IRELAND
Rabble
In 1925, Galway County Council appealed to the Bon Secours sisters to open a nursing home for mothers and babies. Fifty years later two boys stumbled upon a mass grave.
Between 1925 and 1961 St.Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, Tuam, operated under the care of the congregation of Bon Secours. Reports now emerging about the ‘Home’ are what we have come to expect when dealing with institutions of the Catholic Church.
This institution provided space mainly for ‘illegitimate’ children and some mothers. Motherhood outside wedlock was regarded as shameful and the church preyed on the victims of this attitude, as we have discovered through the Magdalene Laundries revelations.
The children attending local schools the primary schools which were just up the street on Dublin Road in Tuam. One local man recalls:
‘I remember some of them in class in the Mercy Convent – they were treated marginally better than the traveller children. They were known locally as the ‘Home Babies’. For the most part the children were usually gone by school age – either adopted or dead.’
The women, or girls, sometimes found work with the nuns in the Grove Hospital.
Their children were fostered out – around the district or further. Some people believe their siblings or other relatives were fostered out and disappeared or died in the ‘Home’ without notice to the families.
An Irish Mail on Sunday front page article on 25th May 2014, recounted a local health board inspection report from April 16/17th 1944 which recorded 271 children and 61 single mothers for a total of 333. The ‘Home’ had capacity for 243.
The report continues listing children as ‘emaciated’, ‘pot-bellied’, ‘fragile’ with ‘flesh hanging loosely on limbs’. 31 children recorded in the ‘Sun room and balcony’ were ‘poor, emaciated and not thriving’. The oldest child to die, according to the MoS, was Sheila Tuohy, aged 9 in 1934. The youngest was Thomas Duffy, aged two days.
The two boys playing on a concrete slab near their homes in 1970, Barry Sweeney and Francis Hopkins, decided to crack the slab to see why it sounded hollow. To their distress they saw it was ‘full to the brim of skeletons’. The priest was called, Barry Sweeney remembers but he doesn’t know what happened after the spot was blessed.
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