateur historian who had spent weeks scouring records in libraries, churches and council offices, she had uncovered the fact that, between 1925 and 1961, 796 children died in the St Mary's Mother and Baby Home, run by nuns from the Bon Secours order, but she was unable to find records of where they were buried. Last September she suggested that many of the bodies may have been put in a disused septic tank in a corner of the home's garden, a spot where boys had discovered a pile of children's skeletons in the 1970s. She was surprised that the local newspapers and radio stations did not share the horror that she and a few Tuam residents felt. She had hoped to get support for a fundraising campaign to install plaques with the names of the dead babies at the site of the home. A small article was printed, without prominence, in a local paper. "It seemed as if no one wanted to bring this up," she said this week. She told the nuns, the local clergy and the police about her research, but there was no response. "I couldn't understand it. We were shocked. We expected an outrage. The only ones who were outraged seemed to be us," she said. "The mentality seemed to be: 'That's a long time ago, forget about it, it doesn't matter any more.'" All that changed a fortnight ago, when a relative of one of the dead children, who had been alerted to Corless's work by social media, spoke to a journalist in Dublin, and the scandalous possibility of babies' corpses in the septic tank exploded on the front pages. Irish media began to pay more attention as the story aired internationally, including in the US. This week, Corless's work finally triggered positive results, when the Irish government launched an inquiry into what happened in Tuam, and in other such homes across the country. Ireland's prime minister, Enda Kenny, said the treatment of mothers and babies in church-run homes was "an abomination", adding that for decades women who had children outside marriage were treated as "an inferior sub-species" in Ireland. For campaigners who have been working for years to have the history of these mother-baby homes investigated, it was a triumph. At her kitchen table, where much of her research was done, surrounded by death certificates and maps of the Tuam home, Corless is delighted that her work has belatedly paid off, but the slowness of the media, the government and the church to respond still puzzles her. "People were saying: 'You can't be talking about that'. Maybe it's an era that people want to forget. Maybe there's a sense of collective shame," she said. The facts of the case remain uncertain. Corless's theory is untested, and unless there is an excavation at the site, no one will know if this really is where the bodies lie. The scale of the belated outcry probably has something to do with the way her research was reported, with much coverage glossing over the uncertainty and presenting the 796-bodies-in-a-septic-tank theory as proven fact, which Corless never claimed it was. Her research is more tentative; she said that "the evidence strongly suggests that they would have used the old septic tank as some sort of tomb or crypt". She has searched records at nearby cemeteries and has found no names that match up with the list of children's deaths given to her by the births, marriages and deaths registry. "I can't prove it. All I have is the list, and no burial records. The death certificates were there, but where are the burial records?" Her anger stems from her discovery that babies and young children died in large numbers at the home (even by the standards of the time, when access to medicines was limited), and that there appears to have been no respectful burial of the bodies. She argues that these uncertainties do not detract from the need to investigate what happened at Tuam and other similar homes across Ireland. "The other mother and baby units, they're delighted. They've been lobbying for years, with the government, for this to be investigated: the unmarked graves of children up to 10 years old – babies, toddlers, all sizes – buried without respect or dignity."
Despite the absence of clear facts, the case has unleashed a new wave of critical self-examination in Ireland, and fresh scrutiny of the Catholic church's troubled past. After the child abuse scandals and the revelations about the Magdalene laundries (where unmarried mothers were often sent after giving birth at the mother and baby homes), radio talk shows this week discussed whether there was an unhealthy desire to indulge in excessive self-flagellation about Ireland's past. But mostly callers seemed supportive of the government's promise to hold an inquiry. Corless neither expected nor hoped to spark a nationwide debate. Initially all she wanted was to raise money to put up plaques for the dead children. She was attempting to raise ˆ50,000 (?40,000) to create a memorial, conserving the work done by locals who have created a shrine on the site of the Tuam home, tending it carefully since the discovery of the bones in the 1970s. "The nuns left it as a wilderness. It is only when the locals found that there were bones there that they took it upon themselves to mind that graveyard for the past 40 years. It's credit to them – not to the town council, not to the county council, not to the church – just a few locals who had a heart and said, 'This is not right,'" she said. All week, Tuam residents have been visiting the small, walled-off patch of land to leave flowers and teddy bears by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Dennis Ward, a landscape gardener, came with his 12-year-old son and his wife, Noreen, and said he hoped there would be a full investigation. "There should be an exhumation. We are not getting any answers by leaving it," he said. But two women (who asked not to be named) at a house built on the site of the now-demolished home said they would lie down in the road to prevent exhumation of the bodies, a process they said would be "disrespectful". There has been debate over whether the remains seen in the 1970s could be famine skeletons, but shuffling the papers on her table, Corless pointed to a different site where the famine grave was recently examined. "Personally, for my own research, I want the truth. I want to know who's down there. If there's a lot of children down there, the ground has to be consecrated, and marked as a graveyard." She is exhausted, but modestly pleased with what she has achieved. Her husband comes in to tell her that the government has announced an investigation, but she is too tired to celebrate. Corless, 60, a former secretary at a textile factory who gave up work to bring up her four children, developing an interest in local history after they'd left, is finding the explosion of interest from international news organisations rather trying. The home was a big presence in her own childhood, and her own uncomfortable memories about the home's children are what sparked her research. She remembers seeing the 8ft-high wall on her way to school. "They surrounded it completely – stone walls. There was broken glass cemented into the top of the walls. It used to glisten in the sun. The kids couldn't get out. I would have been six or seven. I remember the kids going to school – the noise of them marching in their big clogs." Corless wore proper shoes, but the home children wore wooden shoes. "They were long-wearing. Everybody remembers the noise of the clogs." There were children from the home at her convent primary schoool. She remembers the nuns' coldness towards the children, a coldness that bred disrespect among the other schoolchildren, including in her own mind. "People remember being told by the nuns that they would be put beside a home baby if they didn't behave themselves. They openly displayed that these children were different. It was an open form of humiliation. They were born illegitimate, therefore they were bad," she said. She feels uneasy about her behaviour towards the children. "I thought it would be funny to copy a trick played by an older girl – she had wrapped up an empty sweet paper and handed it to a home girl. The little girl grabbed it, of course. There was nothing in it. At the time, being seven, being the butt of teasing myself, I thought this was great fun. I did the same and handed it to another girl – a stone wrapped in a sweet paper. She opened it and dropped it. "When I found out later about the home children, that God help them, they'd never got a sweet in their life, they wouldn't have got any treats in the home … It's only now I realise the impact that must have had on that little girl – to think that she was getting a treat, and that someone was just playing a mean trick on her.
"I feel that the nuns should have told us that these were special children, to take care of them, to mind them. That would have been the proper thing to have done. Instead of that, they treated them differently. They ignored them, more than anything. I don't remember them being hostile. They were ignored. They were left to one side of the classroom." Her early memories of the home focused her interest as a local historian. She heard stories about the finding of the children's bones, and went to the local registry office in Galway last summer to request the names of all those who had died there. The registrar did some preliminary research and called Corless to ask: "Do you really want all those death certificates? You know there are hundreds, literally hundreds." "I was shocked at that," Corless said. The list of the cause of deaths is revealing. Some of the children died of measles, some from whooping cough, but others died from less serious complaints such as laryngitis or abscesses – conditions that may indicate neglect. Corless felt very angry when she was given the full list of names, with much of her anger directed at the Catholic church in Ireland. "I felt hurt for the children, for all those people who were made so little of," she said. "People say that families were wrong to throw out their daughters [when they got pregnant outside marriage]. I agree with that. But it must not be forgotten that the church put those laws in place, saying that sex outside marriage was sinful. They blamed the women – they didn't blame the men who did it, just the women for leading them on. They got that into the mindset of the people. They would preach it every Sunday at mass, so that families would feel ashamed to show a pregnant daughter. I blame them for that – for putting women through so much misery, and ostracising them if they became pregnant outside marriage. Then for their children to be ostracised as well – that, to me, was a crime." She was brought up a Catholic, but said she no longer describes herself as religious. "I am very, very angry with the Catholic church. I lost respect for the Catholic church with the abuse scandals. Again it is the coverup – not letting the truth out. It's the same here. Everything must come out." She wrote to the nuns from the Bon Secours mission last year to tell them about her research. She had a brief email back, to the effect of "wishing you well with your project". The brevity of the response surprised her. When her research became headline news, she was invited to meet the nuns in a hotel in Galway. The leader of the mission, Sister Marie Ryan, offered to make a donation to the collection for a memorial plaque, but questioned her findings, suggesting that the bodies belonged to famine victims, dating back a century. "She said the sisters are devastated about all this … I don't know what she meant. Did she mean for themselves, the limelight of the media, or the story that went out?" Corless was disappointed that there was no promise to begin their own investigations, but later, as the scandal escalated, they released a statement through a PR firm saying they were "shocked and deeply saddened" by reports and promised "constructive engagement" to help establish the full truth of what happened. Since global interest began to focus on Tuam earlier this month, Corless has received hundreds of emails from individuals thanking her for drawing attention to the subject. Many have offered financial help, and some have asked her to look on the list of children to see whether a relative is named. "Some of them had been through the system and they were just thanking me for getting the story out there. They are telling me I am a voice for them, because no one else is listening." JP Rodgers, 67, who was born in the home, forcibly separated from his mother and brought up there until he was five, is delighted that Corless's findings have focused political attention on the homes. "It is wonderful that she has exposed this horrible chapter in Irish history. What went on there was horrific and sordid. We have to face up to it so that it never happens again."
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