IRELAND
The Independent (UK)
DAVID MCKITTRICK Author Biography Friday 06 June 2014
The “Irish Holocaust” saw hundreds of babies left to die – and the practice may have been more common than first thought
The first glimpse of the horror came in the 1970s when two boys prised up some cracked concrete slabs in the grounds of a home run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours in Tuam, County Galway. One of them, Barry Sweeney, then 12 years old, vividly recalls the moment: “There it was,” he says, “skulls piled on top of each other. It was just bones and bits of rags and whatever, just a jumble.”
He and his friend took to their heels. “We just ran,” he recalls. The adults they ran to were also shocked, but at the time it was not regarded as a sensational discovery, for Ireland holds many unmarked graves, often containing the remains of victims of the 19th-century famine.
The bodies of the infants had been stacked – buried is too formal a word – in a disused septic tank. The scene was sealed, a priest gave a blessing and locals erected a grotto.
Only now is the realisation dawning that for decades the Galway earth has held the skeletons of 800 babies and toddlers in “a jumble” that is one of the country’s most unthinkable secrets.
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