What lies there is not a cemetery. It is a sewage tank. And inside it: the mortal remains of 796 children – from newborns to nine-year-olds. Buried beneath a patch of grass, in the middle of a housing estate in western Ireland, near the town of Tuam. Between 1925 and 1961, the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic order, ran a so-called mother-and-baby home there. It was a place of shame – not for the Church, but for the women who were sent there because they had become pregnant out of wedlock. They were seen as morally fallen, dishonored, lost. Their children died in large numbers – from neglect, from disease, from hunger. What was left to them was no grave, no name, no blessing. Only a disused septic tank, a concrete hole – and the silence of the institutions.
That this silence was broken is thanks to the courage and perseverance of a single woman: Catherine Corless, local historian, daughter of the region, a citizen with a conscience. It was she who reconstructed the death toll, combed through church archives, gathered death certificates – until she uncovered the number that still shakes Ireland to this day: 796 dead children, without a single recorded burial. Her research led to the establishment of a state commission of investigation in 2014. But it was not until 2022 that the Irish parliament finally passed legislation allowing the exhumation. And even today, remembrance is hesitant, reckoning is slow, and institutional resistance remains tangible. It is about guilt. About complicity. And about decades of cover-up by both state and Church.
Because what happened in Tuam was not an isolated mistake – it was part of a system. A collaboration of religious control, governmental indifference, and societal exclusion. The mother-and-baby homes were places of reeducation, of separation, of uprooting. Over 9,000 children died in such institutions across the country. And even those who survived were often forcibly adopted – including abroad, often without the mothers’ knowledge. That 796 of them ended up in a sewage tank is both symbol and accusation. It is Ireland’s national wound. And it is open. As long as the names of these children remain unspoken, their remains unexhumed, and their stories untold, Tuam will remain a place of shame. Not for the mothers. But for those who called themselves Christians – and denied humanity.
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