When Annette McKay’s first grandson was born, she thought her mother, Maggie O’Connor, would be over the moon. She had become a great-grandmother.
Instead, McKay found her sobbing unconsolably outside her home, crying: “It’s the baby, the baby.”
McKay reassured her 70-year-old mother that her great-grandson was healthy. But O’Connor wasn’t talking about him.
“Not your baby, my baby,” O’Connor said, revealing a secret she had buried for decades. Her first child, Mary Margaret, died in June 1943, at just 6 months old.
It was the first and only time that O’Connor spoke about Mary Margaret, or her experience in St. Mary’s Home – a so-called mother and baby home in the town of Tuam, in western Ireland’s County Galway.
The Tuam institution was one of dozens of “homes” where pregnant girls and unmarried women were sent to give birth in secret for much of the 20th century. Women were often forcibly separated from their children. Some infants were rehomed, in Ireland, the United Kingdom or as far away as the United States, Canada and Australia, but hundreds died and their remains discarded – their mothers often never knowing what truly happened to their babies.
On Monday, a team of Irish and international forensic experts will break ground at a mass grave site in Tuam, believed to contain the remains of 796 children, as they begin a two-year excavation.
From 1922 to 1998, the Catholic Church and the Irish State established a profoundly misogynistic network of institutions that targeted and penalized unmarried women. It created a culture of containment that touched all aspects of society. Irish attitudes have since changed. But the shame, secrecy and social ostracization that the system created left a lasting scar.
“In this twisted, authoritarian world, sex was the biggest sin for women, not for the men,” McKay told CNN.
“Women who had this visible sign of sex – a pregnancy of ‘indulging in a sin’ – were ‘disappeared’ from the parish, behind high walls at the end of a town,” she said.
O’Connor was sent to the Tuam home as a pregnant 17-year-old after she was raped by the caretaker of the industrial school she grew up in, McKay said.
Inside the home, mothers and babies were separated from one another. Many women were eventually sent to Magdalene Laundries, Catholic-run workhouses where they were detained as unpaid workers. Their babies were then either fostered or adopted by married families, further institutionalized in industrial schools or “care” facilities for disabled people, or illegally adopted and trafficked outside of Ireland to countries including the United States, where, from the 1940s until the 1970s, more than 2,000 children were sent, according to the Clann Project.
But many of those babies never survived life outside of their walls: at least 9,000 infants and children died in these institutions, including the Tuam home.
O’Connor, who was sent to another industrial school after Mary Margaret was born, only learned her daughter had died while she was hanging laundry six months later.
“‘The child of your sin is dead,’” the nuns told her, McKay said, “as if it was nothing.”
O’Connor eventually moved to England, where she raised six other children and lived a life that, on the surface, appeared glamorous, McKay said. But the horrors of the Tuam home never left her.
McKay mourned the sister she never met, but found solace envisioning a tiny grave in the Irish countryside where Mary Margaret might be buried.
But in 2014, that bucolic vision was shattered after she opened an English newspaper that read: “Mass septic tank grave ‘containing the skeletons of 800 babies’ at site of Irish home for unmarried mothers.”
It was the work of a local Tuam historian, Catherine Corless, that had revealed that 796 babies had died at Tuam without burial records and that they had been placed in a decommissioned sewage tank.
Authorities initially refused to engage with Corless’ findings and dismissed her work altogether. The Sisters of Bon Secours – the nuns who ran the home from 1925 to 1961 – hired a consulting company that denied a mass grave altogether, saying there was no evidence children had been buried there.
But Corless, mother and baby home survivors, and family members never stopped campaigning for the Tuam babies and their mothers.
And it worked.
In 2015, the Irish government set up an investigation into 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes, which found “significant quantities” of human remains on the Tuam site. The inquiry found an “appalling level of infant mortality” in the institutions and said that no alarm was raised by the state over them, even though it was “known to local and national authorities” and “recorded in official publications.”
Prior to 1960, mother and baby homes “did not save the lives of ‘illegitimate’ children; in fact, they appear to have significantly reduced their prospects of survival,” it said. The state inquiry led to a formal government apology in 2021, the announcement of a redress scheme and an apology from the Sisters of Bon Secours.
Although many family members and survivors feel that the government’s response has been inadequate and that they are still not being treated with the respect and dignity that they deserve, at Tuam there is now a general sense of relief.
For the next two years, forensic experts will work at the Tuam site to excavate and analyze children’s remains.
Niamh McCullagh, a forensic archaeologist working with the Office of the Director of Authorised Intervention, Tuam (ODAIT), an independent body overseeing the project, said that a “test excavation” on site discovered 20 chambers in a disused sewage tank that contained infant remains ranging from 35 weeks to three years in age at the time of death.
McCullagh told CNN that if forensic specialists uncover evidence that any of the children died unlawfully, they will inform the coroner, who will then notify police.
“The potential is there for sure, you can see that on the death register,” she said.
But she warned that identifying the remains and their cause of death comes with challenges, due to the fragmented nature of the remains, the amount of time that has passed and the lack of complete DNA samples from potential relatives.
“The awful truth about infants is that they have to live with an illness long enough for it to impact their bone… so they don’t often live long enough for some diseases to impact their bone. It’s not a pretty story, but it’s the truth,” she said.
Standing in front of the site where her two brothers, John and William, were born, Anna Corrigan, a 70-year-old from Dublin, told CNN that she was hopeful the exhumation would bring justice and closure.
“They didn’t have dignity in life. They didn’t have dignity in death. They were denied every human right,” said Corrigan, who was raised as an only child. It was only in 2012, after her mother Bridget died, that she found out about her brothers born at Tuam while researching her mother’s early life at an industrial school.
Corrigan’s brother John weighed 8-and-a-half pounds at birth in February 1946. But a report by authorities on conditions at the home, issued just months after his mother left, painted a grim picture of the reality for those inside, describing them as: “Miserable, emaciated with a voracious appetite” and “no control over bodily functions, probably mentally defective.”
There were 271 children living at the home at the time, according to the report. Of the 31 infants, 12 were described as “poor babies, emaciated, not thriving.”
John died from measles when he was 13 months old, according to his death certificate. While she has hope that her brother Will was adopted to North America and might still be alive, Corrigan believes John is buried in the mass grave.
‘It could have been me’
On Tuesday, relatives and survivors gathered at the site to hear from experts on the next steps.
“It could have been me. Every one of us who survived there were only a hair’s breadth from being down in the septic tanks,” survivor Teresa O’Sullivan told CNN.
O’Sullivan was born at the home in 1957 to a teenage mother who told her she never stopped looking for her, despite the nuns telling her that “she had messed up her own life” and that her child had been sent to America. They only reconnected when O’Sullivan was in her 30s.
More recently she has also found a brother from her father’s side, who was with O’Sullivan to support her as the excavation got under way.
“We were beside them. They were in the rooms with us, they were in the building with us,” O’Sullivan said of those babies whose bodies ended up in the septic tank.
“We’ve got to get them out of there,” she said.
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and William Bonnett contributed to this report.
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