IRELAND
Reuters
By Estelle Shirbon | TUAM, IRELAND
Catherine Corless has been haunted all her life by childhood memories of the skinny children from the local Catholic home for unmarried mothers and their babies in the small cathedral town of Tuam in the west of Ireland.
Known locally as the home babies, the children lived in secrecy behind the dark, high walls of the home run by nuns from the Bon Secours order. Some of them attended the same school as Corless, but they were kept apart from the other children.
Once, egged on by classmates, Corless played a trick on one of the home babies, handing over what looked like a sweet but was in fact only an empty wrapper.
“I’m so sorry for that. It’s stuck me with, that memory. It was only later I thought ‘that poor child never got a sweet, they would have loved a sweet’,” Corless told Reuters in an interview at her home in the countryside outside Tuam.
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