Excavators broke ground on Monday in western Ireland to search for the bodies of hundreds of babies and young children, some of them discarded in septic tanks, who died at a home for unwed mothers that was managed by Catholic nuns from 1925 to 1961.
The circumstances of the children’s short lives, the treatment of the mothers and the decades of secrecy surrounding the deaths have been recognized widely as a profound moral stain on the Irish government, which funded the institution, and the Catholic Church, which managed it.
About half of the children, estimated to number about 800 in all, died before their first birthdays.
“Some of the families have been really seeking answers to these questions for many years,” Daniel MacSweeney, who directs the excavation, said in an interview. He leads the Office of the Director of Authorized Intervention, Tuam, an independent organization established by the Irish government in 2022 to recover the remains.
The team began with small motorized diggers, Mr. MacSweeney said, while specialists watched for signs of remains. Once bodies appear, he said, the work will continue by hand, noting “the complexity of the challenge.”
Scientists estimate that infant bodies lie “commingled” in the tanks under St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, a town in County Galway in the west of Ireland. The institution was long one of the most notorious homes for unwed mothers in Ireland.
In the first decades of Irish independence, when the Catholic Church ruled almost every aspect of daily life with an uncompromising doctrine, unmarried pregnant women in Ireland were widely seen as immoral. Shunned by their communities and disowned by their families, they were often sent to one of many such homes.
There, the young women were forced to work. Their babies died at rates far above the national average.
Some mothers were deceived and told that their babies had died, when the infants had in fact been illegally adopted from the facilities.
“If that’s a reflection of where particularly poor and marginalized women’s rights were, it’s a fairly damning one,” Sarah-Anne Buckley, an associate professor in history at Galway University and a co-leader of the Tuam Oral History Project, said in an interview. “It’s the women, but it’s also the children.”
In that era, few people could speak out against the Catholic Church, which ran the homes and other institutions with near-absolute power. The government last year reported that there had been thousands of allegations of sexual abuse at schools run by Catholic orders in the last century.
Some of the women of Tuam have spent fruitless decades searching for their children, dead or alive. They had little to go on until information about the infants’ deaths began to emerge over a decade ago, thanks to the work of an amateur historian, Catherine Corless.
Ms. Corless found that at least 798 children had died at St. Mary’s, but only two were buried in the cemetery across the street. In 2014, after interviewing survivors and combing through the archives, she made a shocking allegation: The nuns had secretly buried infants and young children in the septic system.
“This was immoral,” she told The New York Times in an interview in 2022. “Against Catholic ethos. This was a sewage facility!”
The home’s managers, the Sisters of Bon Secours, apologized in 2021: “We acknowledge in particular that infants and children who died at the Home were buried in a disrespectful and unacceptable way.” On Monday, the order declined to make its leadership available for an interview or respond to questions from The Times.
The home was demolished decades ago and a housing project was built on the site.
The dig, authorized by the Irish government in 2022, is expected to last for about two years, during which time active sites will be concealed from public view and protected by security.
Mr. MacSweeney, the dig’s leader, said that the budget for this year is 9.4 million euros (about $11 million).
He emphasized the many challenges. The team does not know how many children are buried in the ancient septic system, which has 20 tanks. They are preparing to separate the bones, which are believed to be jumbled together, to try to rebuild individual skeletons.They then need to try to identify the children by extracting DNA samples from the remains, which, after decades of decomposition, is not guaranteed. And the bones are tiny, making the painstaking work even harder.
If they can get usable DNA samples, they will try to match them to samples given by relatives.
Finally, the scientists know that there are 19th century famine remains at the site, which was also a military barracks and execution site during Ireland’s civil war in the 1920s. They do not know if bones from those eras could be mixed with those of children who died at St. Mary’s.
But one thing is certain: The jumbled graveyard beneath the soil tells some of the most painful chapters of Irish history, the wounds of which remain unhealed.
Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news.
The post Dig for Children’s Remains Begins at Irish Home for Unwed Mothers appeared first on New York Times.
